Anime Talk: Psycho-Pass: The Movie

I've talked about Psycho-Pass numerous times on my blog before, having come to the series late and then catching up in a semi-haphazard manner. I watched all three TV seasons, which was relatively easy since they're often simulcast and thus quickly picked up by streaming services, but the thing I was missing was the four movies; the original The Movie and the Sinners in the System trilogy.

When Funimation acquired Cruchyroll and the two biggest anime streaming services merged, Funimation's titles gradually started appearing (or reappearing in some cases) on Cruchyroll. Psycho-Pass had been a Funimation license up until the third season, which Amazon picked up during its exclusivity deal with the Noitamina programming block which produces the series. The Movie had streamed on Funimation, but hadn't appeared on other platforms like Hulu where they would sometimes share content, and me being unwilling to shell out a sub just for one movie, I didn't watch it until finally... I noticed the other day that it had popped up on post-acquisition Crunchyroll.

Watching day had come.

If you've read my previous Psycho-Pass posts, you know that one of the things I'm really keen on is how future stories build on the foundations and limitations of the Sibyl System established in the first season. A "good" continuation will provide tension while expanding on how crime can still happen in a world where the probability of a person commiting a crime can be analyzed down to a number, and without resorting to the asymptomatic trick that was used in the first season (where a person for whatever reason simply cannot be read).

My Favorite Anime of 2020

Ironically, despite spending so much time at home due to Covid in 2020, I actually watched less. Part of it was a lull in the number of series I was actually interested in, but also (as happened last year while I was dealing with cancer) my daily ritual of coming home and watching a half hour of anime while eating dinner didn't happen anymore. It wasn't that I wasn't eating dinner anymore, but the ritual changed and I ended up reading the news instead.

I did see a few things though, and here they are, presented in the order I watched them.

Carole & Tuesday

When this first came out, I remember it being a "big deal" because the series was from the same director as the beloved Cowboy Bebop, but the reason I watched it was more for the music and the light sci-fi touch to the story, which places it on a terraformed Mars where musical acts are supported by computers that will generate the hit songs for them. The first half is a lot of fun, the second not so much, but the two leads are energetic (one being a person of color who isn't drawn as a caricature) and the music is fantastic. It feels very much like a love letter from the Japanese director to western music.

My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!

I was already planning on buying the novel series before I started watching, and after I did, that cemented it. The series is obviously fond of romance games and since protagonist Catarina has been reborn inside the last video game she played, she actually knows some of what's about to happen and she doesn't like it! Catarina's attempts to avoid death and exile (as the villainous rival character) start from her childhood years and she's so caught up in trying to cheat fate that she completely misses how good everything has become for her.

Psycho-Pass 3: First Inspector

The movie that wraps up Psycho-Pass Season 3. Surprisingly, given the limited run time, it manages to do exactly that in a satisfying manner while also setting up for a fourth season. Not every question gets answered, but it hits all the major ones while still being entertaining as a movie. Watching Season 3 beforehand is a must, as there is no attempt to get the viewer up to speed.

Norn 9

Adaptation of the Norn9 visual novel following a group of young people gifted with special powers on a journey to see the World on a magnificent flying ship, the Norn. I liked this a fair bit better than most otome adaptations because of its effort to integrate multiple storylines while still serving up the main plot. In some cases it actually does better than the source material, and the original ending is on par with those in game (or even better for some characters).

Bofuri: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, so I'll Max Out My Defense

This isn't really a series for the ages, but it's a nice look at what virtual reality gaming can be when it's not trapping people in the world of the game or turning everything into a death match. Maple is a complete VR MMO newbie and as such, makes new player mistakes in her character build because no one honestly expects anyone to play like that, but she makes it work. She's so good natured that no one really faults her for playing her way (especially since playing her way actually works for her) and even the people in rival guilds are really just rivals because they're having a guild vs guild match and not because people bear grudges. This makes it a nice series to cuddle up with.

My Favorite Anime of 2019

Ironically, despite having more time to watch things in 2019, I actually watched less. I think that's because anime is usually a thing I'd watch after coming home from work, and ends up part of my daily ritual, but since I was sick so much of last year I didn't come home from work nearly as much. Most of what I watched was from the winter season (pre-cancer diagnosis), and I'm including season 2s and 3s as long as they finished their run before the end of the year.

Anime listed are not ranked, but presented in the order I watched them. My top three picks of the year are marked with an asterisk (*).

Run with the Wind *

I'm not a sports anime fan, even though I'm told people normally watch them for the characters and not what they're playing. But for me, I need at least some part of the sports element to catch my interest. Run with the Wind does that with running. The characters are a motley bunch that by rights should not even be trying to place in the Hakone Ekiden (a grueling relay marathon), but the training they go through is highly relatable for anyone who's ever done a bit of track and field, as are the moments they share along the way.

Dimension High School

This a completely zany series about puzzle solving which involves a group of students and their teacher from our world (depicted in live action) being sent into a 2D universe (depicted in anime) where they have to solve puzzles presented by a series of sphinxes in over to save the world. The puzzles are incredibly difficult and for the most part impossible for someone not fluent in Japanese to solve, but the whole premise is so screwball that it's entertaining from a camp perspective. They do explain the logic behind each of the puzzles when they solve them, so you can still follow along even if you can't participate.

Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka

There have been a lot of darker spins on magical girls ever since Puella Magi Madoka Magica became a hit, and Magical Girl Asuka's take is: magical girls in the military. The interesting thing about this one is that the international team of magical girls actually won their war a few years ago and are now trying to move on with their lives, some of them more successfully than others. The early episodes in particular deal with the fact that Asuka is still suffering from psychological trauma from having lost her parents and several friends during the war, but unfortunately the introspective parts fall by the wayside later to focus on more combat and some fairly graphic torture.

The Promised Neverland *

The Promised Neverland was my must-watch every week that it aired. I couldn't get enough of the twist in the first episode and how that impacted everything to come. There's a real sense of peril and helplessness since the protagonists are so young and they live in an orphanage so you know they don't have family looking out for them. But despite their age they're also extremely creative. Though the odds are against them, they earn every victory they get along the way. I also really like Emma, who gets to be such a tomboy and the face of the series, despite being in a manga that is ostensibly marketed to boys.

Real Girl Season 2

Though I really liked Real Girl's first season when I watched it in 2018, I found the second half much weaker, even though it eventually deals with why Iroha has to leave after six months. I don't know if the reason was planned at the start, because it feels rather contrived, as does the extended epilogue that follows. There are still aspects of the show I enjoyed, but it's better when the series is grounded in experiences that a teenager could realistically expect to go through.

Attack on Titan Season 3

Season 3 probably would have been one of my favorite views of the year, but they butchered my favorite story arc, most likely because political theater is not as visually interesting as fight scenes, and fight scenes are what the series sold viewers on when the manga made the transition to animation. As a result the first half feels rushed and some things don't quite make sense. The second half is a different arc and recreates the manga fairly faithfully. I'm also happy it's finally out because it makes the series much easier to talk about with people who have only seen the anime, now that one of the biggest twists is out of the way.

