Spoilers below. Ive always had this pet theory that you can very broadly sort all pieces of media into one of three categories based on how closely they relate to other works in their medium in terms of shared themes character archetypes style narrative elements and so on. Most media falls into the first two categoriesderivative with no major changes to the norm or derivative with some sort of twist. This is neither a positive nor a negative and really is just how storytelling operates so thered be no sense in lamenting it even if it were a negative. Then you have a third category. Things that walk so far outside the usual orbits of their medium that their place within them is questionable to begin with. It is here where Kaiba resides on the farthest outlands of anime as a medium sharing more real estate with experimental anarrative work like some of the Genius Party shorts and 60s cartooning from around the world than it does with its contemporaries and with a soundtrack that foregoes the usual anime soundtracking tropes in favor of a moodier score dominated by surreal washes of sound and lurching one or twoinstrument tracks Kaiba is wholly unlike anything else that premiered in 2008. 08 saw the premiers of the third YuGiOh Series Black Butler the Soul Eater anime and reboots of the Casshern and Macross franchises. Nobody was doing anything like Kaiba in 2008 and almost nobody is doing anything at all like Kaiba now. So what then is Kaiba? Thats a question thats surprisingly hard to answer. As alluded to it defies easy genre classification it mixes elements of cyberpunk romantic drama the Japanese genre of the world story think Neon Genesis Evangelion and even a twinge of black comedy. Kaiba takes place in a world where memories can be stored in tiny cones called chips and bodies are interchangeable. The consequence here is that there have come to be more chips than bodies and the latter are themselves now a commodity. But thats not all Memories themselves can be uploaded downloaded altered erased or fabricated wholesale. They of course are a commodity too. This sort of thing is really where Kaibas cyberpunk shows through its positively Ghost In The Shellian. The first half of Kaiba is largely episodic and here it somewhat resembles traveler adventure anime in structure. Things like Kinos Journey or Gun x Sword or to give a western example Samurai Jack. Our titular protagonistwho throughout a fair chunk of the first half of the series is stuck in bodies not his ownwakes up amnesiac with nothing but a locket containing a picture of a girl in a place called The Underworld whose population are oppressed by the rich living in Heaven physically above them and protected by a thick smog of memoryerasing gas in between. With the help of a vigilante named Popo he escapes to a luxury space cruiser where he travels from planet to planet on as a stowaway. Kaiba and his companion NyonNyon and their pursuer the bearlike cop Vanilla get into a number of.well its hard to call them adventures simply because most are horribly tragic. Take the example of episode 3. When our heroes arrive on a small planet no name is ever given were promptly introduced to Chroniko an impoverished girl with long blue hair and a pair of bright purplish boots that she is quite proud of. We learn that she wants to save money so she can someday leave the tiny backwater planet she calls home. Then we learn that her body is being soldquite literallyto help out her mother and brothers. We learn that this isnt the first time some part of Chroniko has been sold for profit we learn that memories of her favorite books and music have been sold too. Of course to Chroniko this all comes out in the wash. She assures herself that one day after her brothers get good jobs her mother will buy her a new body and shell live again. Not long after we are given a scene where this is quite emphatically proven to not be the case. Chroniko goes to get her procedure done and the doctor supervising it tells her flat out that her chip will not be saved and she will never return home. She is promptly dismantled as the horror of her situation sets in. It is one thing for a character to be killed onscreen and for the audience to watch them die. It is quite another for their existence to be effectively entirely erased and scattered to the wind as Chronikos is. A show less interested in exploring its universes nature might leave things at that but the latter half of the episode is devoted to exploring Chronikos memories and the regret her mother feels at having sold her. Eventually our protagonist even ends up in Chronikos bodyliterally left in a trash heap by the smugglers who bought it. Ironically KaibaChroniko is saved by the cop Vanilla from these smugglers who seek to reclaim their quarry. Somewhere in here I must note that the man who sought to buy Chronikos body was a literally duckfaced pedophile. It is a thorough gutting of her character. Someone so innocent is destroyed utterly by the depravity of the privileged rich. These themes and ideas begin to coalesce into a wider narrative in the shows latter half. Popo returns the girl from the locket shows up Kaiba himself is revealed to be King Warp who were lead to believe is a vile tyrant ruling from Heaven over the people in the Underworld below and the way that Kaibas earlier episodic elements tie into these later more connected episodes is really something special. As an example the recurring narrative of broken mother/child relationships repeatsfirst with Chroniko and her adopted mother selling her body then with Popo and his mother selling her own body to save her sons life only to be rejected by that same son to finally Kaiba having once been poisoned by his own mother for apparent reasons of political intrigue though notable this last one turns out to not quite be the case but the repetition remains. In the world of Kaiba these problemsbroken parental relationships people being condemned to horrible fates in bodies not their own the commodification of body and memory the gap between the rich and the poor and even the lategame menace of the Kaiba Plant no relation except by name threatening to devour Heaven itselfare not just related they are the same. Each feeds into each other. To call Kaiba groundbreaking is no overstatement. It fills me with hope and joy for the medium that Kaibas stylistic children are just now beginning to propagate. From FlipFlapperswhich shares its fixation on memory and mothersto TRIGGERs sugar high crossoverfest Space Patrol Luluco which is another peculiar take on the world story genre it really feels like Kaibas time in the sun is just starting to come. Perhaps it will remain an underground source of influence forever but really if you love anime or animation in general if you love the strange and weird and wonderful Kaiba almost certainly has something for you. There is so much I have not touched onand have no room to touch on reallythat I simply must implore you if any of this sounds at all interesting to give Kaiba a go for yourself.