Chaos Head, the anime, is an adaptation of the visual novel of the same name. Takumi Nishijo is a high school student who is content to bury himself in his otaku hobbies and do as little as possible. He learns of a string of murder cases from someone online called Generation Madness. Soon after, he meets a girl who shows an interest in him and claims to be a childhood friend.
Just like in the Chaos series, the theme of Delusions and how either a positive or negative one could be projected into reality and about a group of super powered people known as giglomaniacs and their ability to use d-swords. The anime is faithful to the main story in general but it is very rushed out and badly butchered. The story went from being a complex suspense in the visual novel to a generic save the world from evil organization. The shows handling of alienation and otaku lifestyle is really just not accurate and it was basically just “Otakus are bad” “Normies are good” and nothing really nuanced.
Things explained in the show like the scientific and philosophical concepts were extremely confusing, contradictory and very illogical. Even the delusions that’s such a main focus in the visual novel are put in the backburner. Many important plot details were either completely gone on or just not fully explored. The mystery and suspense are lacking in the show and the dialogue suffers because of the convoluted story. Subplots were introduced and then dropped and the pacing was fast. Characters were just popping in and out without contributing much to the story and the cast of the show is very large especially for a 12-episode anime. However, the musical score was excellent.
Takumi was useless and just kept running away from problems instead of dealing with them head on. He lacked empathy and complained constantly. He was indecisive and was difficult to like. His love interest Seira Orgel added nothing to the show and was just a foil for some lackluster comedy.
The action in the show was ordinary and the choreography of the heroines to be unintentionally funny, having dating sim type characters trying to pass themselves off as capable action oriented female heroes. I'm not surprised that it was written by the same guy who wrote some of the worst anime shows to be made Ninja Scroll, the series and Devil May Cry. What makes it even worse is that the English voice acting was bland. The Japanese voice cast reprises their roles and do the best job they could.
The animation was just really sloppy and lazy and the art style wasn’t visually appealing either. Some of the scenes were very choppy and rough looking and the background design was bland and undetailed. Character movements felt stiff and the background characters were like statues in crowded areas. Character designs were faithful to the original visual novel but admittedly generic. The show had some very awkward cinematography and it was very over reliant on zooming in and out every few seconds. The features of the blu-ray were minimal with just trailers and textless openings and endings.
This was just really bad adaptation and is what made the Chaos series get a bad rep in the anime community overshadowing the visual novels.
It gets 1 out of 5 stars.