Kaiba Anime Review
A mostly episodic series with childish cartoonish artstyle to depict often violent and occasionally sexual scenes for shock effect. Acts of random cruelty are often displayed as misery porn. The childish artstyle is often taken as a sign of maturity and depth.
Even though there is an overarching plot many of the episodes, and there are only twelve of them, are spent on side-stories with side characters we will never see again.
The stories are too allegorical and come off as preachy morality plays. The characters that matter to the plot don't get enough screen time since the series is episodic and the side-characters are caricatures of ideologies(or misery-porn fodder).
The protagonist is "the chosen one" and there is a prophesy about him. This instantly makes the protagonist less interesting. Just to make him even less interesting for a large duration of the anime the protagonist is suffering from amnesia and is just reacting to what those around him do (mainly by running away). Furthermore thanks to his amnesia he seems totally indifferent to the cruelty around him making him morally unrelateable.
The setting while explained (basically the entire universe is centred around the protagonist and no it's not played for laughs like in Haruhi) is not properly defined. We are only shown a few planets, each of them usually a hellish nightmare in its own way. And in each the author tries to make some vague sentimental point too fast that usually reeks of emotional manipulation and is so satirical that it builds a strawman of the thing it criticizes thus making it harder to take seriously. For example in one episode it is criticizing the fashion industry we are shown a planet in which anyone can get any body they want and an amnesiac robot cat who is a famous fashion designer purposefully creates distorted bodies to get the point across that people should live in their own inferior natural bodies when they can get better ones... because? Reasons that we are never shown + dystopia= deep social commentary for why we should have no standards... Oh so now that's a strawman? God forbid Kaiba showed a counterargument instead of sob stories about characters we only see in one episode.
Plot points are just added tactlessly one after the other and the premise shifts with them without being properly explored. For example the initial premise is that of world of rich people living above amnesia inducing clouds and below a world of poor people whose bodies are stolen so that the rich can live longer by moving their memories into poor people's bodies but then the next thing you know the amnesiac protagonist is on a space ship, and then there is this planet in which apparently rich people can get designer made bodies. And then La Resitance pops into existence out of nowhere and puts forth a plot to kill the prince who is plot twist a clone, and then plot twist La Resistance is actually run by other imperfect clones of the prince.
The characters have realistic and selfish motivations but the cynicism gets boring fast. It's like I have no reason to root for any character and I was not emotionally invested in any of the fates of the characters: Oh look one selfish character kills another selfish character... boring. Idealistic characters can be annoying too but when all the characters are just selfish and not particularly interesting in any other way (none of the characters are clever in this anime for example, they are just cruel).
The romance was... unconvincing. It was just a plot device so that when our protagonist is about to give in to his monstrosity and destroy the world/universe he remembers of the pussy he won't get if he does that.
I give this anime 3 out of 10. The art style neither detracts nor adds anything to the story other than perhaps distracting the viewer from seeing that there isn't that much by making them think "Oh look a mature show with character designs and backgrounds aimed at children."
Recommendations: Kino no Tabi (anime): The same episodic social commentary show with normal art-style is the same indistinct anime style that won't detract you from the substance or lack thereof of the points being made. There aren't that many episodes and there isn't an overarching plot which is ignored in favour of short stories. It is just short stories; even if there are many sob stories and each city Kino visits is a festering shitfest but at the very least a counterargument is occasionally shown.
Galaxy Express 999: The same episodic social commentary in space but the characters are not morally grey at all, although you will still get the same 'people are agency-less victims of circumstance please fill pity for them message.' Likewise each planet they visit is a hell in its own way. At least there is a goal at the end (although the series is needlessly stretched unlike Kaiba which is too short but even Kaiba wouldn't have been any better if it kept on churning episodic episodes with no end in sight). The dark nostlagic atmosphere is pretty good in GE999 and so is the music- it really helps the mood although it gets tiresome and hollow after you have heard it enough times. I mean after you have seen so many tragic things happening to so many nameless characters each episode and the same music always plays it sort of becomes a joke. Also Maetel is hot erhm I mean the artstyle is not bad.
