Three Months of Crunchyroll: Part 2

23 Jul, 2026

Another month, another roundup. I got to a lot less stuff than I was really hoping to this month, but...well, you'll see. My actual watch time was almost the same as last month, but it ended up being concentrated into a few specific things this time around.

Psycho-Pass

So I finished Season 1. The show manages to spin a surprisingly affective yarn about characters who are (broadly) kinda unlikeable and kicks around the surprisingly relevant question of "How do you bring someone to justice when the law does not permit you to touch them?" It's a bit more literal in this case, as the Dominators (and the Sibyl System itself) rely on a "criminal coefficient" score to activate, and the main villain of the season is a guy who doesn't register in the system despite actively murdering people - but I think we can all come up with at least a few people who fit the overall description and could use a healthy dose of justice regardless.

If I do have any major complaints, it's that the story is kinda pigeonholed into this sequence right from the start. Which isn't to say you can't go full dystopian "everything sucks and only gets worse," but no one wants to watch misery porn. Thus, the story proceeds in basically the only way that the premise really can - Akane is introduced to the system and the reality of how it works. Then they introduce a villain who can't be scanned (for political reasons), quickly followed by a villain who can't be scanned because the system just doesn't work on them. Then they introduce a method for everyone to bypass the system and riots break out, with people free to act on their impulses and commit crimes The Purge-style. Finally, it's revealed that the conspiracy goes all the way to the top of the Bureau, and Akane is forced to choose between following the letter of the law (and the system that powers it) or a more nebulous "true justice" that is willing to do whatever it takes, even if it puts her in contention with the powers-that-be.

And like, the whole thing is Fine™. It teases the idea of "And that's how Akane was radicalized into burning down the Sibyl System," but it's a little too cop-brained to go down that road with any confidence. Instead, it deploys a series of half-measures that basically come down to "Akane makes a deal with the system for Kogami's life," and when THAT plan goes awry, she just...kinda shrugs and says "Okay well this system sucks shit and someday people will overthrow it, but I guess I'll be back back at the office tomorrow." It even ends on a stinger where it brings in a brand new inspector in the exact same circumstances that Akane joined the police...except this time it's Akane giving her the speech. It's hardly the first piece of media to come within inches of Getting It™ and then walking away, and it won't be the last, but it doesn't make it any less disappointing when it happens.

Vivy - Fluorite Eye's Song

A hundred years in the future, AI undergoes a singularity and begins to wipe out humanity. Their last hope is to send a program back in time to an android capable of doing what needs to be done to avert this timeline and save humanity. Only one problem: the only android that both A) exists in both the present and future timelines AND B) isn't infected by the AI singularity is a singing robot from the local amusement park - one that was shut down and put in a museum nearly a century ago. As such, Diva (in the present) suddenly finds herself taking a lot more...extracurricular work, as she tries to balance her one true mission (getting on the Grand Stage at the park and making everyone happy with her singing) with the occasional bout of "thwarting the assassination of a Senator because his death inspires legislation that directly leads to the AI uprising in the future."

You may have read that and thought "man, that sounds a lot like Hatsune Miku becomes the Terminator." And you'd be right! The premise rules. I'm not sure how it plays out long term, but the first few episodes do a great job of establishing the premise and even throwing in a couple twists that make you raise your eyebrows. Why does the small child who comes to see Diva at the fair HAVE to die in an airplane crash, hm? Why is altering the timeline to avert the AI apocalypse good and righteous, but saving hundreds of people along the way is "meddling in the timeline" and cannot be permitted, to the point where the tagalong AI program switches bodies to a machine capable of fighting to Diva to stop her from doing so?

Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to watch much of it, because--

The Garden of Sinners

Despite my better judgment, my friend Iro tempted me into watching the Garden of Sinners movies - already did one Fate series, what's another dip into the Nasuverse? And I should lead by saying I totally get why these were cool and important back in the halcyon days of 2008. When your points of comparison are the Tsukihime anime (lol) and the original Fate/Stay Night series (which is...fine, I guess), a ufotable/Aniplex joint would blow my mind too. I can absolutely understand why people would have been hyped for Fate/Zero off the back of these movies, because hell, I might watch that next myself. Frankly though, the problem with these movies is the material itself.

