Back in October, I gave you my first impressions on Chaos; Head. It looked very promising and somewhat lived up partly to my expectations. This blurb is going to be short because I don’t plan on revealing any of the plot-lines, you can check out my first impressions linked up here instead for a part of this.

So here are a few thoughts about the anime now that it’s over and about the visual novel game that inspired the anime.

From beginning to the end, Takumi is a very interesting character to follow. While the twists weren’t as epic as I hoped them to be (I’ve been very spoiled by Code Geass R2), they sure were above your average anime series. Most anime series have endings that disappoints, for different reasons. Some make up some filler ending because the source material itself isn’t over, others just never followed the original material to begin with, others, well have original material over, but that original ending sucked itself. While far away from the worst ending ever, which probably goes to Kare Kano by default, since production simply stopped all of a sudden, Chaos; Head just takes an unnecessary spin the shounen genre with “power ups” and fighting. While in itself it isn’t half-bad, I was expecting some crazy ending more alongside Evangelion and Higurashi (season 1), which has you scratching your head wondering what the hell happened (both for different reasons).

Overall, it was a nice ride. The OP and END songs both grew on me and though something felt lacking on the production value side, maybe that’s just the surreal feeling of it all that gave me that impression. So my recommendation stands for the people that fitted in my “recommended for” part of my post in October. It’s only 12 episodes, so that’s not much of a time investment, yet you will likely not regret it. I’m definitely getting this on DVD, if only for collection purpose when it’ll get over here in North America.

As for the game itself, I only went through a small part of it, but it was quite interesting to see the implementation of some kind of stress meter at some points in the story that will decide if you have a delusion or not, and if it’ll be positive or negative. How is this working? Well while going through the dialogue, at times, you start hearing your heartbeats. On each side of the top of the screen, is the option to choose to view a delusion. You can ignore it or choose one of the two, one is red, and the other is green. What happens then will be affected by your choice on a short term the dialogue, but seems to always come back to the same result, from what I experienced.

As for the story, in major parts, seemed to be the same thing as the anime, with of course multiple branches that weren’t covered in the anime. Are you missing anything from just watching the anime? I can’t tell for sure, but I wouldn’t bother really with the game unless you usually play those to begin with. Anyway, getting it itself is already kind of a pain in the ass, since you need the Japanese-only version and the latest patch from the a certain translation group.

Whose eyes are those eyes? Find out by watching the anime!

Also look forward to my best of 2008 anime list.  Which I’ve been working on for a while.  (It’s really hard to make choices on those )

David A. Anime, Games, Review, impressions