Secret Santa Review: Texhnolyze

Almost four years ago, I bought Geneon CD/DVD combo packs of Last Exile & Texhnolyze (each first volumes). I watched both of them at the time and liked both but not enough to get the rest of the singles, though I did buy the 2nd Texhnolyze soundtrack from a closing Sam Goody store because I liked the music on the first disc. So when those two series along with Infinite Ryvius were suggested as my Secret Santa choices, I felt I had to choose Texhnolyze because it hadn’t developed very much in the first four episodes and this way, I would push myself to finish it. (I had bought Funimation’s repackaging of Last Exile earlier this year so that’ll be Backlog material for 2010. The majority of Ryvius‘ discs were “unavailable” through Netflix.)
The show takes place in Lukuss, an underground city where humanity is basically waiting to die. Ichise, a fighter, gets an arm and a leg sliced off when he tries to stand up to the Organo, an organization running the fighting ring, and afterward the group provides him with new texhnolyzed limbs with the expectation that he’ll work for them. (He doesn’t, though, until the second half of the series.) Yoshii, a visitor from outside, acts as mainly as an observer of all three factions in town – the Organo, the anti-texhnolyzation Salvation Union, and the youthful rebel Racan gang – before deciding to stir up conflict among the three in order to make the city feel more alive and bring forth more primal human energy. A lot of fighting goes on and it eventually comes to an end with Yoshii and Onishi, leader of the Organo, facing off against each other.

The second half centers around the Organo attempting to regroup and Ichise being taken on Organo missions with the guidance of Toyama. They head to the mountain of Gabe, where the Seer tells Ichise (after not wanting to relate such a painful vision) that he will destroy everything, hurt many people and be alone in the end. The doctor who fixed up Ichise wants to return to the Class but is denied entry. Acts of betrayals happen within the Organo and large amounts of each faction decide to leave their groups in order to join a egoist from the Class who wants to rule Lukuss. He does so by putting those men’s heads into mechanical bodies called Shapes and equips them with disintegrating-hole guns.

Ichise and the doctor head to the surface to try to talk with a government official and discover that the real “living people” are those underground – those up top are pretty much ghosts who have given up. Apparently, there was some sort of forced immigration to the underground a few generations before in the hopes that something down there might help humanity evolve and overcome the dangerous elements that couldn’t be eliminated (i.e., pollution or something else). Ichise returns to Lukuss and handles some before finally resting somewhere and peacefully closing his eyes.

As I watched, the slow pace didn’t bother me as much as I thought because I realized that it paralleled the unhappiness of most of the characters, that life has become pretty meaningless. There are some good action scenes in the interfaction conflict and when the smaller factions rebelled against the Shapes. This is a mature series not only from how its story is told but also through the doctor’s sexual advances on Ichise when he’s first getting fixed up, blood spurting after gunshots and sword slices, many people dying, and glimpses of breasts.

Overall, I enjoyed watching the story unfold and its depressing theme of a drawn-out end for humanity. The gore reminded me a little of Speed Grapher but the violence itself certainly wasn’t pulpy – deaths were played fairly straightly and had some impact on the characters. The character designs by Yoshitoshi ABe looked nice and the eyes definitely had his trademark lines. It takes a lot of patience to get through its 22 episodes but that wasn’t much of a challenge for me as I’ve endured some other slow anime including two other ABe-designed ones (Haibane Renmei and Lain) and come to like most of those for certain reasons.