Anime 40858 Psycho-pass 3 First Inspector Reviews Filter Check 3

How to Ruin Someone Else’s Franchise
A Guide, by SingleH

Introduction
In this step-by-step guide, I will be teaching you through a detailed representative case how to ruin someone else’s media franchise, and I will be doing it with the assistance of the animated series Psycho-Pass, a perfect exemplar with which writer Tow Ubukata has already proven in my stead the foolproof nature of the techniques I’m about to teach you. In this tutorial, you will be assuming the role of a replacement for the given series’ original creator in an effort to emulate the given model, and I will instruct you on the four key methods at ... your disposal with which you can lay complete and total waste to the series entrusted to your care with your writing alone, no matter how solid its concurrent standing and no matter how great the talent of its founding and present-day staff.

Step 1. Invalidate their themes.
Themes are the heart and soul of any artistic work, and in the case of Psycho-Pass, Tow Ubukata has proven himself to be a true master of this subtle craft even more so than the ones to follow, as he’s managed to execute the following with a series who’s primary enduring value is in said themes. Psycho-Pass was a series about political revolution set in a dystopia wherein human consciousness and lawful tendencies could be measured and predicted to an extent criminals could be identified by their thoughts, not actions, and the main villain, Shogo Makishima, was a man who could inexplicably commit criminal acts without catching the attention of the surveillance state. Now, this all sounds like the set-up for a choice Hollywood techno-thriller or some young adult video game, but being Criminally Asymptomatic wasn’t just some superpower, it was a societal statement via Makishima about the nature of free will vs determinism. Makishima wasn’t able to kill because of a mutation in the genome or a hack in the system, he was able to do it without raising his Crime Coefficient because he genuinely did not view those living with and operating under the Sybil System to be human—even subconsciously—because they had given up so much of their decision making abilities and personal command of life, he believed them to be little more than bags of meat devoid of agency, ego, or conscious. And the conversation the show had with itself managed to go even deeper by way of the fact Shinya Kogami was put into conflict with Makishima based on action, not conviction. He wanted revenge for the murder of his former partner, not because of some high-minded philosophical debate, and in pursuit of this vengeance, he abandoned the systematic determinism of the Sybil System having acknowledged the fact he himself truly wanted to kill Makishima, thereby supporting his own rival’s argument that individuals cannot confine themselves to someone else’s decision making whist retaining their own judgement and ability to act upon their motivations. Pretty meaningful, right? Well, by introducing a character such as Shindo Arata, a true-to-form Mary Sue who’s latest and greatest ability was such, Ubukata swiftly and expertly hollowed out that entire thematic core in one fell swoop. Having a character without a single ambitious conviction hold the label of Criminally Asymptomatic confirms, at least in this version of the story, it is indeed just a superpower you may or may not be born with as opposed to a mental state conditioned by your intensely personal, revolutionary beliefs, and it irrecoverably tanks the thematic maturity of the work in every facet of contemplation or study.

Step 2. Underutilize or falsely utilize their concepts.
Now, I could easily just echo the aforementioned example of trivializing the nature of being Criminal Asymptomatic in this case as well, but Tow Ubukata has yet again proven his well-rounded utility in this field by providing us with a wondrous wealth of further examples to cite and dissect. Firstly and most iconically is the legendary Dominators. The Dominators are quite possibly the most emblematic and publicly iconic concept to come out of Psycho-Pass, and Tow Ubukata used them—a characteristically cyberpunk symbol of the series’ grit and uniqueness—to not only make the series turn tensionless, but to also make it as run-of-the-mill as any other teenage edgefest you can find. In the first season of Psycho-Pass, Urobuchi Gen, staying true to his nickname, “Gen the Butcher,” utilized the Dominators to terrifyingly impactful effect, using them sparingly but brutally to maximize their presence and memorability, and the legendary animation staff of Production IG delivered these punches will all due gore with their lavishly animated visceral realism. To turn such expertly crafted thrill into a mere joke, Tow Ubukata took advantage of the comparatively pathetic animation quality of Tatsunoko Production to overuse and dilute the Dominators in season two, thereby making them and their now wackily drawn death scenes little more than memes in the public consciousness. In Psycho-Pass 3, however, the animation production was back in the hands of the godly studio which initially birthed it, so to make sure the Dominators didn’t make their comeback, he made the simplistically genius decision to just stop using them altogether. Of course, this is in direct contrast with the setting’s established protocols, but this is yet another reason such a decision so smartly ruined such a strong concept. Production IG animated the living hell out of the endless hand-to-hand combat sequences found in Psycho-Pass 3 and the downright militaristic urban warfare found in First Inspector, but thanks to Tow Ubukata’s heavy lifting behind the scenes, no viewer could shake the question, “Why not just scan and shoot?” Anything from his complete and total underestimation of the established ubiquitousness of the Street Scanners which monitor the populace at large to his utter lack of understanding with regard to the actual permeability of the nationstate overseen by Sibyl, Ubukata’s expert incompetence made sure every vital idea the original series had was thrown into the garbage with such exquisite technique, one almost doesn’t even want to stop him.