So, to start, the movies are all over the place in general. They range from ~35 mins to a little over 2 hours a piece, though the majority of them are around an hour and change. Collectively, they follow Ryougi Shiki, a strange girl who dresses in a kimono and uses a knife and her Mystic Eyes of Death Perception to fight supernatural creatures and solve mysteries. Sort of. See, the format of each movie varies wildly - the first one is a fairly typical "monster of the week," in which a ghost possesses young girls to jump to their death. The second and fourth are both hour-long slice of life(?) movies that focus entirely on Shiki's relationship with Mikiya, her classmate/boyfriend/situationship and her stay in the hospital after an accident. It is genuinely not an exaggeration that 45 or so of the 55 minutes in movie 2 are basically her telling him "leave me alone or I will kill you" - culminating in her actually attempting to kill him, only for him to essentially respond with "nah girl it's cool, I'm into that." Both movies could have been reduced to a five-minute flashback with absolutely nothing lost. The third is a crime drama that plays out similar to the first movie¹, and so on and so forth. The fact that it takes until the end of the third movie for them to even use the words "Mystic Eyes of Death Perception" is wild, doubly so because they do not bother to follow it up with any sort of explanation about what that actually IS.

Are these movies good? I...don't know? Some of them feel like a profound waste of time (the second one being the clearest example), and some of them are fine, if not particularly interesting monster/villain of the week shows. Honestly, one of the weirdest things about it is how despite the fact that these are mostly hour-long movies, almost none of them feel like movies? They mostly just feel like extended anime episodes, and even the longer ones that can stand on their own (Movie #5 - Paradox Paradigm being the best example) are still filled with nonsense and barely make sense, even with a healthy dose of future knowledge about the assorted Type-Moon franchises - and the official subtitles don't help, calling things like the Counter Force the "Deterrent Force" or talking about the "Vortex of Ralex" or whatever when it's clearly referring to what Fate will call The Root.

I ultimately called it quits after watching movie 7 (of 9 total) - for some god-forsaken reason, Aniplex just didn't subtitle anything aside from direct dialogue in movie 8, so everything from a character's internal thoughts (which were clearly supposed to function as narration) to a phone call with the villain of the movie were completely untranslated. I guess I'm glad that I watched them, because it did, admittedly, fill in a huge hole in my Fate (and Fate-adjacent) experience, but unless you're a real hardcore Type-Moon guy, I broadly cannot recommend you do the same. These movies are a vibe, very much an acquired taste, and even after watching 7 of them, I do still have a little of that "...why did I do this?" feeling.

ID: Invaded

Stop me if you've heard this one, but the police in the future have come up with a sophisticated way to examine a virtual crime scene based on the killer's mindset, but you have to be a killer yourself in order to interact with and make sense of it. This the scenario Sakaido finds himself in, helping the police solve crimes by diving into "Id Wells" left behind by a serial killer at each of their crime scenes. Inside each Id well, things interact with a dream-like logic that feel more like an Uchikoshi game than anything else - once the main character gets his legs under him, he's literally pulling together disparate parts of the environment, discovering messages hidden where the ground is literally missing, and running into other, even more dangerous killers inside the dream world, except they're all blurred out (presumably because the culprit doesn't actually know them very well, or at all aside from reputation). If you told me this was heavily inspired by something like AI: The Somnium Files, I'd believe you without ever thinking twice.

I didn't get a chance to watch much of it before wrapping up this month's roundup, but I do really like the premise, if nothing else. There's a lot of really cool stuff that could be done here, provided that it doesn't fall into the same cop-brained trap that Psycho-Pass did. I'm told it doesn't (or at least, not to the same degree), so we'll see how things go in the future, but for now it's a promising start.