While Its been a while since Ive watched this ChoSHEAd is an anime that I passionately dislike enough that I sometimes find myself thinking about it even now. Im a big fan of the Science Adventure series the collection of visual novels created by Mages Nitroplus and Chiyomaru Studio that consists of the ChaosHead/Child duo SteinsGate and its sequel RoboticsNotes and its sequel and most recently AnonymousCode. Like many I was first exposed to the series through the SteinsGate anime which is still my absolute favorite of all time and later on played through most of the visual novels and to my surprise my favorite of the series was not SteinsGate but its predecessor ChaosHead Noah. Shortly after finishing my play through of the visual novel I really wanted to see more and I decided to watch this 2008 anime adaptation based on said visual novel. I was shocked by how unimaginably mediocre it was. 500https://i.ur.com/FHukGTL.png To start a brief summary. ChoSHEAd is a 2008 anime from studio Madhouse that takes place in 2009 Shibuya district in Tokyo that follows a shutin named Takumi Nichijou. Nichijou spends the majority of his days locked inside a converted shipping container that he lives in playing MMOs watching anime and indulging in personal fantasies of his own imagination. In his efforts to distance himself from society he only goes to school the minimum amount of days required for graduation. Around the time the story starts a strange series of bizarre deaths in Shibuya have sprung up dubbed the New Gen Killings. One night Nichijou is playing his MMO when he is sent a bizarre depiction of a grizzly murder in a chatroom from an anonymous person. The following day on his way home from school Nichijou finds himself discovering the scene of this very murder as it is in progress. While Nichijou is able to escape Nichijous fragile mental state begins to dissolve as he fears the killer coming after him and psychological antics ensue. Atleast thats the story thats beautifully told in the visual novel. Here not so much. The Bad The biggest problem with ChoSHEAd is that it is simply unable to clearly illustrate and explain its own plot elements that creates a cycle of the viewer being more and more confused as deeper concepts are introduced the further into the series it goes. I believe that for ChoSHEAd the anime medium is simply inadequate to properly tell this story compared to how its shown in the visual novel. In the visual novel throughout the story Nichijou will have moments where he will be overcome with a delusion from his unstable mind. In the visual novel youre able to choose the nature of this delusion which will then alter the way Nichijou perceives events around him. I found this an absolutely fascinating story telling method that really boosted the experience. This anime adaptation on the other hand is unable to do this unsurprisingly and goes for a much more linear and neutral viewing experience. Because of this I feel like a lot of the psychological elements that made the visual novel as good as it is instead make this anime adaptation feel that much more confused and disconnected than it should be. Another strange issue I found with this adaptation is that they dont clearly explain what is delusion and what is reality. The visual novel also does this but more sparingly later into the story. It first plays a visual and audio queue whenever Nichijou is having a delusion only to later have moments where they dont creating times where its hard to tell whether what is happening is all in Nichijous head or if it is reality. The ChoSHEAd anime is unable to do this properly and it makes for many down right confusing moments throughout. An excellent example of this is Seira a pinkhaired anime character Nichijou is obsessed with who he occasionally imagines in his room and conversing with him. The fact that she is not real is very clear in the visual novel. This adaptation makes it very hard for someone unaware of the visual novel to tell if she is real or not as they make very little of an effort to show that she is a delusion. She kinda just shows up from time to time. I watched this on a website with a comment section and nearly every episode had a thread where someone is asking if she is real or not filled with replies saying IDK. It becomes even worse later as the main heroine of the series Rimi Sakihata who also happens to have pink hair and looks similar to Seira at a glance becomes more prevalent. People were thinking that they were the same person even. It was that bad 500https://i.ur.com/2TUVyoS.png The second more prevalent issue I had with ChoSHEAd was the production. The animation is simply extremely generic and lazy. Characters will have very odd proportions from time to time and background shots will look extremely bare bones and flat. The fact that something of this quality came from Madhouse is kinda a shock with how good of a track record Madhouse usually had.The soundtrack is very basic but overall its just fine. Not nearly as good as the visual novel but at least its not bad. The OP itself is nice Kanako Itou and the Science Adventure series are always a great match but the visuals actually blatantly spoil some stuff which I hated. I also found the ED to be extremely bizarre and not really fitting for most of the episodes it played after. The most glaring issue I had with production though is that they had moments where they would alter the source material. In general I would describe the visual novel as being extremely information dense. Theres very little fluff in the story and most everything thats shown is there for a purpose. People are introduced when they are for a purpose. Things happen when they do for a purpose. This anime adaptation on the other hand handles its time very strangely. I think 12 episodes was not nearly enough time for this entire story. SteinsGate which is double this length spends a large chunk of its first half being much more relaxed and sets the mood as such only for it to shatter this feeling with its intense second half all while following the base story to a T. ChoSHEAd on the other hand around the halfway point begins to lose the original plot by adding a few anime original elements that I felt greatly took away from the story. Theres a specific episode and a half stretch I can remember where it brings a part from the very end of the game to this point for very little reason that kills a great deal of the hype from the final fight. This same scene also has a bunch of extremely weird anime original parts that only made me more confused for very little payoff. It is bizarre choices like that that makes the production that much more of an issue. As another small side note Id like to mention that the source material gets quite extreme and has a fair amount of gore and crazy moments that this adaptation unsurprisingly leaves out. I totally understand that many people arent interested in that stuff and I think its fine that they left that stuff out I do think that they boost the visual novel that much more. The Good With all this being said I would like to take a moment to praise ChoSHEAds characters. I think while the plot of ChoSHEAd is way worse than its source material I feel like this adaptation does a fairly good job of preserving its characters. For the most part the characters are nearly as enjoyable as they are in the visual novel especially the heroines of the story. With this I want to talk about the main character Takumi Nichijou himself. One of the biggest complaints I see with this adaptation is how terrible the main character is but I simply dont agree. While this applies more to the visual novel I think it applies to this adaptation too. Nichijou isnt a good person. He isnt supposed to be. He makes a lot of stupid decisions and he treats people terribly. With that being said I think Nichijou is an extremely interesting main character to experience the story through. I hope most of us cannot relate to him and seeing all the events of this story through his warped view of society offers an extremely interesting scope of storytelling. In the end while Nichijou still isnt exactly a good person I do feel like he grows a lot as a person and improves. Again I feel like this is emphasized a lot more in the visual novel but this anime adaption does a decent job of showing this too and I feel like its an aspect most overlook. 500https://i.ur.com/qfrvPnV.png Final Thoughts In conclusion ChoSHEAd is a textbook example of a bad visual novel adaptation. Aside from its characters it completely fails to tell the story of its source material and will only succeed in confusing you. I tried to keep the finer details vague as I really do love this visual novel and hey maybe if what I did describe interests you maybe give the visual novel a try? It really is extremely interesting and I would highly recommend it. The only solace I can find with this adaptation is that hey maybe they learned from this when they made SteinsGate. I think that SteinsGate succeeds in basically every aspect that ChoSHEAd fails at so who knows maybe its possible? Its a shame though that this adaptation has to be the way it is As much as I wish that I could say that this adaptation was all in my head Im not quite as lucky as our main character.