Ive been baited by the damn semicolon. After coming off OcculticNine last season I thought I could at the very least find some sort of intrigue to enjoy here. I knew that the prequel to this series ChaosHead was near universally panned but Silver Link had me interested when they offered up a special recap of ChaosHead reanimated and clarified as episode one. After that and a trip to the ChaosHead wiki I felt pretty confident that Id be able to understand what was going to happen in ChaosChild. I couldnt have been more wrong and Im 99.99 sure that it isnt even my fault. Now although Child is definitely a sequel to Head the new plot of Child more so builds off of the results of Head instead of continuing some sort of overarching narrative. The show sets itself up as some sort of supernatural murder mystery concerning psychic powers. Not a bad premise but certainly not something terribly original. Of course its set in high school and weve got probably the most stereotypical cast of visual novel characters of all time. Ive already made it a habit of rattling off tropes so Ill spare you this time but just know that there is nothing original or interesting about our characters here... at least not at first. As the incredibly convoluted and confusing story plods forward a two or three of them start to become slightly more interesting with their own sorry excuses for motivations other than lets solve the mystery because MC likes mysteries. As the plot all comes vomiting out after about the first five or six episodes of doing next to nothing to advance it it becomes terribly apparent just how poorly the adaptation was done. ChaosChild is a pretty well liked and indepth visual novel with 50+ hours of gameplay so a branching narrative is obviously one of its strong points. In adapting that the directors chose to basically set up everything first which lead to the 5 or 6 episodes of no advancement and the subsequent vomit. I dont understand why anime directors think they can get away with these condensed VN adaptations. We need look no further than the original Fate/Stay Night by DEEN to realize that this approach is never going to work well. In ChaosChilds case this just makes the already pretty weak climax and twist we are presented with in the second half feel even more outofleftfield and not genuine than they already would have if the director would have just stuck to adapting one VN route. This isnt even acknowledging the other ridiculous plot points such as Nono being shanked in an alley and left for dead surviving as if nothing had happened and instead of being hospitalized just being laid down in her home TREATED BY HER FRIENDS AS IF SHE HAD A COLD. The utter insanity of how some of these actions play out and are flatout glossed over by the characters is frankly unforgivable. Go read a synopsis and if it sounds even remotely interesting to you just go out and play the VN. Theres honestly nothing to enjoy here in the adaptation outside of possibly the first episode and some incredibly generic art character designs and music.