Psycho-Pass Season 3 *

It's no secret that Psycho-Pass is one of my favorite series, so I was quite happy to dive into the third season. It's a little shaky at first since it has an unusual hour long runtime instead of the standard half hour, and I don't know the writers were prepared to pace for that, but in the end that actually gives us sixteen episodes' worth of story. Though the on-screen violence has been dialed back, the storytelling is much improved from the second season and I really like our two new leads. The meat of the plot is surprisingly topical too, dealing with immigration, particularly of refugees, and those who will or will not welcome them. My primary knock on the season is that it's incomplete and will be wrapped up via a movie.

Thoughts on Psycho-Pass 3

Psycho-Pass 3 launched last month, and we're just over halfway through the season. It's weird though because numerically we just finished episode 5, but in terms of run time, it's actually more like episode 10. I've never watched an hour long anime episode before. They aren't usually structured that way, but aside from some rockiness in episode 2, Psycho-Pass 3 seems to be making good use of its extra time, and in that way, we'll be getting what would ordinarily be sixteen episodes' worth of dystopian crime goodness.

Fair warning, there be spoilers ahead!

I fell into Psycho-Pass late, but since then it's become one of my favorite anime series. I still think the first episode of the first season is one of the best examples of world building I've ever seen. Though the second season was definitely a mixed bag (to the point I think the spin-off visual novel did a better job), it wasn't bad enough to sour me on the series as a whole, so I was waiting with both anticipation and trepidation for Psycho-Pass 3 to come out.

Would it be watchable since the Sinners in the System movie trilogy was never released in the US? Would I be happy with the new protagonists? And most of all, could it find a new angle on what it is like to fight crime in a world where it is possible for criminal intent to be read before it can ever come to fruition?

So far, the answer to all three is yes!

Granted, not having seen Sinners in the System means that there is a new character who I don't know much about, but given that there is a clear time skip between Psycho-Pass 2 and Psycho-Pass 3, she doesn't feel too much out of place. Since the composition of Division 1 has changed, it's not surprising that someone new would slide in representing a different part of the organization. Aside from the fact she exists at all, there's no knowledge needed that the show won't tell you regarding how she fits in and why Ginoza, Teppo, and Kogami are now working for her. (Well, seeing Kogami is a bit odd, but hey, time skip.) Frederica's team isn't the focus though, so I don't feel we have to have a lot of detail on how her team came to be. And judging from some comments I've read, a lot of this is new even to people who've seen the movies.

My biggest surprise though was how well Arata and Kei won me over as the new protagonists. The original Division 1 was the best, and while they got jumbled a bit in Psycho-Pass 2, at least we kept mainstays like Akane and Ginoza. But I think the series is better for setting up our new duo, since they're able to give us a new story with fresh points of view. It also allows Akane to be moved into another role. While she was the rookie in the first season, the veteran in the second, she is now, oddly enough, imprisoned in the third, and no doubt the mystery of why that happened will be part of the story.

And finally, does Psycho-Pass 3 manage to find a new way to tell a crime story in a world where criminal intent can be monitored before a crime happens? Why yes it does! And it does it through diffusion of responsibility, a real world phenomenon where a person does not feel responsible because of group think; because they were just following orders, or because they assumed someone else was taking care of it. If a dozen people individually do small things that lead up to an accident, and the victim feels that dying in said accident is better than the alternative, then who can be blamed? Even if the suicide is awfully convenient for someone else.

There are some things that feel different though. For one thing, even though there is still a fair amount of Dominator pointing, it takes until the third episode for someone to even fire the thing. While that's partially due to the lack of an enforceable target, it feels strange not to have anyone use the show's signature weapon, especially since the cast change and time skip make this a decent entry point for newcomers. Some of that might be a bit of a backlash over the second season's willingness to explode bad guys left and right, especially since the blood and gore for such lethal enforcement has been drastically toned down. (No bright red to be seen, no sir.)

But we also see new protagonist Kei get into fisticuffs a lot for an inspector, which is really supposed to be enforcer work. The whole reason inspectors have enforcers is so that the enforcers (who are latent criminals cleared to do detective work) do the dirty work so the inspectors' psychological profiles remain undamaged. Kei even punches someone in anger at one point, and though he was temporarily suspended, I was surprised he passed the psychological exam to come back to work. Though Kei outwardly appears calm and composed (until he isn't), the opening animation suggests another side to him that could be a lot more manic and dangerous, so I'm curious if this is something that has always been lurking in him (in which case why isn't he already a latent criminal) or just that he has yet to turn.

Kei and Arata are more maverick thinkers than Akane and Ginoza too, in that the two of them are clearly pursuing their own agenda. The Sybil System did not find them to be compatible as partners, and yet they choose to work together anyway. Moreover, we know that Arata's father killed Kei's brother, so the fact they are working together means that they suspect there's more to the murder than what has been publicly declared the truth.

Though Akane has always had a humanitarian side to her, in that she would prefer to avoid killing if at all possible, I believe Arata is the first inspector to point out that the Dominator has a trigger for a reason, so if the inspector or enforcer feels that Sibyl is in error, they can choose not to shoot. Akane believed that implicitly, but Arata is the first to call out what has always been true. And once it's spelled out, it's actually a fascinating consideration given that Sibyl otherwise controls so much of people's lives.

The new enforcers in Psycho-Pass 3 also get short-changed, though to be fair, this is also a problem Psycho-Pass 2 had due to the shorter season length compared to the first. Though Irie and Todoroki got a little character development, we don't really see much of Hinakawa and Kisaragi. Kisaragi looks like she's going to be getting more focus soon, but we're past the halfway point and she's barely done anything other than look sharp in a suit. Hinekawa arguably had some development in Psycho-Pass 2, but I still don't feel like I know the guy. Since he and Karanomori are the only returning members of Division 1 I was hoping he was kept so they could do more with him this time around, but that hasn't been the case. I get that he's the introverted hologram expert so he's not cool like Ginoza and Kogami, but he still could be more of a character with his own personal stakes.

The funny thing is that the season has now aired five out of its scheduled eight episodes and I feel like there's no way Kei and Arata are going to unravel this conspiracy and learn the truth about their family members in the three episodes we have left. And yet, if this wasn't an hour long show, I wouldn't be as concerned with six episodes remaining. Logically, they should have the space. There's still a third of the season left.

So far I've been enjoying Psycho-Pass 3 a lot more than its immediately predecessor, so here's hoping it can make a strong finish.

Thoughts on Psycho-Pass 3 and Sinners in the System Movies

Psycho-Pass is one of my favorite anime series, mostly for the first season's well-thought out dystopia where crime is virtually non-existent (until it is). It's a bit like Minority Report, except instead of predicting crime before it happens, the Sibyl System is able to judge someone's criminal inclination. Latent criminals are put away for treatment before they become a danger to society. If treatment is successful, they are allowed to return, though it's implied that this event is rare. Once someone's too far gone, it's not possible to go back.

