Paranoia Agent is the stories of many people who have reached the end of their tether and who then face Shonen Bat. Shonen Bat relieves them of their anxieties by whacking them up side the head with a baseball bat.

But wait, it isn’t just an anthology of people sinking deep into psychosis. There is a plot here, a thread that the detectives are trying to track down, without falling deep into psychosis themselves. And they almost succeed.

This is a 13 episode series and the first 10-11 episodes stand alone very well. The final two episodes start to tie them altogether.

I loved the intro music and animation. The outro was pretty good as well. As one of the commentators said, don’t try to read too much into them. Sometimes the animation is just there to set a mood and not explain the story.

One drawback to the overall story is that we don’t really get much of a chance to revisit some of Shonen Bat’s victims in later episodes. Some we do, but not all. It would be interesting to see how some of those individual stories ended up.

Internally I am quibbling about the rating on this series. 8 or 7? 8, or 7? I think I am going to go with 8 out of ten for the whole series. Most of the episodes would probably get a 7 out of ten, but the whole series does get successfully tied together at the end. It can be very hard to do that in an anime series.