Step 3. Break their characters and/or supplant them with bad ones.
There is no better example on planet earth and no better professor to explain it than Psycho-Pass and Tow Ubukata in the art of wasting characters. In the first season of Psycho-Pass, Urobuchi Gen crafted downright electrifying character personas which had the viewer helplessly glued to the screen at all times, and he imbued each and every one of these badasses with the thematic substance he made himself famous with in shows like Magical Girl Madoka★Magica and Fate/Zero, wherein the characters are just walking, talking moral and philosophical theses respectively. Be it the most iconic anime rivalry of the 2010s, the most thought provoking moral debate of any modern dystopia, period, or the most cathartically complete character arcs in any action thriller I can think of, Butch Gen made Psycho-Pass a true masterpiece of screenwriting while IG made it a masterpiece of modern TV animation, and Tow Ubukata threw it all away effortlessly with a micron of the practice they expended in building it. Firstly, he didn’t try expanding on the characters when the story came to continuation with Psycho-Pass 2, and he also didn’t bother opening up the new characters he brought in. Psycho-Pass 2, for those of you who didn’t know, actually wasn’t even supposed to exist. Urobuchi Gen and Naoyoshi Shiotani, the series’ director, were literally in Southeast Asia doing location study and filming a production documentary for the Psycho-Pass Movie when the production committees behind the anime demanded a second season on TV within the year to capitalize on the series’ massive success. Being the monolith they are, Production IG has many subsidiary studios like Tatsunoko Production to outsource animation to, but seeing as there was no way to have the creative staff fully commit to both productions at once, they found a replacement writer in our teacher, Ubukata. Seeing as the film’s screenplay was already towards finalization, Ubukata had to fill a cour of content without expanding the narrative to an extent which would overtake the developments found in the film. While any writer worth their salt could write some juicy filler, Ubukata instead decided to write a full-fledged continuation which was structured such that the plot line could expand as much as it wanted only in so far as the finale could come in and eat itself backwards as to not overtake the film’s continuity by killing every character relevant to its expansion. A bizarre choice, indeed, but by introducing a whole new cast and only developing the ones he was eventually going to kill off as to not shake up the future narrative which was already planned, Ubukata managed to keep the entire incoming main cast as stagnant and stale as livingly possible.

Psycho-Pass 3 and First Inspector, on the other hand, were supposed to exist, and Ubukata was finally permitted not only to make a story of his own design, but to do so in a way in which permanent changes could be made. After all, following the aforementioned production quagmire, Urobuchi Gen stated outright he would not be returning to the series after having felt quite fairly it was ruined in a way out of his control. Among the permanent changes Ubukata made to the plot and setting, many of which we will be discussing in the fourth and final lesson, he also made further additions to the main character cast. Instead of finally having his way with the characters he was never allowed to alter, Ubukata turned them into full-time bench warmers for his new main cast, Kei Mikhail Ignatov and the previously discussed Shindo Arata. Kei is a brilliant example of a narrative rotten apple who corrupts all characters who come into contact with him. Not only does he symbolize Ubukata’s misunderstanding of the series’ setting which is the subject of our final, Step 4, but more immediately speaking, his motivations and character writing are completely and utterly malleable and a beautiful breeding ground for plot holes. In an effort to superficially mimic Shinya Kogami’s mental decline, Ubukata manufactures no shortage of random outbursts and nonsensically rash decision making from Kei to spice up the plot, and just as you start suspecting it to be all contrivance, it’s promptly and hilariously revealed to us him and his wife are throughly trained sleeper cells who never should’ve suffered from mental trauma post-conditioning anyway. Arata—while betraying the themes as discussed in Step 1—is actually a character, but—as was also discussed in Step 1—is an Elder God tier Mary Sue. Whether it be mystery solving astral projection, crime fighting mind reading, or literal parkour gymnastics, this guy has every trap card a hack screenwriter could ever wish for, and they all come at exceptionally convenient time and with pathetically nonexistent explanation. But don’t worry. Not only did he give these disasters the limelight, but he also made sure to utterly defile all the characters he’d initially left on the bench. From his retconning of Yayoi’s entire founding character development by robbing her of her spirit of the law, completely disrespecting her character’s resolute choice to become a proud enforcer, to his shameless ex post facto rehash of Akane’s entire set of fundamental priorities by taking her prior stance as a headstrong leader who’s aware the system is rigged against her, and who knows she has to take matters into her own hands in order to take ground from an enemy she must essentially cooperate with, and molding her into a passive intellectual who doesn’t mind sitting in the shadows whilst the world goes to hell outside her jail cell—despite the fact she was as take-charge as Motoko Kusanagi last time we saw her—every change Ubukata made managed to be a complete and total bastardization of any original intention the series could’ve ever had.