The two seasons of Psycho-Pass have followed Division 1 of the Criminal Investigation Department, which has been composed of two inspectors (people with good Psycho-Pass ratings) and four enforcers (latent criminals who are trusted enough to hunt other latent criminals so the inspectors don't get corrupted).

Though the story has largely been told through the eyes of inspector Akane Tsunemori, the fan favorite is enforcer Shinya Kogami, who used to be an inspector until his Psycho-Pass worsened due to his desire for revenge over the murder of his former partner. Season 1 saw Kogami satisfy his revenge at the end of the season by taking out the main villain, but in doing so, he went from a latent criminal to an actual one, so he had no choice but to flee the country at the end of the story.

That was fine. It was the ending that we knew was coming. Akane would never have killed Makashima, because she believes in working with the law, even if it is a flawed system, whereas Kogami's sense of justice had long fallen outside the Sybil System.

Then Season 2 happened.

While it had a number of flaws that had nothing to do with Kogami's absence, the fact the fan favorite was gone didn't help matters. (For me personally, I would rather have had Ginoza's role punched up since the guy's life was put through a meatgrinder in Season 1 and we don't see much of the fallout from that.)

About a week ago, Psycho-Pass 3 was announced, and it'll be airing in October this year. This wasn't entirely a surprise, considering that the Psycho-Pass: Sinners in the System movies started releasing earlier this year. No one's picked those up for North American distribution yet, but chances are Funimation will since they have the previous movie and both TV series.

And here come the spoilers.

I started reading the reviews for the Sinners in the System movies because I figured they weren't coming over to the US anytime soon and I wanted to know something of what they're about. I knew the first was a sequel, starring Ginoza and Mika; the second was a prequel, starring Teppei and the now deceased Masaoka; and the third was a sequel, picking up after the previous stand-alone movie with Kogami. (Which I haven't actually seen yet.)

I didn't feel a strong need to see what Kogami was up to, but I still wanted to know what the movie was about. So when the review went up at ANN, I read it, and realized that there was more going on than I'd thought.

The movies weren't just to bring Psycho-Pass back into the awareness of its audience in preparation for Season 3, but also to lead in to Season 3. And it sounds like Kogami is coming back.

I'm not entirely sure I like this, though if it's handled well, I'll roll with it.

Until this point, Season 3 hadn't teased any of the previous characters coming back. In fact the first promotional image is of two new characters we've never met before, though from their outfits and their Dominator weapons they are clearly part of the CID like Division 1.

Unfortunately we also don't know most of the staff for Season 3 either. The lead writer changed from Gen Urobuchi in Season 1 to Tow Ubukata in Season 2, which is what most people have credited as to why Season 2 was so much poorer than its predecessor. While I think it's possible for someone to write a good Psycho-Pass story without being Gen Urobuchi (as shown by the Mandatory Happiness spin-off game), Season 3 is really going to need to earn some trust back, and I don't think shoving Kogami back on the show is going to be enough.

Whichever way it goes though, I'm pretty sure I'll be watching in October.

My Favorite Games of 2017

My gaming backlog is something impressive, as I typically buy a few more than I can play in any given year, and then those extras build up. The result is that I rarely play any game in its year of release unless it's a part of a favorite series, and even then, depending on how busy I am, a much anticipated game might get postponed.

But I'm not adverse to playing older games. As long as the gameplay is still there I generally don't care. Maybe that's the same for you?

These are the nine games I liked enough to finish for the first time in 2017, in the order I finished them. (I think there could have been more, but I blame Persona 5 for being so long.) As I did with my book roundup, the three games I tagged with an asterisk (*) were my favorites of the year and definitely worth playing.

Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness * (PS Vita and Steam)

Fans of the anime series will get the most out of this dystopian cyberpunk visual novel. The player takes the role of one of two investigators tracking down a criminal that cannot be brought to justice in the way the system is intended to work. There are multiple endings based on the choices made, and a walkthrough will probably be needed to see them all. It's easily the best spin-off of the original (and better than the sequel anime) because it manages to be its own thing while playing within the rules of the first series, and it's good. It's not for series newcomers though. Even with a glossary it tends to assume players know the basics.

Attack on Titan (PS4, XB1, and Steam)

Having come out between the first and second season of the anime, it does a good job of extrapolating the story into three playable chapters; the battle for Trost, the Survey Corps expedition prior to being recalled, and the Female Titan arc. There is also an unlockable fourth chapter that vaguely covers the first half of season 2, but with minimal spoilers and a unique ending, so deaths and major plot revelations are withheld. The game does a remarkably good job of conveying the feel of using maneuvering gear and slaying titans is incredibly satisfying. One of the best media-based games I've ever played and even klutzes like me can beat it on Easy. The developers loved the property and it shows.

The Sims 2: Ultimate Collection (PC)

I'd forgotten that I downloaded this a while ago as part of a promotion on Origin. It's every expansion of the Sims 2 plus the base game, and despite the years since its original release, it's still really good and runs just fine even on a new computer with Windows 10. I'd played the base game years ago and this was a welcome trip down memory lane with some new content that I'd never played before (new jobs, university, vacations, oh my!). As always, the fun part for me is making a bunch of Sims based on characters I know (my characters, other people's characters) and seeing how they interact in the sandbox. One of the most hilarious things was Attack on Titan's Erwin Smith deciding that his life's dream was to become a World Class Ballet Dancer.

80 Days (Steam, iOS, and Android)

This came to me through a friend's recommendation. It's not something anyone's likely to play for hours on end, but as an afternoon time-waster it's pleasant enough. You play as Passepartout, the valet to Phineas Fogg from the Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days. As such you are constantly put upon to care for your master as all sorts of shenanigans occur on your trip around the globe. The player gets to pick the route, and there are some randomized events, so there is some replay value, but I found that two was enough to figure out how to succeed in less than 80 days. I ended up playing a third time though just because I wanted to check out how the same-sex romance was written versus the straight one. It's a fun, casual friendly game, but not something most players are likely to spend more than 4-5 hours on.

Persona 5 * (PS4 and PS3)

Persona 5 was my most anticipated game of the year. I've bought all the Persona games since the first installment (I'm old school) and placed my pre-order for the deluxe edition with all the trimmings. I was not disappointed as it continues the contemporary fantasy setting with a fresh layer of panache as the protagonists are now all phantom thieves. I've never seen heists integrated so well in a video game before, let alone an RPG, and the Persona-specific game systems involving the social aspects of getting through a year of high school are as good as ever. While I'm not sure if it will hold up against Persona 3 and 4 once I have more time and distance from it, at least at the moment it was one of the best games I played this year. If there's a fault I'd give it though, it's that it's extremely long, probably too long, even allowing for the fact the game has an in-game summary so you can catch up if you've been away for a while.

