Review: Lycoris Recoil
Lycoris Recoil starts off by asking the viewer to imagine that crime is a thing of the past. There is no violence or terrorism in this future Japan -- at least not if you're the average person. If you're an orphan, then it's a different story.
The basic premise of the show is that orphans are trained from a young age to become the best killers in the world. With this training, they are able to prevent crime while at the same time hiding it from the general public.
This is an original series (meaning that it has no source material - manga, game, novel etc.) from A-1 Pictures (Sword Art Online; Your Lie in April). If you take a peek at what people think about the series online, it's all quite positive. Even Hideo Kojima thinks it's cool. Despite all of this, the show falls flat in some areas.
The plot follows Chisato and Takina, two Lycoris who end up working together after Takina is fired from DA (Direct Attack -- the institution that trains up assassins). Takina is serious about her work and is desperate to return to DA, but is instead forced to deal with the antics of supposed Lycoris genius Chisato - her complete opposite - if she ever wants her job back.
The series starts strong. We get an explanation of why Japan is crime-free in the future and how DA works, including how the Lycoris are treated. We see Takina refuse to follow orders in an attempt to rescue another Lycoris, resulting in her transfer out of DA. When Takina meets Chisato and they start working together, we find out that Chisato only uses non-lethal bullets. This infuriates Takina and causes some conflict. But a few episodes later, the girls have become quite close, despite their differing ideas about life and death in their line of work.
This is where the show falls apart a little. We go from having a really serious and seemingly dark plot, to seeing the girls go on random shopping trips and playing around. There is no issue with this inherently, but it quickly becomes jarring, and episodes 4-10 become boring to watch. There is a baseline plot of stopping a hacker and finding out who is behind a stolen stash of guns, but there's so much emphasis on the sudden slice-of-life aspect of the series that it seems to lose itself in the silliness.
The series tries to build a best-friend relationship between Takina and Chisato, but in doing so forgets to actually advance the plot and manages to lower the stakes at the same time. The audience wants to see this character development, but in a 13-episode anime about girls with guns trying to save the world while also discovering the meaning of life, there just doesn't seem to be enough time. Especially if the brakes are put on the main plot for four episodes just to advance the slice-of-life subplot.
The final four episodes of the series take us back to the high-tension action that we all enjoyed from the first four episodes, while going back to tackling the idea of "who gets to decide who lives and dies?". It's as though the studio suddenly remembered they were making a serious show.
So why is it so popular? Firstly, the animation quality throughout the entirety of the show was outstanding. The fight scenes were drawn fluidly and the calmer scenes conveyed the mood perfectly. The first four and last four episodes were also written extremely well. The pacing was good and the story itself was interesting and entertaining. The series was good. But not great. It struggled in terms of character development and seemed to flip-flop between genres in the middle of the show in a way that was distracting and a little bit confusing.
Despite this, Lycoris Recoil is a good series. Not quite the anime of the Summer that people were claiming it to be (Call of the Night ran away with that title), but definitely worth watching. If you can get through the middle episodes, it's worth the time in the end. If you enjoy well-animated girls with guns, Lycoris Recoil is for you.