ēlDLIVE (2017) Review
“The Space Cop Show That Almost Got Out of Its Own Way”
Winter 2017 saw a lot of product drop, and most of it wasn't aimed at anyone who remembers renting VHS tapes from a Curtis Mathis video store. ēlDLIVE is a twelve-episode shonen built around a middle school kid, a symbiotic alien who lives inside him, and a galactic police bureau that recruits him because the AI said so. The premise sounds like Men in Black crossed with The Last Starfighter, and it basically is. Within forty-nine seconds of the first episode, you have met four characters, established the central running gag, and—yes—seen a panty shot. The show announces what it is immediately.
What it is, specifically, is a mid-tier shonen adaptation of a manga by Akira Amano—creator of Katekyo Hitman Reborn!—with a solid emotional core buried under transparent pacing problems and the evident reality that Studio Pierrot was not treating the series as a flagship production. The show earns its second half more than it earns its middle, which is a strange thing to say about a twelve-episode run.
The manga was serialized on Shueisha's Jump Live app from August 2013, moved to Shōnen Jump+ in September 2014, and ran until November 2018—eleven volumes total. Published in full color throughout, which is rare for the format and signals that Amano considered the visual texture of the world part of the work itself. The anime is a 12-episode TV series that aired on Tokyo MX from January 8 through March 26, 2017. Studio Pierrot produced. Takeshi Furuta and Tomoya Tanaka share directing credit, with Toshimitsu Takeuchi on series composition and Han Seungah and Keiichiro Matsui on character designs. Music by Yasuharu Takanashi. Streamed on Crunchyroll (sub and dub). Current MAL score: 6.09. That number is not wrong.
Chuta Kokonose is a middle school introvert who has heard a voice in his head his entire life. He talks back to it and has been socially punished for it since childhood. In the first episode, his crush in “Home EC” sees him apparently acting like a pervert—he was reacting to the voice, which ends that particular hope. The voice is Dolugh, a Monitalien: a symbiotic alien living inside Chuta who can manifest whatever Chuta concentrates on. The galactic police bureau ēlDLIVE recruits Chuta because their AI system "Mother" selected him. Chief Laine Brick runs the operation; the ship is the Jeanrenoi-R, and the force carries no death penalty—rehabilitation is how they handle criminals.
Chuta is not a fan of being picked, but after some prodding, the voice inside his head says, “This looks cool; do it!” Of course, he does, and like any exemplary police force, there is an exam. So he has to arrest a C-Rank criminal from the planet Chabrol. By the time we get to episode 3, the manga's solid foundation is evident through a small world-building grace note—a half-moon alien helps Chuta because Chuta is the 50,000th person to see his hidden arms. The MOTW phase ends cleanly, and the show signals the start of a multi-part arc.
Episodes 4 and 5 are where the show reaches its ceiling. Chuta's childhood trauma is revealed: he led a field trip where he lost three friends—Michiyo, Matsutaro, and Ken. He spent years believing they died because of him. Ken survived by being rescued by DeMille, the criminal syndicate, and is now a captain in their ranks. Their reunion—where Ken weaponizes Chuta's guilt to extract Dolugh—is the emotional high point of the series. It's the G.I. Joe Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes dynamic: former friends on opposite sides, a wound that never healed, and a confrontation that ends in conversation instead of death. When Ken's mother apologizes to Chuta and realizes the time capsule was dug up—proof her son is alive—that moment is earned. The show worked for it.
Episodes 6–8 introduce Dr. Love—full name Taklamakan Strange Love (a possible nod to Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, 1964)—a 500-year-old genius scientist who sheds bodies and currently presents as a much younger man. His arc delivers Misuzu Sonokata's backstory: she was a test subject in Dr. Love's Taklamakan Project, which destroyed half a year of her memories and implanted an SPH-producing organ from another individual. Her current medication has stopped working—a real reason for a tsundere to be in crisis. Competently executed, not thrilling.
Episodes 9 and 10 are simply filler. A bowling episode and a groper investigation subplot stall the momentum. Episode 9 does land one genuinely hilarious moment where Dr. Love explains to Chuta that his own reproductive line is in danger while casually praising a buffoon like Tateyan. There's also a good small beat: Misuzu wakes from a daze the instant someone mentions salmon. The show is being honest about her—she hasn't softened just because Chuta's been trying.
Episodes 11 and 12 deliver. DeMille moves on Earth. The spy inside ēlDLIVE is revealed to be Vega—it's telegraphed early, but the execution is fine. Chuta's final confrontation, where he and Misuzu channel their combined SPH power into a single committed strike, carries deliberately phallic imagery—the blazing sword, Dolugh at his center of gravity, and the moment of full commitment before impact. Classic shonen vitality symbolism: the body no longer divided against itself. The show closes on choosing to live with your past rather than erase it—the theme it established in Episode 1.
Michiyo and Matsutaro are alluded to as potentially alive somewhere in space; that thread goes nowhere. Ken's situation beyond episode 5 is left open. These are the costs of a one-season adaptation of an eleven-volume manga.