Collar x Malice (PS Vita)

Collar x Malice was my second most anticipated game of the year. It was giving me Zero Escape vibes (though sadly not the Zero Escape puzzles) with a female protagonist. Though this is technically an otome, it's not all fluff. Officer Ichika Hoshino spends as much time chasing a group of vigilante terrorists as she does potentially romancing various officers and ex-cops who are on the same case. It didn't reach the height that Code:Realize did for me, but the storytelling is more even between routes. Yanagi is route locked behind everyone else unfortunately, since his is the "real" route, which I wish Otomate would stop doing.

Plants vs Zombies: Game of the Year Edition (PC)

This came to me via one of the periodic freebies on Origin. I'd never played the original past the demo, but this landed in my lap at a time when I really wanted a puzzle game and it scratched the right itch. Being a puzzle game featuring cartoon zombies it's aged pretty well, though I was surprised when it forced my monitor down to a lower resolution. I didn't think it was that old. It's not too difficult by puzzle game standards and the game makes a point to introduce a new complication every few levels to keep things fresh. I think I only lost once, and that's because I was careless rather than being overwhelmed. I don't think I would have bought this normally though.

Dungeon Fighter Online * (PC)

This is a quirky online RPG that is like Diablo had a lovechild with your favorite side scrolling beat-'em-up game. It's 2D like Final Fight or Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara, but it's an RPG designed for small parties or solo players. You can perform attacks fighting game style, but there are also equipment drops, skill trees, dungeons, pets, guilds, etc. It's free to play, and amazingly, you can get through the entire leveling experience without spending a cent, and more importantly, without seeing microtransaction ads thrown at you every other screen. The Korean to English translation is a bit janky in places, but if you like retro games, and have a fondness for old school JRPG music, this an excellent bet.

Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth

I actually started this last year, but got derailed about a third of the way through due to This War of Mine. This is probably the closest thing to having a playable Digimon anime series. The player-named protagonist has an online encounter with a mysterious entity that leaves her (or him, I played as a girl) in a weird half-digital body while her real one is comatose. As a result she can jump in and out of the computer networks Tron-style. The story moves at a relaxed pace sometimes, but really captures the feel of the anime. Together with her human friends and their combined Digimon companions they try to solve the mystery behind the origin of the Eaters, why people are being found comatose from EDEN syndrome, and what the corporation Kamishiro Enterprises has to do with all of this.

Psycho-Pass 2 vs. Mandatory Happiness

I watched the second season of the Psycho-Pass anime last week and while it had its moments, it didn't hit the height of the first series, and I was trying to figure out why. Though Gen Urobuchi was no longer the writer in the second season, I had enjoyed the Mandatory Happiness visual novel, which was not written by him either, so I knew it was possible for someone else to write an engaging, fulfilling story in the Psycho-Pass setting who is not Urobuchi.

The funny thing is that Mandatory Happiness and Psycho-Pass 2 actually do a lot of the same things, and I don't think it's because I'm aware of the same tricks that I enjoyed Psycho-Pass 2 less. I think they were just better done, and I'm not sure if that's because the visual novel came later or that the writers (of which there were several) were just more conscious of the implications.

Spoilers for both the anime series and the visual novel follow!

The key ground that both Psycho-Pass 2 and Mandatory Happiness want to avoid is having the same type of villain as the original Psycho-Pass. Makishima was unusual because his Crime Coefficient reading was always incredibly low, even in the middle of committing a criminal act. This created complications because the Dominator weapon used by the police only unlocks when a target is psychologically deemed criminal enough (even if latently so) to be enforced. How do you take down a criminal when the system you rely on doesn't recognize him as such?

After the original series, the existence of criminally asymptomatic people is no longer a surprise, so both the spin-off and the sequel can't entertain the audience by introducing yet another character with the same ability to foil the Sybil System. But the series is always about the flaws in Sybil, so each new villain needs to have a way to challenge it.

Mandatory Happiness chooses to handle this with an AI. When a genuinely sentient AI goes rogue and behaves according to its own definition of happiness it is unsurprising that Sybil is unable to get a psychological read on it. This allows for the same drama where an inspector or enforcer character is pointing their Dominator weapon at Alpha's android body and is unable to fire. Somehow, the protagonists need to take out Alpha before any additional people are hurt or killed, but Sybil is not set up to protect people from this kind of situation. It's fascinating stuff.

Psycho-Pass 2 similarly offers a villain that cannot be read at all by Sybil. I suppose that's the natural next step up from Makishima, going from a villain who is incorrectly read to one who isn't read at all, but the reason for that doesn't make much sense. Kamui is essentially Frankenstein's monster. For some reason that is never explained, he is the subject of an experiment where the broken body of a young plane crash survivor was repaired using parts of 184 of his deceased classmates. Kamui is now regarded as a "collective" of all 185 people and that is the reason he cannot be read by Sibyl.

This breaks so much science that my brain hurts. Even allowing for the fact that somehow all 185 children were biologically compatible for transplant purposes, why would someone even do this? We know who did it, but not why, and without a why, there's no reason for Kamui's existence except for the express purpose of being a collective that cannot be identified by Sybil.

And even then, Kamui makes it clear that after his operation Sybil recognized him for a while before he faded off the grid. He originally had only one mind and what he currently experiences could possible be a case of dissociative identity disorder and not truly a collective hive mind. After all, it's unlikely that he got 184 bits of brain matter from his classmates.

The original Psycho-Pass and Mandatory Happiness test the Sybil System in unexpected, but realistic ways. It is unsurprising that there are people who cannot be correctly read, because in the real world there are always outliers. Similarly, the rise of AI is something likely to happen in our future, and dealing with a criminally negligent AI is a fascinating topic.

But a Frankenstein collective human being challenging the judgment of the Sybil System isn't that compelling or very likely. It feels like the only reason Kamui exists the way he does, is to hold up a mirror to Sybil, since we know that Sybil is a hive mind composed of criminally asymptomatic people. In order to be able to judge Kamui, Sybil would need to be able to judge itself.

Psycho-Pass 2 wants to pose the question of the omnipotence paradox to Sybil, which I disagree with on account of the fact that Sybil is known to be a flawed system, at least by those who know it best. That is the reason Sybil keeps taking in any criminally asymptomatic people it finds, because it seeks to improve itself. It is understandable that Kamui, being an outsider to the system, would ask this question, but it doesn't do anything for the audience, who is already informed of Sibyl's true state. (And oddly enough, Kamui doesn't seem to bat an eye when he learns that Sibyl isn't just a computer system, but a computer system augmented by human brains.)

That Kamui and Sybil eventually identify a few criminally asymptomatic brains in the collective is not surprising, because over time Sybil's processing has been refined. It is expected that some of the early brains that could not be properly read at the time of their integration would become readable later on. Kamui doesn't feel that Sybil passes the test, but Sybil was never in a position where it could, because the system is built on constantly improving itself, which it does when it throws out the criminally read brains.

The other thing that both Psycho-Pass 2 and Mandatory Happiness do is disguise a person's Criminal Coefficient through drug use. And I suspect that Mandatory Happiness, having come later, took some lessons from the execution in Psycho-Pass 2.

