We may have orders from RABUJOI Corporate to be tougher on shows and I may have had a long cold week, but neither of those things factored into my impression that Active Raid isn’t good. It is, in fact, quite bad. So bad, it was at times painful to watch. I’ll elaborate.
The setting and premise are a strange melange of Psycho-Pass, Gatchaman, and Rail Wars!, without any of the strengths or charms of those shows. It also has a touch of Taimadou with its by now done-to-death “team of misfits”, but both the newbie Haruka (a smug, hollow Tsunemori knockoff) and the pithy, one-note misfits come off as dull and unlikable.
Let’s set aside the fact that a guy randomly grabs Haruka’s ankle for no reason, Haruka often speaks English for no reason, and the titular unit with the too-long-winded name travels along on a slow train that shares rails with commuter trains as the perps (apparently “minors” who look like they’re thirty) fly around in Gatchaman like mecha.
But the most damning aspect of this show is that it’s so interminably boring. Endless time is spent on displays and endless dialogue is devoted to getting confirmations and permissions and authorizations from the extremely inefficient bureaucracy. One could infer that that’s the point; that this unit could perform better if they were less hog-tied by red tape; but that’s just a theory.
In the meantime, the first episode’s obsession with following rules and the resulting, thoroughly listless sequence of action that got two random teenage perps got barely caught at great cost and trouble precludes any desire on my part to watch another episode in order to see if that theory proves true. This is another “anime-loaf” made up of several pieces of better shows, not baked with love, and I shall be avoiding it.
RABUJOI - An Anime Blog 