A million times more painful than you could imagine.

So, the episode pretty plays out as you’d think it would, only with a few more GIAnT BLACK SNAKES and Lances of Longinous than expected. It wouldn’t have bothered me so much if 1. Taku had actually managed to win the “fight” without the help of every girl in the show (as well as a crippled, diseased 10 year old) and 2. they hadn’t decided to play that distorted version of Traditional Japanese Crosswalk Lights Music (there’s a name for it, but I can’t remember). That was instead of disturbing, just EXTREMELY irritating, to the point I’d hoped Taku would just die so the music would stop. What was welcome was Taku getting a stake shoved up his… back. I think the censoring even lended something to the experience; only the visceral sounds and shadow of Taku gave any hint that such a torturous event was taking place.

Final Impressions:

So what was good about Chäos;HEAd?

• The music was fantastic and really well used. Every track fit the scene that was taking place perfectly but what really stood out was the direction, at  the points that were, at the very least, supposed to be disturbing. It’s sad that the calibre of the show didn’t match up to the calibre of the music.

And what wasn’t so good?

• The animation was average bordering on truly terrible at times, they should’ve put less money into animating Taku’s quivering eyes and more money into drawing faces properly.

• The plotline was pretty stock , and as I said before any sense of mystery about the show was eliminated when you could predict  how the series was going to continue after the big reveal about Nozomi and Noah way back in episode 6 or so.

• The characters were all pretty terrible/cliched/uninteresting/harem-esque/annoying, except for Shogun and Rimi, who had a surprisingly loving and warm relationship (about the only good relationship in the entire show.)

• Voice-acting and dialogue were all just kind of “meh”, the dialogue especially was needlessly convuluted at times and stupidly simple at others, but you could put that down to the pointless use of science in the show (it really was unecessary to hear about the Dirac Sea in a show about harems and giant swords).

Chäos;HEAd can be summed up in one word: dissappointing. All the expectations I got from the first episode of the show were dashed one by one throughout its entire run. I thought Taku would eventually develop into a human being. I thought that the harem elements would slowly dissappear and be replaced by a disturbing, Higurashi-like atmosphere and as such there would be needless amounts of blood, violence and gore combined with mystery and conspiracy in the show. I thought we’d even possibly get a few decent sword-fights out of it. It’s the kind of show where you just keep waiting and waiting for a payoff that never comes. The show got steadily worse as it contued and further and further away from its true potential. If you’re holding out to watch the entire show at a later date, I wouldn’t recommend it. And if you were unfortunate enough to have expectations of the series and watch the whole thing, weep with me. Weep bitter tears.