Review of Texhnolyze

My wife and I both strongly disliked, and were bored to tears by, Serial Experiments Lain so we were both quite hesitant going into Texhnolyze, as it's from the same character designer, Yoshitoshi ABe. Nonetheless, we are both big on giving things an honest chance and having an open mind so we gave it a watch. Neither of us enjoyed this anime, and here's why- Art- The art style and the way the anime is directed is remarkably similar to Serial Experiments Lain, which to us is a negative thing. This anime is now 15+ years old, so it's not fair to compare it graphically to somethingmore modern, but this anime did not age well graphically. It's not particularly pretty, it looks clearly dated and some of the character models are pretty rough. Also, a key character in this anime looks far too similar to Lain herself, which we thought was weird and lame.

Sound-

The sound as a whole was also mediocre at best. The voice acting is extremely average at best and has absolutely zero standout performances.

The music was well below average. I hardly noticed it throughout and there are no songs whatsoever that remotely stand out to me or that stick in my memory just days after completing this anime, nevermind weeks or months down the road.

Character/Story-

As usual from Yoshitoshi ABe, many of the characters in this anime are super cliche and stereotyped, one dimensional and in many cases simply very weird. I'm convinced this man has never interacted with a woman in his entire life because almost every female character in every anime I've seen from this man is about as stereotypical, cliche, cookie-cutter, one dimensional and unrealistic as they come.

The "main character" in this anime, and I use quotes because it strongly felt to me like Onishi was the real main character, is one of the worst leads I've ever seen. He hardly talks or has any personality whatsoever, he has a poorly animated fat face and basically the only thing he does throughout the show- and he does this over and over again- is get angry and start hitting things. He's got a much less cool "Hulk mad! Hulk SMASH!" thing going on.

The story overall didn't do it for us either. Any negative adjective you can apply to the story of Serial Experiments Lain is applicable here as well. Gruelingly slow? Absolutely. Convoluted? Yes. Hard to follow? Definitely. Super weird? Often. Outright boring? For sure. The pace as a whole is just punishingly slow and the overall story could have been told in 15 ish episodes, tops, but it drags for a very long and drawn out 22.

To say one positive thing, the latter part of the show was better than the former and it had a few cliffhangers and a building mystery I was somewhat intrigued by, but it took wayyyyy too long to get there and the characters were so underdeveloped and lame that I simply didn't care about any of them by the time we hit that point. It was very much too little too late.

Enjoyment-

For both my wife and myself watching this just felt like a huge slog damn near from start to finish and we only opted to finish it at all because we absolutely hate dropping things and we see things through to the end for better or worse. We both fell asleep during this anime on more than one occasion and watching it just felt super tedious. The ending of the show was decent but by that point we were completely uninvested and just praying for it to be over as soon as possible. Neither of us enjoyed watching this at all. It wasn't our single least favorite anime of all time, but it's definitely very low on our list and not something either of us ever want to watch again.

Overall-

If you read this review up to this point you know my overall experience with this anime was largely negative. Just like Serial Experiments Lain it was very very slow, weird and convoluted and worst of all simply outright boring. It's big on symbolism and non-verbal story telling and if you liked Lain there is a good chance you'll like this. I strongly disliked Lain and this anime is very similar to it, so, thumbs down and definitely not recommended as far as I'm concerned...

+Story concept is original and not something you've seen a dozen times before

-GRUELINGLY slow
-BORING
-Very underdeveloped, cookie cutter, one dimensional characters
-Graphically dated/hasn't aged well

OBJECTIVE RATING- 4
PERSONAL ENJOYMENT RATING- 4