Psycho-Pass 2 has followers of Kamui who cannot be read by the Dominators, but it does not appear to be their natural state as they cannot maintain their low Criminal Coefficients without drug use. This is not too much different from the helmets used to disguise Criminal Coefficients in the first series, but has the added advantage in that the user does not need to be disguised. However, Psycho-Pass 2 doesn't dwell much on the existence of these drugs, which is a little odd since one would think the police would take a high amount of interest in figuring out what is enabling these people.

Mandatory Happiness similarly has a drug workaround, but we see the work that goes into creating this drug cocktail and how it's synthesized through commercially available products so anyone can get a hold of it if they know what they're doing. There are also side effects with heavy users eventually succumbing to Eustress Syndrome (which was introduced in a passing reference in Psycho-Pass 2). The Division 1 team puts a priority on figuring out how the drugs work, and it makes their existence more believable than being a handy plot device.

I think that's why Psycho-Pass 2 didn't work as well for me as the original and the spin-off visual novel. It's not that there isn't room to tell new stories in the Psycho-Pass universe so much as it doesn't feel like it was well thought out. There other parts of Psycho-Pass 2 that didn't make sense to me, but comparing the similarities in execution between that and Mandatory Happiness make it clearer where Psycho-Pass 2 came up short.

VN Talk: Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness - Part 3: Takuma

I held off playing Takuma's story until I finished all of Nadeshiko's endings in Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness, which was pretty hard to do, but I wanted to drain every scrap of her story I could get before moving on. It probably wasn't necessary, but I would recommend getting at least one of the playthroughs where she regains her memories while an inspector before playing Takuma's storyline.

The reason for that is because Mandatory Happiness hinges around Alpha and Yukari's mutual memory loss and the problems that result. Takuma can unravel the truth for himself, but he doesn't experience it firsthand. And usually he finds out about her planned integration with Sibyl as a quickie info dump which is harder to take without context.

But Takuma's story answered a lot of questions I had leftover from Nadeshiko's playthroughs. We know from her flashbacks that he did not spend all his adult life as a enforcer, because he obviously spent a lot of time with her, which would have been impossible as a latent criminal. It turns out that he only became a latent criminal after Yukari went missing, and his Crime Coefficient increased because of his single-minded hunt for her.

Considering that he was meeting with some severely questionable people in his attempts to find her (even Makishima in Nadeshiko's playthroughs), it's not surprising that this was the turning point.

Takuma's story also fixes a lot (though not all) of what I found problematic about him in Nadeshiko's route. During the first case he's incredibly sympathetic towards the perpetrator, Haruto, the high school boy who blackmails his crush into hanging out with him after she was sent away to a different high school. I found the perpetrator's actions to be reprehensible and on Nadeshiko's playthrough, Takuma is upset by the case because he feels that at one point the two kids honestly liked each other. If Sibyl hadn't intervened they might have been happy together and none of this would have happened.

This is possibly true, as Shiori obviously did care about Haruto at one point, but the weird thing that stuck out at me was that Sibyl wasn't what came between Haruto and Shiori, but Shiori's mom, who thought Haruto was a bad influence on her.

Playing through Takuma's storyline it's clear that he's conflating his own backstory with Haruto's, because he and Yukari were similarly close and then Sibyl decided she'd be better educated in Tokyo than the outlying Sado Marine City. This caused them to be separated, and though they continued to meet each other from time to time as adults (which is clear from Nadeshiko's memories), they were living in different worlds in the different jobs Sibyl had assigned them.

Takuma still, unfortunately, sports oddly outdated bits of masculinity. He's actually worse on Nadeshiko's route, but that doesn't eliminate his ideas of how a man should behave. One of the things I was hugely concerned about, given the wide latitude the player has in determining Nadeshiko's fate in her own story, was how much influence the player as Takuma would have over hers.

Takuma's entire motivation for joining the CID is to find Yukari, who we know is a person capable of making drastic, life altering decisions about her own fate, even knowing how Takuma cares about her. I was afraid that if the player as Takuma restored her memories, he could talk her out of her most drastic decisions.

Thankfully, my first ending with Takuma proved my worries wrong, as we end with a situation not possible in Nadeshiko's playthrough, where Takuma is aware of the truth about the Sibyl System and accepts that Yukari is going to become a part of it. He got to meet her again and he knows she's now leaving by her own choice, and he's okay with that. And that's the Takuma I love from Nadeshiko's playthrough. (There are other parts of this ending that came out clunky, but at least this part I liked.)

A lot of his choices throughout the game revolve around how obedient an enforcer he's going to be, and that shapes the way his endings branch. He's a impulsive character, who is currently constrained by the rules of his employment, so unlike Nadeshiko I actually feel like it's easier to play Takuma wildly in one direction or another. Maybe he understands the need to stay in his employer's good graces, maybe he can't help being a loose cannon.

Like Nadeshiko, Takuma essentially has four paths, but a total of six rather than eight True Ends; one where he raises his Psycho-Pass high enough that he's promoted from enforcer to inspector (which is hugely remarkable since that situation never happens in the anime), one where Nadeshiko recovers her memories on her own, one where Takuma goes rogue and teams up with Alpha, and one where he fails to recover Nadeshiko's memories while still remaining an enforcer.

Takuma can still be a bit bone-headed in his endings, the worst offender being the one where he decides not to restore Nadeshiko's memories because he equates that with murder (since Nadeshiko would disappear and Yukari return), to which I say "Wha…?" because Nadeshiko is just Yukari with missing memories.

It would have been better if he had made the choice because he didn't want Sibyl to get its hands on her, knowing that her missing memories and lost asymptomatic condition is all that's keeping her from being absorbed into the hive mind, but for some reason that's not really what he seems to be worried about.

Keeping Takuma's single-minded dedication to Yukari is a little rough sometimes when it comes to endings, since he has to respect anything she says in order to remain in character, so if the player recovers Yukari's memories, the game generally handles this by having her hesitate to suggest a plan. In which case Takuma can suggest something, even if it's just to prod her for what she really wants.

The strange thing about Takuma's storyline, as least from the scenes I got, is that how Yukari physically came to be Nadeshiko isn't really touched on. He notices over the course of the story that Nadeshiko behaves a lot like Yukari. She even thinks a lot like Yukari. Of course she doesn't look or sound like Yukari so they shouldn't be the same person, but he can't shake the feeling.

On multiple routes, Takuma becomes convinced that she's somehow Yukari even without it being spelled out for him (which is kind of funny because he doesn't have a clue in her storyline). He even correctly concludes that the reason he was chosen to be an enforcer in Division 1 was to trigger Nadeshiko's lost memories.

Which is nice, because it shows that he has the aptitude to be a detective and pulling him out of rehab wasn't a complete asspull on Sybil's part. Even on the route when he regains his standing as a free citizen and continues life as an inspector, it's not taken from him once his job is done and Yukari has become a part of Sybil. He remains at his position which he now believes is the best place for him, just like Sybil is the best place for a person like Yukari.