The SPH (Space Pheromone) mechanic—how someone smells to you is tied to emotional perception—is genuinely interesting and under-explained. The co-puberty reading is worth naming: Misuzu's urgency to mature intensifies alongside Chuta's growth, a parallel the show draws without quite articulating. Episode 12 briefly introduces the Kusa/shinobi concept—the classical deep-cover spy in ninja lineage doctrine, the operative who plants in a community for years before activating (Kusa/草 simply means “grass,” the warrior disguised as a civilian)—which faintly echoes the Mazoku atavism in Yu Yu Hakusho: ma-atavism, a bloodline regression to a more primal demonic state. The parallel to Dolugh’s activation through emotional authenticity is stronger than the show acknowledges. Grace note, not a fully developed idea.
Chuta Kokonose has a recognizable pattern by episode 7: grow confidence, make a mistake, lose confidence, and rally. It reads as a cheap writing loop. But the arc underneath it, a guilt-paralyzed kid choosing to live with his past rather than be consumed by it, is coherent from first episode to last, and his voice actor earns the range on display in the Gucchi arc. Dolugh is the most structurally interesting element in the show. The co-puberty/symbiosis mechanic—Dolugh's literal health as an emotional barometer for Chuta—is built into the story's mechanics, not stapled on as a metaphor. When Chuta is depressed, Dolugh fades. When Chuta commits, Dolugh manifests. That idea justifies the premise.
Misuzu Sonokata does nothing new with the tsundere archetype until the Taklamakan Project reveal gives her coldness a reason beyond aesthetics. After that, she works. She remains hard on Chuta even after he saves her, and the show doesn't apologize for it.
Dr. Love / Takkun benefits from Yoshitsugu Matsuoka's voice work. A 500-year-old man who sheds bodies but hasn't matured emotionally is a legitimate concept, and Matsuoka keeps him from tipping into one-note comic relief. The show uses him better than expected. Ken / Gucchi carries the most dramatic weight in the series despite appearing in two episodes. The specificity the writers built—the guilt, the years, the weapon made of a wound—is what makes the rest worth watching. Inspector Chips, the mascot alien who ends every sentence with "chu," is exactly what he needs to be and nothing more.
In 2017, Studio Pierrot was deep into production on Naruto Shippuden and Bleach. ēlDLIVE was not a priority. The show is never ugly, but it rarely impresses. Character designs by Han Seungah and Keiichiro Matsui are clean and readable—Misuzu's angel transformation is a genuine visual standout. The school uniform's checkered pants look like tablecloths. That is a real costume design choice, and it will bother you from episode 1.
Episodes 1–7 hold up decently. Episode 11 appears to have received a budget bump—action choreography is more fluid, and staging is more confident—and the finale sustains that momentum. Fan service is consistent throughout: panty shots, censor-friendly nude framing (laser-blocked during Veronica Borowczyk's (her name likely a reference to Walerian Borowczyk, the Polish animator/director known for erotic art films (La Bête, Immoral Tales) spinning kick, two-way mirrors during the bacta tank scene. The show makes no effort to pretend otherwise. Brick's space suit in episode 8 has the practical specificity of a Macross flight suit—a striking detail. The gravity-on/gravity-off continuity aboard the Jeanrenoi-R is comical though inconsistent, making the details more noticeable by contrast.
Yasuharu Takanashi's work on Naruto Shippuden and Fairy Tail is among the most recognizable in the genre-scoring of the 2010s shonen wave. On ēlDLIVE, he works on a smaller scale and, for most of the series, operates competently in the background. Episode 11 is where his craft surfaces. The score during the DeMille threat reveal is genuinely ominous—not ominous-flavored texture, but music functioning as a structural signal. When the episode gets serious, the shift registers immediately. The opening theme, "Our Sympathy" by Alfakyun, is upbeat and genre-appropriate. It does its job as a tone-setter, and the title becomes thematically relevant by the finale in a way that rewards patience. It doesn't hold up outside the show. The ending theme, "Kimi no Koe ga..." by The Super Ball, is softer and works well as a cooldown. Both tracks are competent. Neither is a revelation.
ēlDLIVE is a 6 out of 10, and the math is specific.
Episodes 1 through 5 earn the show a genuine recommendation. The Gucchi arc is the best two episodes of shonen television from Winter 2017 that you have probably never watched, and the Dolugh mechanic is a more compelling structural idea than the show gets credit for. Suppose the series maintained that quality through episode 12; this would be a 7. It doesn't. Episodes 6 through 10 form a plateau. The Dr. Love arc is competent but not memorable, and the bowling episode and the groper investigation are what they look like. Five episodes of a twelve-episode run operating below their own ceiling are a real problem. The show climbs back in the finale and sticks the thematic landing—Chuta's commitment to living with his past rather than erasing it is solid shonen architecture—but the sag costs a point.
The unresolved threads are structural casualties of a one-season run covering the first third of an eleven-volume manga with no continuation—production reality, not creative failure.
The show is for viewers who can tolerate a slow middle in a twelve-episode run, want their shonen with consistent comedy and actual world-building, and don't need every episode to punch at maximum intensity. If the Gucchi arc premise sounds worth two hours of your time, the surrounding material earns it. If mid-tier Pierrot on a budget crunch is a deal-breaker, nothing here changes that.
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