The Fall 2016 Anime Preview Guide

Trickster

Hanasaki is one of the youngest members of the Boys' Detective Club, a group dedicated to protecting their city from villains like the mysterious man with twenty faces. Their nemesis' newest plan involves hijacking top-of-the-line military robots in order to achieve some nefarious goal, but Hanasaki isn't terribly interested in that. Instead, Hanasaki is trying to catch up with a new boy he just met, one who seems to have a mysterious power that both prevents him from dying and brings great misfortune to anyone who gets too close to him. Can Hanasaki reach this boy, and will his new friend ultimately empower or destroy the Detective Club? Trickster is an original anime work and can be found streaming on Crunchyroll, Mondays at 1:35 PM EST.

Jacob Chapman

Rating: 3

Hey, you know the surest way to win over audiences to your anime? Introduce an extremely adorable puppy and then blow it up for no good reason! Be sure to flash back on that blood smear a few times, that's the ticket!

So Trickster is a head-scratchingly handsome show with smooth art design, slick animation, sharp direction, and bizarrely repellent writing. The plot is simple and engaging enough: future detective agency of future detectives solves cases in the future, recruits mysterious esper boy into their ranks, tangled conspiracy with arch-nemesis unfolds, etc. The problems lie entirely with the motley crew of crime-fighters, composed of five characters who are all equally unlikable for different reasons.

Let's see, there's the senior agency detective who sexually harasses women and complains about everything. There's the officious associate police detective who seems perpetually annoyed at the former guy (for sexually harassing her) and only seems to care about fast results. There's central intelligence kid, a bratty hacker girl who whines and rolls around in a halfhearted "spoiled baby" routine. There's junior detective hero boy, who's so recklessly genki it's ridiculous, making dangerously stupid decisions while laughing way too much about everything because he's "kindhearted," I guess. And finally, there's monotonously suicidal esper kid, who tries and fails to kill himself a lot and crawls in his skin for the entirety of the episode about his uncontrollable telekinetic powers and immortality. (He's responsible for that pointlessly exploded Papillon.) Given just a few tweaks, all of these characters could have been lovable rapscallions or even stock-level tolerable anime stereotypes, but the dial is cranked just a little too far on every single one of them, turning them into Scrappy-esque eyerolling clowns instead. This bad character writing really cuts the legs out from under what could have been a perfectly enjoyable action show.

The weird juxtaposition of these things doesn't jump to any particular extreme somehow, Trickster is neither unpleasant to watch nor "enjoyable if you just turn your brain off." It just exists in a shruggy space between its extreme perks and flaws. If mystery-action is totally your jam, this might be worth a couple more episodes to see if its characters find their feet. They're really the only thing holding this otherwise promising show back, but boy is this cast a handicap!

Rebecca Silverman

Rating: 2

Trickster is to Edogawa Ranpo what Clueless is to Jane Austen's Emma: so loosely based that, while you can see the similarities if you look hard enough, it really just feels like a way to justify the show's existence. Keep in mind that this is coming from a fan of Edogawa Ranpo's works – if you don't have any background in his writing, you may find this less irritating than I did.

Sadly, that doesn't mean that you're likely to find it a whole lot more coherent. Drawing its characters from Ranpo's “Boy Detectives” novels (only the first of which is available in English as of this writing), the first episode is very loosely based on a stand-alone Akechi Kogoro story from 1925, “The Case of the Murder on D Hill.” (You can read it in The Early Cases of Akechi Kogoro.) It features a very different take on the characters some viewers may be familiar with from the 2014 series Ranpo Kitan: Game of Laplace – this Akechi Kogoro is a light-hearted playboy going head-to-head with female cop Nakamura and Kobayashi is now an immortal teen boy protected by a mysterious force field that destroys any and all attempts to harm him, including adorable little dogs. Kobayashi wants nothing more than to die, and makes repeated attempts throughout the episode, which may be an issue for some viewers; probably the most difficult to take is when he tries to shoot himself. While his suicidal tendencies are triggering, however, they aren't without weight and explanation. Trickster takes the view that immortality is more of a curse than a blessing, with the strong implication that Kobayashi has been kicking around for some time. This does have the potential to be interesting, particularly since it seems that if he lets his guard down a bit, as he does with Hanasaki, one of Akechi's boy detectives, he can be injured. There could be some sort of tortured metaphor about trust lurking in background, especially since Hanasaki and Kobayashi are polar opposites in terms of personality and outlook.

I'm not sure that this show will be able to handle that, however. This episode feels very messy, relying on viewer familiarity with Ranpo's works in its introduction of the Fiend with Twenty Faces and Akechi himself but then not delivering on that assumption with a coherent story to go with them. The episode title also would imply greater fidelity to the series' inspiration than we are given. The leggy character designs (courtesy of mangaka Peach Pit) are attractive enough and the setting is an interesting mix of current and futuristic, but the story itself really doesn't hold up enough for me to want to give it a second episode. It does have some potential, but not quite enough to live up to the literary credentials it wants to have. Right now it feels like we're better off waiting for season two of Bungo Stray Dogs.

Paul Jensen

Rating: 2.5

Damn, Trickster is a good-looking show. Solid animation, strong visual direction, and some gorgeous background art make this an early contender for the eye-candy series of the season. The character designs are perhaps the weakest part of the equation, and even they are slightly above average in terms of aesthetic appeal. I want to take multiple shots from this first episode and hang them on my wall. It's a shame, then, that there's a world of difference between a good-looking show and a good show.