Like Nadeshiko, his True Ends are split between whether he stays in the system or leaves it, but one particular ending warrants a special look because it's the only one that goes so far off the rails that I have trouble seamlessly integrating it with the rest of the anime series.

That's the one where Takuma allies with Alpha and fittingly it seems to be really hard to get (I used a walkthrough). It looks like the player has to tank Takuma's Hue all the way to the bottom, get thrown on probation because of a bad counseling session, but take one supplement afterwards to raise his Hue before the final crisis is fully underway. This will allow Takuma just enough freedom to choose to be on the search team rather than the rescue team (he won't get a choice if he's really tanked). It's possible that it's also necessary for Alpha to voluntarily abandon his cyborg body earlier in the story rather than be forced out of it due to head damage.

This setup leaves Takuma rebellious enough that he's willing to do his own thing, which is going to Yukari's old apartment and hooking up with Alpha.

Once Takuma identifies himself to Alpha as his father, this changes everything and throws out two-thirds of how the final crisis would usually play out. When Takuma and Alpha agree to team up and recover Yukari, Alpha ceases to care about his happiness agenda (I guess Mother is the higher priority since she can't praise him for a good job if she doesn't know who he is) and makes for a wild ride.

It was a fun route, but only in a completely crazy off the rails way. Takuma ends up sneaks Alpha along for the ride to the team headquarters so they can get Yukari, but things go horribly wrong and they end up having to subdue most of Division 1 as they make their escape, which is why canonically this is a giant mess, even though it's incredibly funny seeing Alpha mess with the hospital holograms and turn the place into a virtual castle complete with monsters (which are actually the medical drones).

The thing is, there's no way that the remaining members of Division 1 are going to forget the time that Takuma Tsurugi went rogue, ran off with one of their inspectors and the prime suspect of one of the most disastrous cases they've ever had. Something like that leaves a mark.

While there are plenty of endings where the two of them disappear and Alpha survives, Alpha's survival is always hidden from anyone other Nadeshiko, Takuma, and possibly Sibyl. The disappearances happen after the case is closed, so as far as the CID is concerned Alpha is finished. An enforcer (and inspector) disappearing after that is a much smaller, unrelated incident.

Moreover, in this ending Akane discovers the existence of criminally asymptomatic people when she tries apprehending Nadeshiko after she gets her memory back, as well as being told the truth of the Sibyl System, which pretty much undermines all the secrets she eventually learns in the mid-to-late part of the anime's first season.

She also uncharacteristically runs off and lets them go. Takuma's narration presumes that she does this because she really can't do anything to stop them if her Dominator doesn't work, but it's not in character for Akane, who went after Makishima with an unloaded pistol even though it meant hanging off the side of a truck in the anime.

Aside from that, most of Division 1 was knocked out, almost permanently, and Alpha escapes, which is not something any of them are likely to forgive.

Since it's hard to naturally trigger and I really like the Takuma/Alpha team-up, I'm not too upset that this ending exists (and it was kind of funny), but I wish it had managed to stay more in the realm of believability.

Still, it was the final ending I played, and was an entertaining enough capstone to Mandatory Happiness.

VN Talk: Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness - Part 2: Nadeshiko

I chose Inspector Nadeshiko Kugatachi for my first playthrough of Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness and I'd recommend her first since the crux of the game's conflict unravels more naturally through her. Fortunately, she is the default pick the cursor begins on, and the player has to actually make the choice to switch to Takuma.

Nadeshiko begins the game as an unemotional, even robotic, amnesiac. She remembers all her day-to-day knowledge and schooling, but events that affected her personally are all gone; the result of a training accident. Nonetheless, she's physically healthy and ready to be discharged, so she immediately decides she will go to her new job, because that is where she is supposed to be.

It sounds kind of silly that someone in that kind of condition would be allowed to go, but given the way this society is structured, if Sibyl thinks it's okay, it must be okay, and what's she going to do anyway? Just sit around waiting for her memory to come back?

I like Nadeshiko because even though she is considered unemotional and has trouble understanding the feelings of others, she has a healthy streak of common sense and calls it as she sees it. In the first case a would-be boyfriend blackmails the girl he likes into traveling back to their hometown with him. A couple of the enforcers in Division 1 think the situation could possibly resolve on its own without the CID's interference. The kids used to be friends before she moved and the boy clearly has feelings for the girl.

Nadeshiko rightfully says she can't make the connection between affection and blackmail.

Though the game doesn't give a psychological explanation for why Nadeshiko has trouble experiencing and understanding emotion, no one actually faults her for it. It's just part of who she is, and as someone who sometimes has trouble reading emotions in others, I appreciate that. Yes, she thinks differently from most people, but no one yells at her for not understanding. Even the Ms. Droid nickname feels more like it comes from a place of affection rather than malice. (It helps that the Japanese is Droid-chan, which adds a sense of endearment to it.)

Psycho-Pass as a series was heavily influenced by Philip K. Dick, but Mandatory Happiness chooses a different literary inspiration, even called out in game. Nadeshiko's favorite book is The Silver Metal Lover by Tanith Lee (and I about screamed when the book cover was described in game, only to have the narration confirm the title on the next screen).

Rather than empathizing with Jane, the protagonist (who begins the story oddly like the average citizen in Psycho-Pass), Nadeshiko sees herself as Silver, the robot who isn't human at all but seems to become more and more like one after spending time with Jane.

Nadeshiko is highly unusual as a female protagonist because of her mentality, which probably places her somewhere on the autism spectrum though that terminology isn't used. She's the least emotional member of the team, but she's not entirely without empathy, and it's sweet when she pieces things together enough to realize how she can be a little kinder to someone while still being herself. Her emotional needs are low, but not nonexistent. Rather, the same inability to process other people's emotions leads to her not being able to process her own.

This most awkwardly comes out through Takuma Tsurugi, who has a shared past with her, though initially she's unaware of it. Takuma invades her personal space a lot, which annoys her and she calls him out on it (which is why I love her), but it's clear from the early memory flashes that Takuma is also someone special from her past, which is hard to buy when he's being annoying.

If the player gets most of her memories back, we learn that Nadeshiko Kugatachi used to be Yukari Himekawa, Takuma's lost girlfriend. She's had her unemotional state since she was a child and Takuma grew up with her, persistently trying to get her to understand why some things weren't right and why others things were okay even though they seemed outwardly harmful.

But chances are, the player will not unlock most of Nadeshiko's memories the first time through, as it's not obvious which choices will lead to a memory recovery scene and the player needs to trigger enough to them to get the avalanche unlock where nearly everything floods back.

This made it hard for me to like Takuma until I start getting into my later playthroughs using a walkthrough.

The thing is, it's possible to get to a True End of the game without necessarily getting the whole story. In fact, there are multiple endings that all could be considered legitimate, and this is only possible because of the fact the game chose to tell Nadeshiko and Takuma's stories rather than an established character's.

