Review for Un-Go

Oh dear. What to say about Un-Go? As someone who loves good and slightly cerebral anime (in my opinion) but hates the bad and the puerile, Un-Go confounds by somehow being neither. I also love a damn good detective or mystery story and, to be honest, it doesn’t have to be too sophisticated to get my interest. However, I do like to understand what’s going on and mystery often demands the revealing of a hidden but understandable logic. Which Un-Go does. Sometimes. But not always. And as a result it failed on its first basic premise.



But it also wants to be a little bit like ‘Death Note’ too, introducing other worldly soul-eating help into what might have just been a damn good straight down the line mystery series. I’m guessing something got lost in translation and maybe, having just finished watching ‘Last Exiles’ anything else was going to disappoint.
Which is not to say Un-Go is bad. It’s not. It just doesn't live up to the promise of its first two episodes.


Apparently based on the novels by Ango Sakaguchi, Un-Go features a detective affectionately referred to as ‘The Defeated Detective’, Shinjurou Yuuki, a young sleuth prone to melancholy and philosophising who wants nothing but the truth, whatever that might be.


He is often pitched against the public prosecutor, a Government official who is satisfied at merely getting the party line. But in the shadows is yet another ‘detective’ who observes via webcam and never actually visits the scene of the crime. Curiously he is also the Citizen Kane style chairman of a large corporation. Go figure. 


Shinjurou has an assistant, Inga, an irritating nasally teenager, who it transpires is just one manifestation of this soul-eating side-kick who, when transforming into a scantily clad busty Amazonian female who extracts a single truth from all her victims before dining on their souls by way of reward. Yeah – I know. All a bit of a stretch.


Then there’s Rie, the pretty wide-eyed daughter of Chairman Kaishou (you know – the one who doubles as the detective who never leaves his room) who believes that he is a man who can do no wrong and would never be party to any of the various corporate sub-plots that form part of the mystery here.


Oh and then there’s Kazamori Sasa who is actually an artificial intelligence programme and generally inhabits the body of a cute little stuffed toy bear. 

So once you’ve tackled the cast you have to make a start on the narrative and this is where things get highly convoluted. At first I thought we were going to get a stand-alone mystery per episode with a few strands of continuity but that premise is soon lost as the series becomes seriously episodic. The pleasure of figuring out the mystery alongside the detective gets lost along the way. We either know early on or the outcome is so bizarre that no one, beyond the man who guessed Rumpelstiltskin’s name, would have a chance. And what’s with that story-telling prisoner? Sorry, but that lost me completely!


Occasionally it was fun to watch. Shinjurou is super-cool and is played that way so when he’s solving puzzles effectively it’s great. But once the Scooby-doo style ‘masks’ and ‘he was there only it wasn’t really him’ stuff starts getting used to explain away the incomprehensible plot, I found it pretty tiresome. Even the ghost of husbands passed story, which started so well, descended into some cyber-punk melt-down that eventually made very little sense.



I got off to a bad start anyway with this set. The Blu-Ray played just fine and looked great but, apart from the Manga trailer intro, I couldn’t get any audio at all no matter what combination of buttons I pressed. I now understand that Manga have issued a statement saying that it doesn’t work on Panasonic Blu-Ray machines. Yeah – you guessed it. 

So grumpily I progressed with the standard DVD’s which, for the format, looked pretty impressive despite packing up to 6 episodes and some trailers on to a single dual layer 7GB+ disc. Then I made mistake number two. I watched the US dub version. Ouch.
I actually only did this as this very site's animemeister (Jitendar Canth) had suggested that to you needed to watch the English version to get the screen caps in English for folks titles- and there’s no way to toggle one from the other.



The US dub isn’t great. Too few voice artistes covering too many characters leaving the older guys sounding like teens. I also found the music and effects to voice ratio overly high meaning that I struggled to follow the fast paced dialogue from time to time.
Visually the programme is all style. Lovely economic lines drawn with stylish sweeps with huge pop-art blocks for backgrounds make this look great – and super-great on Blu-Ray as long as you don’t have a Panasonic player. The animation is slight with very economical, almost minimalist movement, though I liked that. Visually it’s a really pleasing series and if you can get the Blu-Ray to play (replete with audio) then that, at least, deserves top marks.
This is definitely NOT a series I’d recommend to anyone new to the genre. Maybe something is lost on cultural translation because you just couldn’t imagine a series like this getting made in Europe or the US. It’s all over the place with a twisting and convoluted premise that, unfortunately, destroyed the potential for a straight-forward detective mystery series that just looks great. But I accept that this is just one view. The series must have its fans and I guess they must have understood what was going on.

Maybe I shouldn't be reviewing anime. I like it most the time but I can't profess to be anything of an expert. Maybe I'm missing something with Un-Go that a hardened fan of the genre wouldn't. 

If you DO like the series then the double format pack will seem like a good buy.