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.

I vaguely remember seeing the Guyver movie many years ago. It’s one claim to fame was that it starred Mark Hamill. And even that was rather forgettable.

Back to anime: The Guyver is a bionic exoskeleton that gives its wearer superpowers. And the wearer will need those powers because an organization named Chronos has decided that humanity was created to evolve into super-soldiers (by some long-lost space-faring civilization) and they are going to accelerate that evolution by creating Zoanoids. Zoanoids first appear as ordinary humans on steroids, but when they get angry they transform into monstrous, mindless killing machines. (There appear to be a limited set of Zoanoid types, so the animators can reuse the cells from previous fights.)

Chronos also found/developed the Guyver suits. They had three of them but they were stolen. In the process of recovering them, one was found by a high school kid, Sho; one was broken; and the other was found by a mystery man. (Well, we all know who he was, but he is supposed to be mysterious) So, Sho is taken over by the Guyver suit and fights the Zoanoids while he learns what the suit can do. The Mystery man appears at times to help out. The MM seems to have a grudge against Chronos as well. And the two of them manage to destroy the Japanese branch office.

Chronos is a global organization, so there are other branches to destroy, if they want to.

And, of course, there is a background high-school story going on. And everyone seems to know that Sho is the Guyver, so Chronos can attack his friends, his school, and anyone else they want. Nothing like wanton, mindless violence to illuminate the meaning of life.

This one is pretty lame all around, so I will give it a 4 out of ten.

Ayumu Narumi is a loner, high-school freshman, living forever in the shadow of his older brother, who disappeared several years earlier leaving only the cryptic clue: “Blade Children”. Ayumu lives with his sister-in-law, a police detective who has never given up the hunt for her missing husband. Mysterious deaths start happening around Ayumu’s school, and they seem to involve the Blade Children.

Ayumu uses his top-notch reasoning abilities (of course, his brother was better) to solve these murders, but never seems to get closer to the Blade Children. But the Blade Children are coming after him.

Along the way Ayumu picks up his Dr. Watson, the nosy editor of the school paper, and together they do stuff. Ayumu, being the loner, not-friendly type, doesn’t really bother explaining anything to his Watson until the end of the show.

Ayumu is also a world-class pianist (of course, his brother was better) who has given up the piano because he just isn’t good enough. I don’t know if this will factor into the story later on or if it is just a point to show that Ayumu doesn’t believe in himself and as long as he doesn’t believe in himself he will always be a loser.

As a detective series, Spiral is of interest. They have some nifty locked-room type murders to solve and the first disk didn’t leave any blatant clues sitting around. And there was a fair amount of humor with the sister-in-law. I’m not sure what is going on with the Blade Children, at least they should keep Ayumu on his feet. It would be nice to find out why everyone who knows about the Blade Children wants to kill them. The ones that know always seems to die before they can tell Ayumu what it is all about.

Overall I will give this series a 7 out of 10.

Earlier, I reviewed the first volume of The GetBackers. I just finished viewing the second disk and I am starting to find the series more intriguing. The five episodes on the disk covered two stories. The first was to get back a Stradivarius, and the second was to get back a Van Gogh. Along the way,a number of back story tid bits are dropped, a love interest is sparked, a rivalry is established, is another love interest sparked? and Himiko doesn’t try to directly kill Ban, like she did when they last met. Ginji and Ban each have pasts and the pasts look like they they will be significant stories in their own right.

So, I’m upgrading GetBackers to 7 out of ten (although I still think that use of juvenile animation to indicate particular moods is stupid).