S-CRY-ED - Volume 1: The Lost Ground

What an excellent idea for as a storyline! All credits to Yosuke Kuroda for superb creation of interesting future: destructive earthquake flattens Yokohama and neighbouring cities and changes geography of Kanagawa region. Now an island with high mountains and wasteland, ‘The Lost Ground’ is inhabited by strange humans known as Alter Users. They have the capability of materialising their alter-egos into weapons. Japanese government reacts, creating the city on the edge of the region and special police unit HOLD to suppress the lawless society. Due to Alter Users threat, super special unit within HOLD is created to fight them, named HOLY. You guessed good – loyal Alter Users are members of this elite force.

That was the outline and framework. With borders blurred between good and evil, black and white characters, it is always a mystery what would be our hero’s (?) Kazuma next move. Really nice division of personalities and plots add flavour to storytelling that progresses flawlessly from incidents to full grown rebellion. Unplanned but welcomed by viewers, I’m sure. Another aspect of Kuroda’s work is fascinating: character of alter-ego units fits perfectly their owners. Guess that Herr Freud’s holy scriptures have been consulted. Big plus to their design as well.
Animation is flawless, but when you see SUNRISE signature, you know it would be so. 3D animation is incorporated well and director Goro Taniguchi  had had an easy task of gluing scenes together by simply following the story. I have to complain about the faces being ‘flat’, but overall design and especially alter-units innovativeness is superb.

Aimed at younger teenage crowd, S-CRY-ED does have a couple of ordinary elements, like ‘Cougar’ character for instance, whose half-successful attempts of being amusing diminish seriousness of the series. Also, battle scenes are diluted a bit for my taste dulling the edge that would’ve fitted perfectly if being razor sharp. Thus, PG-13 is suggested, also as ADDICTION. Could have been better, but much, much worse as well. I’ll continue to follow epic of young Kazuma.