12 30-minute Episodes
Based on the visual novel of the same name, Chaos;Head is a confused series. Not a confusing one, but a confused one, since it doesn't exactly know what it wants to be. The story centres around Takumi Nishijo, a shut-in otaku with a shaky grip on reality who frequently proclaims that he has no need for the "3D World". He spends all his time in a fantasy, playing his favourite MMO, Empire Sweeper, often imagining his favourite anime character beside him, encouraging him to stay away from people. After stumbling across a gruesome crime scene, a series of young ladies suddenly enter his life, as he tries to work out what's going on, where everyone's getting these translucent swords from and why people keep encouraging him to 'wake up'.
I went into this expecting something dark, and in fairness, the first couple of episodes did not disappoint, but not entirely in the way I was expecting. The main character is an anime and MMO obsessive, and his routine is depicted in a fair amount of detail. The scenes with him imagining Seira-tan, his favourite anime character, loudly proclaiming her to be his 'waifu', and that with her, he has no need for 3D girls make for uncomfortable viewing. His delusions, imagining several encounters with the female cast to be similar to a hentai game are similarly squirm-inducing. (it's also worth noting that this show started airing when the first calls were made to allow hardened fans to marry 2D characters) On the one hand, it makes you glad you (hopefully) have a more solid grip on reality, but on the other, it does make you question the depths of your own obsessions. After all, we've all seen some piece of merch that we've drooled over, possibly even bought. Sure, we're not as pathetic as Takumi, but on some level, we're exactly the same, and it's hard not to think that the producers are laughing at you for it. Hideki Anno would be proud.
(for the record, I've only ever had hallucinations of this nature once: I was 13, playing Super Metroid and I'd been up for about 30 hours straight by this point. I was convinced that the noises the enemies in the crashed ship area made when shot with the ice beam were telling me how the ship crashed. I wish my delusions involved big breasted cuties telling me they're all I need)
Similarly, the one or two scenes of violence are surprisingly effective. The first, involving a man skewered by countless cross-shaped stakes is surprising, but nothing out of the ordinary. The second, in the penultimate episode is far more unsettling, involving a melonballer and an exposed brain, and actually managed to surprise me, so kudos. Unfortunately, the rest of the show is pretty toothless. Most of the damage is done offscreen or to backpacks (it makes sense in context) with the only other blood occurring when the token shy-but-cheerful girl falls and bangs her knee. I'm not the kind of person who demands all-dismemberment all the time, but it seems weird that they show someone being mutilated with pointy objects in the very first episode, then immediately tone everything down thereafter.
Then there's the plot itself. Oh dear lord. It starts off as a psychological drama, then contracts Tenchi Syndrome, having the main character be a magnet for numerous girls despite the fact he's clearly retarded, before mutating into Mai-Hime as all the female characters start running around with awesome but impractical swords. Halfway through, the dark-haired stoic gives the main character, and by proxy the audience, a massive technobabble-filled infodump that kinda explains everything, but doesn't. It suggests that the main character's hallucinations are being put there by someone else, except they're not, and they're also kinda real, but oh my God, I've gone crosseyed. It's like they're trying to ape The Matrix, but they aimed wrong and got Reloaded by mistake. And still did it badly. And then at the end GIANT FUCKING ANTI-MATTER SNAKE OUT OF NOWHERE! which doesn't even really make sense in context except as a vaguely interesting way to put down the Big Bad Evil Guy. And one of the potentially most interesting fights (involving Seira-tan) isn't even shown which is, in a word, criminal!
If all this makes it sound like I hated this show, then I apologise. Its a decent enough series with some nice character designs and some interesting concepts. The problem is, they never let the concepts flow naturally, instead telling you exactly what's going on in a very ham-handed way, rather than making you come to your own conclusions. Had they gone with more subtlety, leaving the viewer to question what actually happened, we could've had something special: a Serial Experiments Lain (still the benchmark test for mindfucks) for the new millennium. What we ended up with was a nice, but shallow show with occasional flashes of what could've been. Watch it, but don't expect it to change your life.
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