Quick Take Review: ēlDLIVE (2017) – Space Police Comedy
ēlDLIVE is a 12-episode space-police comedy from Studio Pierrot that feels like a lost 90s Saturday-morning show: loud colors, rubbery aliens, fanservice gags, and a sincere, awkward kid at its center. It adapts only the early part of Akira Amano’s manga, and you can feel the ceiling; the world is bigger than the single cour it’s trapped in.
We follow Chūta Kokonose, an anxious middle-schooler who hears a voice in his head, lives above his aunt’s muffin shop, and is quietly drowning in guilt over a childhood accident. That “voice” turns out to be Dolugh, a symbiotic alien (Monitalien) who lets Chūta turn imagination into reality via SPH, a space-pheromone-based power only aliens can use. He gets drafted—reluctantly—into ēlDLIVE, the space police, where he’s partnered with the blue alien Chips and constantly belittled by his crush and colleague Misuzu Sonokata.
The first five episodes are the show at its best: goofy alien-cop cases layered over Chūta’s survivor’s guilt and his unresolved resentment toward Dolugh. The two-part “Pursuer from the Past” arc, where his supposedly dead friend Gucchi returns as a DeMille captain, is easily the high point—pushing Chūta to decide whether he’s going to run from his past or own it. You can feel the outline of a stronger series here, one that really sits with trauma instead of resetting him to “crying kid who has to find his courage” every other week.
Then the middle sags. The Dr. Love three-parter gives Misuzu a tragic backstory involving an SPH-organ and introduces Veronica and Nina. Still, it leans hard into ecchi framing and a repetitive emotional pattern: people get hurt, Chūta loses confidence, someone tells him to believe in himself, and he pulls out a win. The comedy mostly keeps it watchable—upside-down teleports, Chips ending every line with “chew,” the bowling episode with undercover aliens, and a Tikvahkian “nose plug puberty” gag—but the narrative momentum thins out.
The last two episodes spike again: production noticeably tightens, the soundtrack goes bigger, and Vega’s betrayal/“spy” angle finally pushes Chūta into a real “no-regrets” moment. The climactic fight, with Chūta, Misuzu, and Dolugh shouting “Sympathy” while swinging a frankly Freudian light sword, is dumb, loud, and weirdly satisfying. It doesn’t resolve the manga’s larger plotlines—DeMille and beyond are still mostly table-setting—, but as a self-contained emotional arc, it lands better than its reputation suggests.
On paper, ēlDLIVE’s reputation is middling: around a 6.0 on MyAnimeList, a similar score on IMDb, and mostly “could’ve been more” reviews. I landed on a 6/10 myself—not because it’s terrible, but because you can see the better show it almost is. If you grew up on Ninja Scroll and then lived long enough to watch World Trigger, ēlDLIVE plays like that odd cousin in between: part Saturday-morning sci-fi, part trauma drama, and part fanservice gremlin. Not essential, but if you’re in the mood for “Men in Black via Jump+ with a side of Freudian sword metaphors,” it’s worth a curiosity watch.