Step 4: Challenge the foundation of their world, and call into question the logic behind its mechanics.
While blatant to a comical degree, Tow Ubukata’s execution of this final technique was downright incredible. In the first season of Psycho-Pass, Japan was established to be a near impenetrable fortress under Sybil. With the overseers having taken advantage of Japan’s conveniently isolated geographical locale and exceptional ability to mind its water-bound borders whilst being on an international stage plagued with civil war and little to no foreign conflict or meddling from their end, the Sybil System’s society easily managed itself as a locked nation. This point was of such narrative importance, it was literally the plot device used for the series finale, wherein Makishima attempted to knock out their food source and force them to open their doors to trade, or in other words, open their doors to immigrants. Immigration was always the perfect downfall for the Sybil System because, as it was proven in the Psycho-Pass movie, the social contract it establishes is so fundamentally different from any which has existed on planet earth prior to itself, that any from of connection to the outside world would cause seriously radical dissonance between the Japanese and the rest of the world. The Sybil System could only work on an island, literally, and Makishima’s master plan was to make said island uninhabitable such that its citizens would have to either leave or allow others with the resources they lacked inside, thereby polluting their perfectly calculated collective cognitive state. So what does our master, Ubukata, do with his newfound control over the narrative? He makes Sybil choose to allow immigration. A B S O L U T E G E N I U S. The conflict seated in immigration is quite possibly the single most asinine plot development you could ever even think to house in the Psycho-Pass universe for its established rules and setting, and by having it take up the focus of the entire installment of Psycho-Pass 3 and First Inspector, anyone paying even a lick of attention to continuity and consistency will know the writer is completely and totally unconcerned with the logical foundation of the show they’re building upon. And even after this bombshell of a plot hole hits the viewers like a bullet train to the face, they then have to take in the idea of the Foxes, or the Bifrost, or the fucking unscanned cult-districts in the middle of the city! I understand this level of purposeful contradiction is the stuff of legend, but this is the level of unabashed foundational deconstruction you need to enact to break a setting as airtight as that of Psycho-Pass, and this is why Tow Ubukata is the best at what he does, as well as the best to teach you how to do the same.

Conclusion
Unfortunately, at the end of the day, you are just a single individual, so you can’t realistically hope to completely destroy every singe little part of their franchise all by yourself. By invalidating their themes you make the series totally shallow and devoid of any meaning, by underutilizing or falsely utilizing their concepts you make it impossible to find the series interesting or engaging, by breaking all their good characters and/or supplanting them with bad ones you make it impossible to invest in the series emotionally, and by challenging the foundation of their world and calling into question the logic behind all their mechanics you trivialize even the most basic building blocks of the narrative, but even in our example, poor Ubukata has been stuck in the most technically proficient & thereby critically respected animation studio the world has ever seen, so no matter how thoroughly he desecrated the script at hand, all those pesky animators will keep it looking visually stunning, which isn’t even mentioning Naoyoshi Shiotani’s expert visual direction behind it all, as he personally served as episode director on episodes one and two. That said, as a writer, there is next to nothing your co-creators can do to relieve you of the means to ruin their franchise with the given steps, so even if some annoying, talented people around you do their jobs, anyone consuming the final product will be hard pressed calling it good thanks to your nobel efforts, and those working in your tandem will be equally hard pressed in stopping you from hammering the final nail in the coffin, the coffin of a masterpiece they built and you single-handedly broke into a downright depressing train wreck.

