Tag: PSYCHO-PASS

PSYCHO-PASS: The Movie—The Part Where We Pretend Season 2 Never Happened

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hisui_icon_4040 Hear me out. PSYCHO-PASS: The Movie is Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Let me explain. The original PSYCHO-PASS is the first Star Wars trilogy. Both of them are science fiction stories that take almost all of their elements from older popular works and then combine them into new if somewhat formulaic story. They both have some major flaws and plot holes but if your will to suspend your disbelief a bit they are highly entertaining and maybe even a bit enlightening. Neither of them is for everyone but they are easy to recommend for a general audience and probably worth watching just so you can talk about them. Also while there are some major and vocal detractors for both of them then both generally got universal praise.

The second season of PSYCHO-PASS is the prequel trilogy. It is just a train wreck that eats away any good will that the original had earned. They really seem to miss what made their predecessor popular and totally botch a good deal of the world building, character development, and thematic resonance from the original. They both started off and the fans tried to convince themselves they were good but by the end most people just hated everything about them. Finally they both turned off a lot of fans who would have otherwise stuck with the series.

So PSYCHO-PASS: The Movie and The Force Awakens had a heavy burden placed upon them. They had to convince everyone who had been burned by what came became before them to give their respective series another chance. The Force Awakens succeeded in that mission amazingly well. Does Psycho-Pass: The Movie do the same?

narutaki_icon_4040 The PSYCHO-PASS movie sees the return of Shinya Kogami, co-protagonist of season one who left before the dust had even settled. Akane grew a lot during that time and when they encounter each other again, it is more as equals.

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Case Closed Reviews: Fall 2014

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First impressions are great but what about our thoughts after we’ve watched an entire series week to week? We figured our listeners might want to hear our final impressions as well so we’ve created the Case Closed Review podcast. Just like the S.W.A.T. Reviews, these will be mini-podcasts and completely off the cuff.

Here are the shows we finished from the spring and summer seasons:

Listen – Final impressions of Rage of Bahamut: Genesis from MAPPA. It is streaming on Hulu and Funimation.

Listen – Final impressions of Gugure! Kokkuri-san from TMS Entertainment. It is streaming on Crunchyroll.

Listen – Final impressions of PSYCHO-PASS 2 from Tatsunoko Productions. It is streaming on Hulu and Funimation.

PSYCHO-PASS: This Plastic Beautiful World

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hisui_icon_4040 What is cyberpunk? While it is hardly as problematic a term like steampunk, which is a tempest in a teapot in of itself, it is a genre that gets plastered on quite a few series for mostly cosmetic reasons that often miss the point of the purest essence of the classification.

Therefore I am going to say that to be a full cyberpunk series you need to simultaneously fulfill two requirements. The first is the proliferation of cyber-technology. Cybernetics and Cyberspace should be fairly ubiquitous in the setting. While in many ways we are living in parts of the cyberpunk future laid out in things like the Sprawl Trilogy any contemporary cyberpunk work should be set in the not too distant future where our present information technology infrastructure is even more omnipresent. There should be more advanced augmented reality, more complex and sometimes totally cosmetic integration of man and machine, and a totally ubiquitous internet.  The technology should advance with the march of science.

The second part is there should be a fairly oppressive divide between haves and the have-nots with a distinct air of dystopia. The rich should live in luxury and decadence with a technological regime that supports them. At the same time the down and out live in a paradox. While they have progressed a good deal with the ubiquitous nature of technology their lives should actually be worse since they have lost so much freedom and security. Also the gap between the poor and the rich should be astronomical with the resentment on both sides being equally intense.

You see that in all the classic cyberpunk novels like Neuromancer and Snow Crash, RPGs like Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020, and anime like Serial Experiments Lain and Ghost in the Shell. So our question here today is how much does PSYCHO-PASS fit into this two-part model. Does it have a cyberpunk flavor or is it full-immersed in the genre?

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