Fugó keidži – Balance: Unlimited

[Watched 1 episode, first impressions] Hoho, this was more fun than I expected! Imagine a bored James Bond who has unlimited capital but very limited empathy. Honestly, in real life I would never get along with such a person, but on the anime screen I give him the green light 24/7 and just go crazy! Because not only does Daisuke look terrifyingly good (#nohomo), his breach of universal rules looks as elegant and simple as smoking a cigar. Not to mention he is dubbed exceptionally well. His sidekick will play his balancing moral counterpart, and I believe they both have stories to tell from their heavily influential pasts. Aside from the yucky CGI cars, it's got some awesome audiovisuals, the music in particular has real oomph. I'll be keeping an eye out for future episodes. (10.04.2020)

The stamp of Yasutaka Tsutsui is very noticeable here, the show is visually stylish and manages to combine suspense, action and humor quite artfully. This all applies to the first half of the season. Then, subtly at first, a more coherent plot starts to emerge, where the creators managed to grab my attention, the show starts to pick up momentum and the season struts like a peacock, adding more characters and cliffhangers as if it is going to run for another 20 episodes, only to quickly fizzle out in the last few episodes and all the suspense fades away like a beauty, who walks away in the morning. The choice of a new voice actor for the main hero was excellent, the characters are well written and the absurdity goes hand in hand with the hyperbole, which are delivered in an entertaining way, but by cranking the story up in the second half of the season, the creators bit off a bit more than they could chew, and they only managed to push it out through their anuses in the last few episodes. As a small snack to stave off the boredom for a day or two, however, it is perfectly satisfactory (16.10.2020)

I can see why the reviewer Scalpelexis likes The Millionaire Detective Balance: Unlimited and he was right, it is quite stylish and entertaining. A lot of this is down to the charisma and demeanor of the smooth, cool main male protagonist who has a technological arsenal that could rival James Bond, and who has a similar superpower to Batman's - he is extremely rich. I also liked the fact that I could watch the season in two halves, as the first half has a display of wealth showing it can get you almost anything and there is some larking around. The second half of the season is a convoluted case full of quite interesting and sometimes unexpected twists which means it does not become samey. I also appreciate that the characters are not stereotypical, and it is not that classic buddy cop thing where you use two different characters to bounce off each other resulting in their relationship helping them grow and changing them as people. Although these two characters do change a little, it is a natural process, so the character development (or transformation if you prefer) is more believable. Katou was not that impressive as Kambe's partner, he struck me as the straight-laced nice-guy detective who is a decent counterpart to the other main protagonist. That should have made sense, although I thought he was just unremarkable, a weaker link - and he was not that entertaining. I was not able to suspend my disbelief and just lose myself in the hilarious absurdity (which I have had absolutely no problems doing with other shows). For example, how the hell do you get from England to Japan in eighteen minutes, or how do you get a band from its gig onto a train full of pensioners in just a few minutes? Well, the paradoxes of time and distance are only the tip of the iceberg! I should not have to deal with that on a TV show, I know such paradoxes exist in other productions like the Bond movies, etc., however, in this show I thought there were just too many... When I look at it and think about how much I enjoyed it, I think that an above-average rating is quite fair really, the important points work for me and the things that bother me are basically secondary. When compared to the shows I have awarded 7/10 to recently, I decided on a fraction less. 6.5/10. (24.09.2020)