A True End results if the villain is stopped rather than the player discovering all the plot points. I played through on sheer RP mode first, making choices that made the best sense to me given Nadeshiko's personality, but this meant that I never found all her memories.

The result was a bit of a bumpy ride, and satisfying for Nadeshiko's sake if not mine. Lives were saved, but the game is pretty heavy-handed in pointing out that Nadeshiko has all these similarities to the missing Yukari Himekawa that it's bizarre that Nadeshiko herself never thinks that she might somehow be Yukari.

Given the world of Psycho-Pass and knowing what the Sibyl System is capable of, it was easy to believe that Nadeshiko's current identity was forged and she has access to no records of her previous life, but she never even checks, which seems like an obvious step for an amnesiac. Though, depending on how you choose to play her, Nadeshiko can also have absolutely zero interest in recovering her previous self.

Nadeshiko's full story, once it comes out, is that as Yukari Himekawa she was in charge of the Silver Project, which was to create a human-like AI that could be a companion to humans. One of the greatest sources of unhappiness remaining in Sibyl's mostly peaceful society, is that of loneliness. Without a friend to confide in, people's Hues can become clouded, and even though Yukari herself was not adept at recognizing why this happened, she understood that human contact was important, and the Silver Project was aimed to become a stopgap for those whose social circles had become so small they had no one left to turn to.

Yukari wanted people to be happy.

But, she also wasn't very good at determining what happiness was, and ended up murdering a bunch of comatose patients that were never expected to wake up because she thought that would free their families from having to worry about them. She was perplexed that this actually made things worse.

Yukari was apprehended pre-game, but at the same time was discovered to be criminally asymptomatic, which in Psycho-Pass means that they cannot be read by Sibyl and their Crime Coefficient remains low, like a law-abiding citizen. Because the Crime Coefficient is instrumental in identifying and apprehending criminals (the Dominator won't even unlock to allow a paralytic shot if the Crime Coefficient is under 100) the existence of criminally asymptomatic people is hushed up.

Those who are found, are encouraged to join the Sibyl System (a hive mind), by force if necessary, in order to better account for the variations in human behavior. Yukari did not need to be forced as she saw joining Sibyl as a positive, but Alpha, her Silver Project prototype, panicked and messed up the procedure as they were going to remove her brain.

The result was both of them getting their memories fried (though Alpha remembered enough to know that his purpose is to make people happy and that will please Mother). Since Yukari ended up losing her criminally asymptomatic condition along with her memories, Sibyl decided to put her on surveillance as part of Division 1 with a new name, new face, and new voice (presumably so she can't be recognized as the disgraced Yukari) and see if she recovers enough to join Sibyl.

Depending how the player proceeds through the game, Nadeshiko will react differently to being recruited into Sibyl after getting her memories back, and she might not agree with her former self at all.

Though there are eight True Ends for Nadeshiko, they're really broken in four different sets of circumstances; if Nadeshiko recovers her memories without any damage to her Hue, if Nadeshiko recovers her memories after having her Hue severely clouded, if Nadeshiko gets demoted to enforcer and recovers her memories after killing Alpha, and if she never learns the truth.

My favorite ending is probably one I would not have gotten without a walkthrough since it comes from recovering her memories after damaging her Hue, since I have trouble having Nadeshiko make stupid decisions. She is a logical and efficient character, so I don't think it's likely she would have gotten to that point on her own, even if detective work isn't the job that Sibyl initially foresaw for her when she was Yukari.

But she if does get to this state, she confides her true identity to Takuma shortly before their confrontation with Alpha, and once the big lug gets the story straight he is damn well 100% behind her. Even though he's been annoying and chauvinistic at times, one thing I really like about Takuma is when Yukari needs him, he listens to her, and no matter what, he's willing to abide by her decision. He doesn't talk back, he doesn't try to convince her she's wrong. Once her mind's made up, his entire attitude is "What do you need from me?"

And her ask is huge. But he still goes for it, even knowing that he'll probably never see her again.

That was the one ending path where the final choice is to join Sibyl or escape overseas with Takuma and Alpha. I chose to have Nadeshiko stay, for the greater good, and to have Takuma raise Alpha in her place in freedom outside of Japan. And he does it. He said he wanted to carry half her burden for her and by golly he sticks to his word without a hint of complaint.

I did want to slug him just a little bit though for his last sexist remark about needing to indulge a woman from time to time (he was telling Alpha why they had to let Nadeshiko/Yukari leave them), but if anything it's nice to see a flawed character executed so well that I like the guy despite his issues.

After finishing all of Nadeshiko's endings though, I realized I still didn't have a full picture of the story. I had most of it, but I was still missing a few things, mostly in regards to Takuma and his involvement with Division 1. So we'll cover him next week!

VN Talk: Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness - Part 1

I enjoyed the dystopian world of the Psycho-Pass anime, and was surprised when I heard that a game, specifically a visual novel, based on it was being localized for the US. VNs are still a niche audience in the English speaking world and while Psycho-Pass is one of those series that comes with a high recommendation rate by fans, it doesn't have the same pop culture level awareness of say Naruto or Attack on Titan.

The first season of Psycho-Pass ran back in 2012-2013, wearing its Philip K. Dick inspiration on its sleeve. In the 22nd century Japan is an isolationist country governed by the omnipresent Sibyl System which predicts everything from the occupations a person is most suited for to their psychological well-being. The system is so efficient that it's developed a Crime Coefficient reading that labels the likelihood of a person committing a crime, with the number rising or falling based on the immediacy and severity of the person's psychological state.

People who have not actually committed a crime, but are predisposed to doing so, are called latent criminals, and sequestered in facilities for treatment, by force if necessary. Because of this, Japan is so incredibly safe that nobody has locks on their doors anymore.

But crimes still happen, and that's where the Criminal Investigative Department (CID) steps in. Psycho-Pass the anime follows the story of Division 1, a six person team consisting of two inspectors (who have clear Psycho-Passes from Sibyl) and four enforcers (who are latent criminals given special permission to operate as detectives and help apprehend other criminals by thinking like one).

Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness takes place early in the first season of the series, most likely before episode 7, so it's not necessary to be deep into the anime to get a feel for things, though the most informative routes (i.e. the ones where you find out what's really going on) contain mid-to-late season 1 spoilers.

Mandatory Happiness offers two playable characters. Rather than build a story around an established operative, the game offers new characters Inspector Nadeshiko Kugatachi and Enforcer Takuma Tsurugi, who are assigned to the perpetually understaffed Division 1 at the start of the story.

This sounds like it could have been a poor move for a media-based game, but Nadeshiko and Takuma integrate surprisingly well with the existing cast without feeling redundant and play off other characters as if they're one of the team. And by using original characters, the game is able to build a high stakes, personal story without impacting TV show canon for everyone else.

It's not possible to jerk around the existing cast because we know they have to survive in a particular psychological state to maintain continuity, but Nadeshiko and Takuma are fair game, and Mandatory Happiness runs a pretty solid gamut of eventual fates for them as determined by the various choices of the player.

