Review of Texhnolyze

Texhnolyse is not a 'fun' anime, as many have pointed out before. It was not supposed to be, as far as I'm concerned. It's not cool, exciting or stylish, maybe because it's not some vision of the future one should aspire to pursue, as many other cyberpunk dystopias ended up, even if unintentionally. That is precisely why it succeeds in something many other cyberpunk dystopias fail: to warn about a future (which is very much present, I'm afraid) we should be wary of. An interesting question posed early on in Texhnolyze is that of the reason of being, the 'raison d'tre'. It's a question that keepscoming back for each character, and even for the 3 major organizations in the anime and for the city of Lux itself.
As Texhnolyze has very little exposition (a departure of storytelling style from animes in general) and we don't have access to anyone's inner thoughts, we are left to wonder and figure out what's going on and why it's happening.

There are great reflections on the effects of the replacement of our human qualities with technology, where it can lead us and how it can reshape us as tools of violence. There is also a nightmarish remainder on how fascistic ideologies work through dehumanization, not only of their targets, but, more terribly so, of their very own supporters, who give up their humanity for power.

I remember thinking at some point around episode 19: This is one of the bleakest and most interesting visions of the future of humankind I’ve ever watched, for in it, we did not lose a war against the machines as in many other dark futures, no. Instead, we became the machines ourselves. In Texhnolize future, we lost our humanity, we replaced it with our technology.

But then I watched the last 3 episodes... And the end turned out so nihilistic (and somewhat disappointing) that I could not enjoy it, even as a philosophical exercise. I guess this is not a matter of critique of the quality of the storytelling per se, but a fundamental disagreement on how I view life and our potential to create meaning and the authors' vision for this anime. Even though my dissatisfaction with the ending did not spoil how much I liked the work as a whole, it does leave the taste of a bittersweet anticlimax to this otherwise great philosophical sci-fi anime.