MarcusCyron

The series truly has everything. Everything a good crime series shouldn't have. Over-the-top and unbelievable characters, lousy plots, and bad artwork.

It begins with the detectives. Two wealthy heirs from industrial families who pursue police work as a hobby. He with complete arrogant conviction, she practically in secret. They also have a butler for the female detective, who ends up solving the cases for them because they're supposedly too stupid. But how are they supposed to solve the cases, which were designed on the drawing board-and apparently a few 30-sided dice were also used to construct unbelievable events and twists, making everything even more unbelievable.

Furthermore, the series, which is set almost entirely in the upper class, has every kind of cliché you can imagine. And unfortunately, it shows that in Japan, people apparently can't empathize with other cultures. For example, a descendant of a Japanese mother born and raised in the USA acts exactly like a Japanese person. With not only the same moral values, but also the same cultural and everyday behavior. Even if the series were to portray the Japanese legal system even remotely adequately, that would be fatal. Because then, for reasons of shame and saving face, many capital crimes would not be prosecuted by the state because they go unreported. That would be a deeply archaic system.

The series is neither suitable as a crime thriller-it's simply not exciting-nor as a comedy-it's simply not funny. And from a German (speaking) perspective, the dubbed version produced in South Africa is unbelievably bad.

The "dungeon" is a standard feature in most Japanese isekai and fantasy anime. A magically created place that adventurers can traverse in search of treasure, usually across multiple levels, each with a final boss to defeat - and at the end, the dungeon boss. So far, so good. But has anyone ever considered what goes on behind the scenes of these dungeons?

That's what this anime series is dedicated to. What happens when a wall collapses during a fight and you suddenly find yourself standing in the dungeon boss's living quarters? Then, as a top adventurer, you quickly get a job behind the scenes. And suddenly, the monsters you were fighting the day before are colleagues. And actually quite nice people. And how do you get new recruits? And how do you interview them? How do you renovate the dungeon? How do you deal with rule breakers?

This anime, which is quite amusing for the most part, is dedicated to all of this. It's not an expensive, glossy project, which you quickly notice. There are a lot of freeze frames, there aren't as many interlacing frames, and the design isn't as good as it could be. But you can overlook that, because you realize that everything is lovingly crafted.

The stories have a few long stretches here and there, and sometimes you wish that perhaps they had gone a step further, with the normalization behind the scenes, and that a bit of magic had been removed. The quasi-official, unofficial relationships with the real world also rob the whole thing of the meaning and value of the original idea a little.

But in the end, it's a very entertaining, successful series, even if it's not outstanding. More of it!

Admittedly, as a European, this whole idol system is very foreign to me. But the idol concept is now the central plot element in a large number of anime. Thus, this anime, even if not completely authentic in all its elements, should portray the system quite accurately.

And what can I say? It's hollow, it's empty. Two young men who have no talent of their own, can only sing mediocrely, hopping around on stage and grinning borderline idiotically into the camera. It's the promotion of a soulless business. Essentially, all of the series' protagonists are portrayed as people with very limited worldviews. Some want to be worshipped (for virtually no achievement), others desperately want to be worshipped.

The protagonist, at least at the beginning, stood out, honestly demonstrating what it's all about: making money without much effort. But over the course of the series, he naturally had to be "converted." And mutate into a greased cog in the machine.

Even this soulless stuff could have been packaged appropriately and appealingly. But the series - thankfully with 10 fewer episodes than usual, but still far too many - never manages to, and never even attempts to, offer real substance. The little content per episode is even stretched out by mostly mediocre to bad singing numbers.

In the end, the series is like the idol system itself: without substance, without soul, without a reason to exist. Bad entertainment designed to rip people off. Visually, the whole thing is also nothing special. From the character design to the animation, this is a truly cheap production. Inside and out.