Chaos Child the anime is an adaptation of the visual novel of the same name and was animated by Silver Link. The story is about Takeru, a high school student and his newspaper club who are investigating a series of murders when they discover a conspiracy behind the killings.
It is not accessible to those who didn’t play the game where the story is explained as you progress. In the anime, it is just rushed through. Information and lore are dumped all at once. The way stuff is explained in the anime feels pretty dumbed down due to cutting out most of the storyline. The themes of communication and media and their downsides are cut out entirely.
The anime continues the tradition of creating parodies of real-world brands like Mountain View. The art style is faithful to the original visual novel and the character designs looked nicely updated. The suspense and neo noir like atmosphere are there still and the background design of the world is generally good. The animation was pretty messy and rough but the dark visual style lend itself really well.
Since the action comes from a visual novel, the way its executed is lacking because none of the action scenes felt really intense or interesting to watch.
The characters aren’t as multilayered as the original but still retain their main aspects. Some of the other characters had hardly any purpose for episodes. The character reactions to the events around them is best described as mild surprise and the characters motives are left out. Don't expect Hana to appear in the show often as she hardly had any relevance to the plot in contrast to the original game. Mio just like in the game, is extremely unlikable and very unpleasant to deal with and she’s constantly belittles everyone around her and start fights unnecessarily.
Takeru is more decisive and resourceful in the anime than in the game. He is very focused on the task at hand and determined to solve the cases.
The voice cast from the visual novel reprises their roles and did a splendid job. However, the English voice cast was a bit inconsistent. The dialogue is as cliched as any other otaku pandering anime out there. The musical score is ok but the opening song wasn’t really that catchy and the audio quality is subpar.
The comedy isn’t as balanced as it is in the mainline series as jokes are a distraction given the very dark nature of the show.
The way the show introduces d-weapons was unexplained and felt very sudden. Just like in the game, the anime has a very badly written ending where not only does the main villain get away but many unresolved plot points come about. This leaves more questions than answers and it will have to take Anonymous Code to come out to explain what happens.
Serika, the real murderer gets away while Itou and Takeru are being blamed for the crime. There is a cover up and Yui Is dead and the committee of 300 still gets away leaving room for a sequel but that isn’t likely till another 5 years or so.
The special features on the blu ray is very barebones.
This was a very bad adaptation.
It gets 2 out of 5 stars
The main problem of the show was caused by production issues due to the limited budget. You have to be a very hardcore Science Adventure fan to really enjoy this show.