Psycho-Pass

O, wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in't.

- Miranda, The Tempest

Psycho-Pass is an anime about a futuristic Japan ruled by the Sibyl System, a supercomputer that quantifies everyone's psychological profile with a number. Anyone exceeding a particular target number is deemed a potential criminal threat and dealt with...

Status

Anime: complete. (33 episodes, 2 seasons)

Thoughts

Psycho-Pass is definitely on the intriguing end of anime series, though I'm just slightly shy of saying calling it an auto-recommend.

It takes a peek at the psychological and moral issues surrounding the judgment of people. While these discussions usually aren't handled with the proper depth an actual discussion would constitute, I credit the series for doing its best to avoid preaching. All sides and approaches, at a minimum, have explicitly acknowledged virtues and flaws, even if little practical impact may come of them.

It quotes many external sources on related subjects frequently, particularly in the first season and whenever Makishima is around. These quotes usually sound like philosophical BS, but there's still a few good things to pick out - one that stood out to me was a reference to the Panopticon system designed by Jeremy Bentham.

The presentation is generally very well-done, and character design is probably a high point of the series. Although Akane Tsunemori takes a while to come into her own, she becomes a very decent protagonist worth rooting for and sympathizing with, and the supporting cast, while making use of many stock archetypes, does at least make them entertaining and sympathetic. It's just too bad they didn't get more screentime, and their own plot lines followed (Shūsei Kagari, Nobuchika Ginoza, and Yayoi Kunizuka come to mind). The second season generally makes this worse, as the new cast usually doesn't make up at all for the loss of older characters (Mika Shimotsuki, I'm looking at you...).

Unfortunately, one major exception to good character design, to me, seems to involve the primary antagonists. All of them have vaguely plausible motivations and actions, perhaps, but no matter what gray and even black shows up on the side of the protagonists, the antagonists never gain sufficient sympathy with their actions, which always involve running over a lot of innocent people.

Overall, Psycho-Pass has its moments, and is a decent enough, if somewhat shallower than advertised, look at the philosophy and morality about people and judgment of them. But it's the (IMO well-done) presentation that must draw you in for it to be worth watching...much of the raw content can be found for cheaper and better quality elsewhere.