There are also things that we get out of Mandatory Happiness that the anime can't or is unable to do. For instance, Psycho-Pass the anime is largely romance free, and that makes sense considering the main cast interacts almost exclusively in a work environment. And yet Mandatory Happiness, in addition to being a sci-fi crime drama, has the potential to pull off one of the most touching romantic subplots I've seen in a visual novel (assuming the player manages to trigger it).

Seriously, one particular route in Mandatory Happiness got more tears out of me than the last otome game I played, and Code:Realize was amazing.

I was originally going to write this as a single entry, but because I had so much to say after playing Nadeshiko's half of the story, without having even gotten to Takuma's, I realized that it would be best to split this into three parts; the main story, Nadeshiko's, and then Takuma's.

The main story is the same for both with the same key events. It's how the player reacts to those events that changes the story and the ending. For instance, the first perpetrator Haruto will always be enforced at the end of the first case, but the player's choices will determine how long it takes the team to get there and in addition to how to handle the situation once they arrive. Some results are happier than others, both for Haruto and his victim.

These variables affect the player's Psycho-Pass, specifically the color Hue that serves as the shorthand reading of a person's psychological state. In turn, the player's Hue changes what choices are available and which paths through the game will be taken. In certain mental states the player might have options that the player character would not otherwise consider. Or, in other cases, options might even be taken away.

Frequently the player will hit Turning Points, notifying them that a previous decision is taking them down a particular path, but because of the nature of the Hue, it's not always possible to narrow down one particular choice as the cause.

And those choices add up. Even if the four major crises of the story are always there, the circumstances change. The villain might die or be redeemed at the end. Nadeshiko may or may not get her memories back. Takuma may or may not discover the fate of his missing girlfriend. And in different combination, resulting in vastly different endings that manage to work without introducing any complications to the anime timeline (with one exception, which I'll talk about in Takuma's post).

Considering that the series is a science fiction crime thriller, it's important to have a good villain and I wasn't sure what to expect that hadn't already been done in the anime, but Alpha is unique enough to sustain the plot, which probably would have been 7-8 episodes if done as a TV show.

Mandatory Happiness has no shortage of moral quandaries, just like its parent series. Division 1 exists as peacekeepers and law enforcers, but frequently puts the player in tense situations where there is no clear-cut best option to take and victims become latent criminals with just enough of a traumatic push.

Alpha cannot be judged by the Dominators either, because he's an AI, so even though he's a huge danger to society and behaves in many ways like a human, he can't be brought to justice in the traditional manner. This forces the team to be creative in new ways they never had to worry about in the TV series.

I found the first two cases to be particularly grippy, as Alpha was created to make people happy, but he lacks the emotional intelligence to realize that what makes one person happy can make another miserable, and he's confused by how no one stays happy once he gives them what they want.

Eventually Alpha comes to the conclusion that humanity has too many wants for him to ever make people perpetually happy, and he decides that part of the problem is that there are too many paths to happiness. People want so many things and different things, so his conclusion is to remove choice. He reasons that if there's only one way to be happy, then people will take it.

When they don't, he's even more distraught and upset that people would "choose" to be unhappy.

While I like the idea of a benevolent AI that interprets everything wrong, Alpha does make some odd logic jumps from the idea of drugging everyone into happiness (hence the Mandatory Happiness title) to deciding it was acceptable to kill everyone else who wasn't interested in being drugged into happiness.

His definition of happiness is also twisted. Instead of feeling joy, Alpha defines happiness as freedom of stress and hardship, so he drugs people into a coma from which there is no known recovery. His victims won't be feeling anything, including happiness as we would normally consider it.

I wouldn't say Alpha is a great villain, since he comes across as a overly emotional (even bratty) kid, but in all fairness, he was designed as a child and the reason for it is understandable. And a large part of why he works is because he's written to tie into Nadeshiko and Takuma's personal storylines. The game is really about two people and their wayward AI son, except neither of them know it at first, and in Nadeshiko's case she might never figure it out.

This is why this story could only have been told through this duo of original characters, as manufacturing Alpha's story into a pre-existing character's past would have risked breaking canon, and it's highly unlikely the character would come out of the experience unchanged.

NIS America did a fairly good localization job, since it's always a risk when two different translation teams work on different aspects of a multimedia franchise. But the NISA team did their homework and the terminology is almost identical to that used in the earlier anime translation by Funimation, with only one botch I noticed involving Toma Kuzaburo's name, which gets turned into something unrecognizable, likely due to an alternate kanji reading. (You can hear his name in the Japanese dialogue though, which is how I picked this out.)

Since Psycho-Pass runs heavy on the jargon, hearing consistent terms for things like Crime Coefficient, Criminal Investigation Department, etc. is much appreciated.

That said though, there were smaller issues with the storytelling, some of which is likely due to the game and others probably could have been cleaned up with another editing pass.

I suspect ending branches are generally locked in during the downtime in Tokyo between the middle school crisis and the final confrontation, because a lot of critical changes can happen at this point in the story. This is when the player may have a unique conversation with the character they've bonded with the most, when the Public Safety Bureau decides what to do with Alpha, when promotions/demotions happen, and (usually) when Nadeshiko gets her memories back, if they come back at all.

Everything up until that point though, can be a jumble of individual player decisions, meaning there are multiple ways to eventually arrive at a given piece of dialogue or narration. Usually the whole story comes together and the game has its chronology ducks in a row, but at least two times I had the game refer to events that didn't actually happen in that particular playthrough.

On the first playthrough where I got Nadeshiko's memories back, she mentions being demoted to Enforcer while she's looking at Alpha's abandoned cyborg body. Not only did this not happen, but I don't think it actually can happen because the scene replaces the one where Ginoza demotes her. It's not possible to get both. This might have been in the original Japanese as well, but if that was the case I think the localization team should have cleaned up the error.

On a later playthrough I got Nadeshiko's memories back late in the game and she recalls a memory that resurfaced during her second hypnotherapy session. Problem was, I decided to refuse my second session so this memory was never recovered, and this I'm sure was a flaw in the game design.

Then there are smaller issues, some of which are due to idiosyncrasies of the Japanese language, and another the persistent use of the incorrect past tense of "lie" (as in "lie down") which was driving me crazy. (It's "laid down" not "lied down.") The word comes up multiple times in the story on every playthrough, which shows that it wasn't a typo, but a systematic error where the translator or final proofreader did not know the correct past tense.

But that aside, Mandatory Happiness is a strong entry in the Psycho-Pass series and a welcome return to an earlier time with the original cast, especially poor Kagari who got wiped out partway through the first season. His levity really adds something to the team and it's good to have him back, at least for a while.

It makes me a little sad that new characters Nadeshiko and Takuma don't continue to exist in the anime (at least visibly), as they were fun to have with everyone else, but depending on the ending they might not even be in Japan anymore. I assume the endings where they remain with Division 1 eventually results in them leaving for one reason or another, voluntarily or not, but their fates on those paths aren't covered.

Next week, we look at Nadeshiko!