Psycho-Pass

A blend of cat & mouse and heady anime. At first glance it seems not unlike Minority Report with the pre-crime pre-destination angle. However, Psycho-Pass is at its heart a bit more human: do we achieve social progress and happiness through a systematic process of improvements; or through emotion and will. A stylish and polished futuristic clash of bureaucracy and romanticism, more about us than about our justice or crime systems.

S1. Starts off as a police procedural inspired by Minority Report and Blade Runner but quickly turns into something more interesting and large-scale. Not overly original but really well done, focused and with restrained character designs.

Another "dark" and "psychological" anime that squanders its premise on skin-deep questions and poorly written edge-lord villains, all while adding nothing new to the discussion. The more one thinks about the world, the less it makes sense - there are no benefits to how it is, no subtlety in its dystopic elements, it's so obviously broken from the start that one questions why we need so much time to explore it. Also, the main character's eyes are too goddamn big. Dropped.

I've only seen season 1 but I actually quite dug it. It had a good Blade Runner-esque vibe to it, engaging characters and nice worldbuilding. There were some more disconnected standalone crime stories early on that didn't grab me as much, but overall, yeah, I'll happily check out the second season one day.

Best villiam

Some interesting elements to the show, and I liked the premise alright, but the world-building just... sucked. It wasn't believable at all. You either completely ignore it, or you have it fully fleshed out. The series did the opposite, where they tried to use it as a plot twist, but the twist is inconsistent with the world. I enjoyed the character dynamics, though. Will not be watching past season 1.

After season 2

excellent

I have ambivalent feelings about this; on one side, the setting is brilliant, the animation is top-notch and the story is actually very interesting. And yet, somehow it is hard to watch, it took me a few months to finish it; it never gets you into a rhythm, and you never really care about what happens next as it is very environment driven. I haven't seen the second season yet, maybe it looks up.

s1 84, s2 74.5, s3 76.1 A weighted average per season was used to calculate the score.