Thank you for reading. And thank you to those who made my Psycho-Pass 3 review top-rated before it was taken down explicitly for being too creative. I love you.

So, Psycho-Pass 3 was alright. Not amazing, but could've been much worse. You could already kind of see the writing on the wall for turning this series into a bog-standard detective show that had dropped a lot of what made it compelling. I get it, studios need to sell Blu-rays. This follow-up, however, gives me little hope for whatever sequels they have planned.

The ending set it up as an almost complete abandonment of the grit and moral quandaries of the first season in favor of shipping several couples together in that typical anime fashion where they never kiss or confess their feelings (except the ... lesbian couple from season 1). The stakes are low and audiences are instead treated to tons of superfluous battles with police robots and mechanized turrets.

On the technical side of things: the art's good. The animation is good, though the quality has a bit of a drop near the end during the last major conflict that makes it more like Roddy Piper and Keith David's fight in They Live. The sound design is alright but sometimes the mixing is awkwardly loud or there are very clear stock sound effects that could have been implemented better.

In short: if you loved the compelling questions Psycho-Pass posed about its fictional society in season 1, you'll probably hate this. If you want to enjoy this, turn your brain off and you'll be able to think the shotgun Dominator is super awesome.

It has become obvious that Psycho Pass will never rise out of the mediocrity that it has been in since the end of its first season. That original season breathed a breath of fresh air into a dead genre. Let's face it, there are not many good science fiction anime. Yet Psycho Pass gave us a likeable cast, an interesting narrative, and most importantly, a compelling ethical dilemna. Yet as the story of Psycho Pass has progressed through its sequels we have only gotten farther and farther from those original ideas.

So here we are, standing with a cast twice removed from the originals, and facing ... a crisis that has nothing to do with the core conflict of the series. I know how we got here, but what I want to know is why? Why has Psycho Pass insisted on dancing away from the central conflict of the series? Why are we being forced to trudge through storylines we don't care about with characters we don't want? Why do I feel like the further we go, the less chance we have of getting closure? I just can't help but wonder why the story was chosen to go in this direction, when it could have gone in so many others.

It is a testament to the strength of that first season that I'm even still here after all these years. I've stuck through the mediocrity in hopes of a trimphant return to greatness. All I've gotten is a profound feeling of unsatisfaction. I think it's time to say goodbye to Pscyho Pass. It has become clear that the series is not worth it anymore.

At this point I'm sorry that this is very tiresome to write a long review of this show. Please read my PP3 review for full depth on how bad this show has become since 3 barring the Sinners of System which Tow Ubukata didn't laid his hand on.

Spoilers ahead, maybe mild but to be honest, this is really a time waster..


Story - The plot is cumbersome, there is no explanation of Bifrost or the other Inspectors given how Kei was 13th, was expecting more since this whole 3 episode part completely melts down PP series. Where to even start ? Kunizuka's scene at the PP3 ... season was already ruining for the fans of the series, moving that aside as it doesn't have any explanation or anything to even talk about. Then the congressmen, who are those ? how did they get selected ? nothing absolutely nothing is explained here. There is no way on how Kasei knew about bifrost at the ending of the 3 part series, nothing is explained at all. It just ends they filled all the Arata's stupid mental trace with zero explanation and pulled a deus ex machina from his past as Tow Ubukata doesn't know what to do with the PP3 and how to handle this season. Shame how the director for Sinners of System was also not able to do anything, as those were really good, esp the the second and third.

Characters - I cannot fathom how absurd the characters are so under used in this 3 part series, all enforcers are just dumb plot pawns used for nothing just brute force into the plot and absolutely disrespect to the whole Psycho Pass franchise. It's a waste of time even to talk about the names but let me tell Karina, what is her character arc about ? Immigrants pandering ? please. Keep Japan out of this PC agenda. I suspect Amazon has a role in this, having the excl. rights to the series ruined this whole epic masterpiece and legendary Anime. She doesn't have any weight to pull off, AI, just watch some great anime like Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor to understand how Japanese Anime writes AI, even Appleseed has better and much richer approach, why explore unknown, they created this mcguffin AI where Azusawa entirely clamors for Sybil and tries for this place where we know absolutely nothing about his past nor his affiliation tot he Sybil system, there is no explanation whatsoever, same for Akane and how Homura Shizuka has nothing explored about his arc, there is no explanation for anyone.