The problem here is that the writing in Trickster aims for an angst-ridden style of cool that's very compelling when done well and supremely annoying when done poorly. If you're going to talk about death in abstract terms from the very first scene while following the trials and tribulations of an immortal kid who just wants to die, you'd better have some high-caliber storytelling to back it up. Trickster just isn't quite up to the task, and it shows in a big way. What should be emotional, insightful monologues consistently come across as trite and hollow in this episode. Instead of feeling sympathy for the perpetually miserable Yoshio, I found myself hoping he'd suddenly lose his voice and go back to standing quietly in front of dramatic backdrops.

It's a shame, too, because there are a handful of emotionally poignant moments to be found here. Hanasaki's doomed search for a missing dog comes to a quietly sad ending, but not in the teary-eyed way one might expect. There's also some human warmth to be found in Hanasaki's first coherent conversation with Yoshio, and that offers hope that there's some real chemistry between these characters. The game of cat and mouse between the detective agency and their criminal nemesis also shows some potential, but the adult characters need to find some depth in a hurry if that storyline is going to hold water. At the moment, everyone apart from Hanasaki and Yoshio comes across as forgettable and one-dimensional.

A swift narrative intervention could save Trickster, and for the sake of those lovely visuals I hope it does. For now, however, the dialogue and narration have too much of a “my first serious story” vibe for my tastes. Even when it's backed up by strong production values, the appearance of deep storytelling isn't enough to hold a series together.

Rating: 3.5

Trickster is based on the works of Ranpo (sometimes Rampo) Edogawa, a mystery writer who is one of the most influential figures in early 20th century Japanese literature. Unlike last year's Rampo Kitan: Game of Laplace, though, this work seems less specifically based on any particular novels or short stories and more a conglomeration of characters, scenarios, and ideas taken from across the breadth of Edogawa's works. For instance, the title of this episode, “Mirage on D. Hill,” is a clear reference to “The Case of the Murder on D. Hill,” the story in which long-time Edogawa regular Kogoro Akechi makes his first appearance. (I suspect this means that all of the episode titles will be allusions to Edogawa works.) Unsurprisingly, Akechi also appears in this episode as the senior detective of the Boys Detective Club, which is a long-standing institution in Edogawa works. Unsurprisingly, Yoshio Kobayashi (Akechi's sidekick) and Fiend with Twenty Faces (Akechi's nemesis) also look like they are going to figure prominently into this story.

The big twist here – aside from this being set in the near future – is an interesting one. Yoshio has some kind of involuntary protective barrier which makes him nearly impossible to harm; he can safely jump off of high buildings, go underwater, even slice in half a bottle of tea tossed to him. And he'd rather that wasn't the case, since, for some as-yet-unspecified reason, he badly wants to die. That just makes him all the more intriguing to the high-spirited Hanasaki, who even has a smile on his face as he rescues a random girl from kidnappers. His personality is so inviting that even the mix-up at the end of the episode seems unlikely to keep Yoshio from hanging with the Boys’ Detective Club (which doesn't seem to be all boys, as their cyber master is a girl). Then we also have the duel of wits between Akechi and Fiend with Twenty Faces, who seems to be up to some scheme involving security robots. There's also a female police chief(?) for Akechi to bounce off of, too.

Right now it's a little hard to see how this is all going to come together into one unified story – assuming it comes together at all, of course, as these could just be disparate storylines which happen to intersect. I have to think, though, that there's just as a big a mystery to be solved surrounding Yoshi's ability as there is concerning Twenty Faces. It looks like he action component won't be a weak point, either, and the technical merits in general are pretty good. While the first episode involves a hodgepodge of elements which can be found in innumerable anime series over the past few years, overall it does have some promise.

Nick Creamer

Rating: 2

Trickster is one of those shows that makes me lament anime's deeply imbalanced talent pool and source economy. Reduced to a sequence of still frames and a soundtrack, Trickster's first episode is a highly compelling production. The character designs are simple but attractive, the color work is vivid, and many of the backgrounds and compositions are beautifully constructed. Vast shots of the night sky smartly convey the loneliness of Hanasaki's new friend Yoshio, and the climactic scene in a burning factory uses a mixture of deep reds and heavy blacks to create a vivid hellscape. The music is equally strong - this first episode has a compelling mix of orchestral and vocal tracks that set tones as disparate as Hanasaki joyfully rappelling down the wall of a building versus Hanasaki returning the body of a dog to its owners.

Unfortunately, the characters in this show also talk. Trickster's first minute is an excruciating monologue on the inevitable nature of death, narrated by an actual teenager and portrayed with all the gravitas of a lesser Linkin Park song. “Death is a gift bestowed upon all who live” intones our emo protagonist, before attempting to stab a broken shard of glass into his invincible neck. In a world where we all long for human connection, Yoshio is both separated from others by his dangerous power and not even allowed to enjoy the finality of death. How wincingly sad for him.

The disconnect between Trickster's strong production and bad writing continues all throughout this episode, weaving from lecherous jokes by Hanasaki's co-detective Akechi through more mopey segments starring the surrounded-by-tragedy Yoshio. And the final scene, where a man Hanasaki is saving from that burning factory ends up first calling Yoshio a monster and then screaming at both of his saviors, perfectly captures the concept of adult characters as written by child writers.

As an adaptation of an existing manga, Trickster can only do so much to elevate the egregious dialogue and structural blandness of its source material. If you're not taken by Yoshio's over-the-top sadsack story, I can't imagine this show's redeeming qualities will be enough to sell it to you. Some shows are essentially doomed from the start.