Anime: 11 Eyes 2j6n53

11 Eyes (never really figured out the title), is a confusing story about a group of special characters (known as fragments) and their struggle to survive an alternate dimension that is triggered seemingly randomly (think like a fuzetsu in Shakugan no Shana with the randomness trigger of day dreams in Yumekui Merry).

The plot progression is very much like in Chaos; Head and Fate Stay Night where the main protagonist is thrown into a foreign, dangerous situation and is forced to adapt; and with the viewer being somewhat confused as the mysteries are slowly unraveled. The downside to this series is that it fails to pull in the viewer's interest in the early episodes (compared to Chaos; Head) and fails to deliver any semblance of a decent conclusion (compared to FSN).

This is a fairly serious series (not too much heavy fan service) with an emphasis on the sharp contrast between normal school slice-of-life and the unreal Red night. While the setting is eventually explicated enough, it is accompanied by a plot line that seems random at times and finishes off with a very annoying ending that isn't even worth spoiling.

Do yourself a favor and look elsewhere for a series, the review by roriconfan already contains lots of related anime, and all the ones I have seen on that review are better. If you must learn why this is utter fail, continue reading.

Animation:
Animation is probably the series' only saving grace. While not gorgeous, the animation is nicely done with decent character designs and average battles (there is significant blood in certain scenes). There is a large focus on dark colors (blood red) to complement the tone of the series. One annoyance is the hordes of very strange-looking creatures in the Red night (obviously deriving from the hentai...) that don't really serve much of a purpose, I found them distracting and utterly not worth the screen time.

Sound:
This is fairly average stuff. OP starts rather interestingly but then becomes somewhat bland while the EP features a girl with crazy vibrato, but the melody just fails. Both fit well enough with the action-base of the series. The BGM is mostly forgettable with a techno-based theme during battles. VAs are average in this series (Daisuke Ono's usual humor potential is wasted on the boring main protagonist) but I blame the characters more than their respective VAs.

Story:
This is where things start going really down hill. At least the premise is decent. You find a guy with one eye (other one is supposedly blind) and a typical girl next door that he likes, and suddenly they're transported to an alternate dimension and he wants to do everything to protect her yay.

Unfortunately that's pretty much the end of the good news. The series then goes through many plot developments based off of way too many crazy explanations (completely unbelievable) to try to help the viewer make sense of what is happening (while still leaving huge plot holes unexplained). This is just way too much combined with characters that start behaving erratically (see next section) and just making a whole mess of something that originally had decent potential.

Example: Person A dies at end of episode x, at beginning of episode x + 1 aha I tricked you A didn't die he/she was transported through a vortex that you didn't see just in the nick of time!).

And like the previous reviewer I also greatly lament the pointless ending.

Character:
This series has greatly underdeveloped characters. A lot of times, the characters are unpredictable, as in they act in a way that isn't consistent with what you know about them at the time. The majority of the character development focuses on the guy (Kakeru) and the two girls interested in him (Misuzu and Yuka). As you can probably guess there is a bit of a love triangle and eventually one of the girls starts going coocoo. This seriously undermines any attachment a viewer might have with the character and leads to very unpredictable wtf moments in the plot line. Yeah they also decided to throw in a bit of an implied sex scene (though nothing to the extent of Yosuga no Sora) though it has absolutely no impact really on the plot line and makes a girl seem like a whore.

Value:
This pretty much takes the cake for being totally not worth your time. There are better girls with sword series, better action-thrillers, better cute-girl-in-distress, etc. While the series does play with a multitude of elements, they are just not integrated in a uniform, consistent package. Save your bandwidth and eyesight for something else.

3eyes … I mean, PERSONA11 … I mean, 11eyes is a porn game adaptation which pays tribute to Persona 3 and other far better series. If you don’t believe me, just check the premise: The protagonist has a magical (Geass) Aeon eye that makes him the epicenter of the fate of the world (insert O’rly?! Owl here). Because there is this alternative dimension called (Fate/stay) Red Night, ruled by Dark (Hour) Knights that want to kill him to prevent a magic girl from escaping her crystal prison. So he must gather a team of supernatural teenagers called (Persona s) Fragments, enter the dimension, fight (Shadows) Evil Spirits, and beat the baddies before it is too late.

And it’s not that I dislike it because it reminds me a lot of other things; it’s more about how predictable it feels. The first episodes are introductions to the characters, the mid-episodes are a build up, then comes an episode that exists only as a massive infodump which reveals all the mystery in a long boring monologue, and then there is nothing left but the finale. It plays out very mechanically, with the most memorable thing being the “having sex to power up” trope, and even that is common in porn games.

The cast are generic archetypes with not enough meat to become memorable. The animators gave them nice mannerisms, so they all act and feel perky. But without much fleshing out they end up being stock characters. The low number of episodes doesn’t let them do anything other than moving from one event to another. I kind of liked how at least they are not plot armored, since many of them get killed over the course of the series. Although you don’t care much about them, the stakes are high all the time. I mean, isn’t it stupid if the whole world can be destroyed and nobody ever dies? Too bad this semblance of tension goes to hell, because the ending is a time reset! Yes, that’s right, it has the cop-out of everything being magically restored, everyone getting revived, and everybody living happily ever after without ing anything that happened throughout the whole series. Damn you Clannad for making this a trend and killing all the drama by magically undoing the plot.

Visually-wise, there is a nice contrast of bright colors during scenes of the normal world with crimson ones during scenes of the Dark Hour … I mean, Red Night. The girls all look cute and are full of cheerful accessories, not to mention the underwear. Man, skirts in this series have anti-gravity powers. They flip upwards all the time, answering the crucial question of what color the pantsu are every two minutes (so we won’t forget it obviously). And the cinematographer for the show must have been a worm, as there are a lot of low-angle shots to help you see under their skirts, even when they are just standing still. I’m sure that is very crucial for understanding their *inner world*. So yeah, it stands out for erotic aesthetics rather than atmosphere or cinematics. It has serious moments too, but then some underwear will flash in your face and you won’t care anymore.

At least the animators bothered to make the characters lively and not motionless sluts with flapping mouths. They made their bodies move a lot, gave them nice mannerisms, and didn’t go overboard with the underwear ala Ikki Tousen. Also, the battles can be fun since they have some choreography and tactics, but they are nowhere near the level of Fate / Stay Night, which also happens to be a porn game adaptation where they also have sex as a power up.

There’s the inclusion of some creepy sounding Hungarian words, given that many characters hail from Transylvania, in an attempt to make things scarier. Unfortunately, the story is not horror. It is silly and comes down to grotesque monsters fighting happy-go-lucky lolis with squeaky voices that don’t miss the chance to flash their pantsu. So who cares about Count Dracula’s hometown language when it has the usual “I will protect you” or “Kyaa! You pervert!” all-time classic anime catchphrases?

In conclusion, it is a very original and unpredictable story … NOT! Only newbies who haven’t watched anything other than Pokemon have chances of liking this one, assuming they will even bother to watch something as old and forgotten as this. The rest will most likely drop it, find it to be an average time-killer, or call their lawyer to file a sue concerning plagiarism. However, if you come in with a mindset of it being erotic fan fiction of more esteemed franchises rather than a standalone original series, you might get some enjoyment out of it. So yeah, watch it as the Persona 3 characters have sex with the Fate / Stay Night girls, so they can go back in time with a microwave oven and Dragonball Nagisa back to life. Tutturu~!