Beatless Review
The premise sounds interesting, right? Beatless is a robot-themed sci-fi anime that features AI robots that are pretty advanced. They have dominated society and can be seen everywhere, from corporate to entertainment industries.
However, not all sci-fi shows have proved to be very promising over the years. Some are pretty good, but most of them have left a bad taste in our mouth.
Beatless will tell us about the robots with no hearts yearning to have a heart beating in them, which will still make them beatless. Let’s delve deeper into our review about the sci-fi anime, Beatless!
Story
The story opens in a future where humanity has developed and advanced greatly, creating HIEs, human-like robots that serve society and have become an important and dominant part of society.
Arato Endou is our main character who loves HIEs and treats them not as servants but as someone equal to himself. He desperately wants to own one, but his financial status does not allow him to do so.
His life is going smoothly when one day, he comes across a hacked and violent HIE that attacks him and is about to kill him when he is saved by an abnormal HIE, Lacia, who is carrying a weaponized coffin with her. Lacia is highly advanced and had escaped from the MemeFrame corporation in order to survive.
Lacia offers up a sweet deal to Endou. She tells him to register her under his name and own her. Endou has no choice but to accept and take her home. Now, all of Lacia’s actions would be Endou’s responsibility. He must trust the AI girl and deal with her.
The story started interestingly but soon became pretty uneventful. A lot of uninteresting and unnecessary characters were introduced that did not contribute much to the story. The crucial parts of the story were overshadowed by long and tedious dialogues from such characters.
We were expecting some serious plot twists in the anime but did not get any. The story kept going in only one direction, and it became painfully dull at one point. The events were presented in a very dull manner, and we could not make ourselves care about them since nothing was exciting or fun about them.
There is something very wrong with the pacing as well. The action scenes are supposed to be precise and meaningful. But with Beatless, the action scenes do not seem to contribute to anything. They’re just being dragged to the point that they become pretty dull to watch.
The creators tried very hard to make the series very complex but ended up creating a mess. There is use of heavy symbolism as well as serious dialogues. But unfortunately, they couldn’t contribute much to the story.
Overall, the story is not very enjoyable because it makes you bored to death. And with such terrible pacing, it makes you just drop it mid-way. The story and plot greatly disappointed us!
Characters
The characters of the series are literally just copy-pasted and are very generic. Our MC is the typical nice and kind-hearted guy, and we don’t see a lot of development with his character. He's just too strung up about Lacia and is very affectionate towards her. There isn’t much that we get out of his character.
We were a little hopeful about the character of Lacia. Her character did seem a little promising. However, it also became shallow and bland as events unfolded. We have Arato’s sister, who’s just there for fanservice. She serves no other purpose. All other characters act similarly, serving no purpose to the story, even the antagonist.
The only character that did have some dimension is the character of Kouka. She is a complex character and puts some life in the story, making it a little less dull and unbearable.
Overall, the characters are bland. The main characters and the antagonist should’ve been interesting. However, the creators failed to add sufficient depth to them.
Animation
When it comes to character designs, it’s hard to differentiate humans from robots. It’s vital for anime like Beatless to give the viewers some way to distinguish between actual humans and machines. But in this series, they all look the same.
The background design was pretty average. There was nothing special about it. However, the colors used were very suitable. Overall, the animation is far from being perfect. The action scenes are also not very fun to watch as they’re not fluid and lack proper animation. The animation department lacks in various ways.
Music
We’re finally going to talk about the things that deserve some praise and recognition. Sure, the visuals are lacking. But at least the music is good. Both the openings and endings are highly impressive and are composed and sung by famous artists.
The voice acting was very appropriate and full of emotion. Each character’s voice actor was very suitable for their nature. We don’t have much to complain about in the sound department, so it’s good to go! The background music is also pretty impressive, making up for the lack of other things.
Final Verdict
The anime would’ve been a hit if the storyline provided had more polish and better pacing. It doesn’t satisfy this viewer’s appetite and definitely leaves a bad taste in your mouth. For us, it was pretty average. It might appeal to others, so giving it a bite won’t hurt anyone!