They just bought Kougami and Hanashiro for nothing after that brilliant EP 3 of Sinners of System, it's a shame to see them do nothing at all just hollow pieces of wood blocks in this chore. Shion is again some computer expert uses to blind the Obata who is a dumb punk inspector. Dang, my brain is hurting the more I think about the PP3. Just stop and think what did Teppei do, How degraded the performance of Kisaragi, Ginoza, Shimotsuki is. There is nothing at the end of the show.

Pathfinders are just dumb as a rock hitmen who are super unskilled, just like all the characters who were used for pawns to carry this destruction of Psycho Pass series.

Art - Psycho Pass always had some beautiful art of the post dystopian Japan and the cultural exploration in the beautiful world Urobuchi and IG made. This one has some fancy 3D CGI in a few scenes and drones, this movie lacks even art, the accuracy of how Shion looks all her beautiful charm is gone just like how her character has been murdered by making her guilty of what she did, it's very very bad, Kougami's sharp face cuts were and Kasei's look, Enforcers is just wrong, the Bifrost's art was something mechanical and organic a bit of Giger's slight look but it's dead and dissolved now just like all the wooden planks we have in this series.

Sound - Everything is reused, there is no significant weight that the season had nor any moment which had gripping sound, all of them are from the prior achievements. The OP and ED are generic nothing great, same for the artistic approach of them.

Conclusion - Please save your time fellow Psycho Pass fans, I'd suggest you guys to end the show at S2, it was much much better than this and had a great villian arc despite imitation of Makishima still it had elements, slight inputs from Urobuchi despite the destruction by Tow Ubukata (man who destroyed Ghost in the Shell and now Psycho Pass). Stop at the Sinners of System and never ever watch this and PP3, complete waste of time and new characters are nothing to even sneeze at from enforcers to the new antagonists. You do not miss anything.

PP, PP-S2, PP - Movie & Sinners of System 3 part series, put a fullstop there and never watch PP3, and this abomination as a hardcore fan for the series and the characters and my respect to Japanese people. Please do not give rights to your franchises to these western companies they just want to mint money not tell the visceral and fantastic stories, art and the culture of Japan that we all love and respect.

Thank you for your time. I hope my input helped.

This Series Become Worst and Worst.

Psycho pass 1 is Great.
Psycho pass 2 is ok, not that bad.
Psycho Pass 3, WTF? The main character is shit. the story is shit.
i hate the governor the most. the worst character in this Franchise, why, because she only think about 1 man's life, she is governor, in the crisis she only think to save a man who she like, not the entire people in the building.

I wait they to make akane know about what mika did to akane and her grandma, but they just forget that. akane and grandma suffer becuz mika in the season 2, but in season ... 3 or the sinner trilogy they forget about mika betray akane and tell sakuya anout akane grandma.

How to Save this Franchise from Crisis?
Bring Kougami and Akane, ginoza

DISCLAIMER: I'm not a manga reader so I always come absolutely blind to every anime I watch (that applies to any source material not just manga), so take into account that I judge only what's presented in the animation and/or season story-wise.

SPOILERS AHEAD

ABOUT THE STORY:
Last season was bad enough, and since they made the mistake of not even finishing it... Well they made this. One of the many MANY mistakes was to present the season in +45min episodes, it was tiresome and boring for that and so much more, yet they thought to do it again to wrap up the mess. This season(?), movie(?), special(?) ... shouldn't really exist at all. Making Psycho-Pass 3 in 24 - 25 episodes of ~20min each, would've been so much more fitting.

Everything has the same stuff wrong as the actual season so I advise you read my review on that one since they're like, one whole thing. The only new thing that stood out this time was: "We are gonne kill Yayoi, but not really and make absolutely no buzz about it." That and the fight in the "grand finale", you already did a dreadful job introducing Arata so making the final boss one of the subordinates of BIFROST and not a congressmen itself, you messed up the entire organization you intented to introduce in the first place.

ABOUT CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT:

• KOICHI AZUSAWA: I'm led to believe his the final villain? Really? He's just a hitman, he's as important as the "peacebreakers". So yeah, bad decision there.

• SHIZUKA HOMURA: So he's not the bad guy? The only character who would make for as good of an antagonist as Shōgo Makishima is NOT the bad guy?

• YAYOI KUNIZUKA & SHION KARANOMORI: I just wanna say I'm so proud of them clearing their hues, but they're two of the older characters, so leaving the Bureau would require a whole thing for the fans to say goodbye to them as enforcer and analyst no matter if we are going to see them again or not.