Review of Den-noh Coil

I'm of two very distinct minds on this one. On the one hand, I love the concept of this series. There are some really cool concepts at play and it makes for an interesting and mostly engaging world. The more we learn about the cyberworld as portrayed here, including how it's accessed through the glasses, the various errors that pop up and resulting obsolete spaces, and in particular the variety of illegals on display, the more interesting this gets. This series is at its absolute best in its first few episodes and roughly in the middle of the series when it just delves into these conceptswithout relating them to some wider ranging story, and if the whole series had been nothing but that, this would have been a great ride that I'm sure I couldn't help but recommend, particularly with this nice visual presentation and some great animation of its cyber world.

On the other hand... well, that isn't what happened. There's a lot more at play as we learn about kids dying and becoming comatose as well as the separation of cyberbodies from physical bodies. I'm a fan of a good mystery told well, but I can't say this one quite worked for me. The series does a great job setting up the mystery through a variety of characters and as a part of building out its world, and even though I wasn't invested in that mystery in the first half of the season (largely due to this series' obsession with keeping many of its most central and knowledgeable players as mystery boxes), I appreciated the slow build-up of information. And as the first few episodes of the second half started, I was getting more invested, particularly as Isako's character got filled out.

Cut to the last roughly 5-6 episodes and that slow drip of information turned into a deluge. Suddenly, we were getting incredibly detailed and specific information along with a lot of technical jargon specific to this world, and as someone who likes his jargon and was taking copious notes to keep up, this just confounded me. I couldn't keep up with much of the information dropped in episodes 22 and 23 in particular, and given that the series only had a few episodes to tie it back together and provide a meaningful conclusion to its many mysteries, this put the series as a whole in a precarious position.

I'll give the series credit: it kind of sticks the landing with a pretty satisfying conclusion between its main characters... assuming you're fully bought into their journeys. That being said, I don't think it works overall. The bonds between its most central characters in particular don't feel that well established despite their spending so much of the series together because far too much of it is spent with them at odds. I'm not sure I can fully explain why many of the characters just didn't click with me, though I think a lot of that has to do with just how little we knew about them for so long. You can have characters be a mystery for much of the series and have them work, but they still need to have something to grab onto and, aside from a couple of side characters I really enjoyed, I can't say that happened here. It doesn't help that the series can't help throwing more characters and lore into the mix even as it goes into its penultimate episode, which distracts from its efforts to wrap things up succinctly.

Still, I didn't dislike this experience, I just wish it had either been more consistent with its delivery of information if it wanted to focus on this mystery. If we had known more about Isako, Nekome and Takeru in particular before those later episodes, it would have been easier to connect to their motivations and generate interest in the mysteries surrounding them. There was plenty to dig into, but by the end, my head was spinning with way too much information.