P.S. I just don't see what @thatanimesnob sees in this series.
I've yet to finish it, but I don't think I will like it as much as Yuasa's other stuff like Ping Pong and Kemonozume.
I didn't like Ping Pong and Kemonozume (especially kemonozume) so you might still like Kaiba. Ping Pong is very different from Kaiba. Actually Ping Pong is much better as far as characters and the plot making sense is concerned. Kemonozume looks rougher than Kaiba but at least it sticks to one idea (even though that plot to destroy the world or something came out of nowhere). I also think that there is more gore for shock effect in Kemonozume than Kaiba. In Kemonozume I didn't feel like I was made to care about what would happen to the world except the two lovers and in Kaiba I didn't care about anyone in particular.
The amnesia is justified because a major mechanic of the universe is transferring memories. While the end sequence is quite messy, it's a much better commentary on the world it created than other shows trying to do the same thing.
Kaiba definitely isn't as bad as you say and definitely not as good as Petros says, but I lean on the good side. The episodic part of the show was excellent at showing how the world works when an idea is taken to an extreme, but the plot section is quite a lot weaker. The tree part acted as a good conclusion sequence but the bits leading up to that were incoherent for a lot of it.
Kino's Journey is Kaiba but without any form of plot or ending to act as payoff and with next to no character depth outside of several select episodes.
Well, at least Kino's doesn't promise any sort of progression or plot and perhaps not having any progression or plot is better than having a bad progression and a bad ending. But, yeah I guess my expectations were too high because everyone including Petros kept on saying that it was a great show.
If I had just randomly found it and watched it perhaps I wouldn't have been as negative. In Kino's you get weird extreme worlds each episode and you stay or leave for that. In Kaiba there is this mystery that in the end makes little sense. There just were too much ideas in this show. In the end I didn't get what this show was about at all other than some convoluted social commentary that is hard to put your finger on to keep it vague (like the artstyle) to make it hard to criticize its ideas.
Sometimes like in this case, I like or dislike an anime and then subsequently try to come up with reasons why I liked it or didn't. It isn't always that obvious.
"The episodic part of the show was excellent at showing how the world works when an idea is taken to an extreme"
It just came off as unfunny satire. I am fine with satire if it's actually funny like in Gulliver's Travels but here the characters(many of which especially in the episodic parts were extreme caricatures) were not funny or witty, nothing was made to be fun of. And besides the different worlds and the contant movement of the characters separately made it hard for me to empathize with anything that happened to the characters.
The constant misery-porn was off putting as well. I felt like I was being emotionally manipulated rather than appealing to my reason.
Kaiba wasn't satire. You seem to have been negatively affected by wrong expectations. It wasn't emotional manipulation because there was no manipulation to be had. It presented the full story in each episode, which generally was quite depressing. It would have been emotionally manipulative had the show focused on being sad rather than being honest about what would happen in a broken world where memories are physical.
SAO episode 3 is emotional manipulation because it presents a character, writes in that Kirito cares for her, then kills her off after skipping the process of coming to care for them. Kaiba never does this. I'd assume you find the Chroniko episode the most "emotionally manipulative", but this is very far from what it was. Warp didn't participate much in what was going on. He was apathetic for a lot of the early part, save where it directly involved him. You could say that the aunt feeling regret was emotional manipulation, but this isn't a strong argument because it's logical that an aunt would feel regret and guilt after selling her niece's body.
The amnesia makes sense within the plot but it doesn't help with characterization. I don't know. Warp was too apathetic for me to care about ironically I guess that makes me apathetic. I don't know, is that irony? So many things are called ironic that I don't know what irony is anymore...
I don't know it killed characters too fast. It gave me that same feeling I had when I watched Galaxy Express 999; 'Oh now you feel sorry for fictional people, give us your money, here you go another batch of characters to feel sorry for, now give us your money etc....' Perhaps I am being too cynical and perhaps this shouldn't be called emotional manipulation, after all that's the deal, but then what should it be called? Maybe 'misery porn'? I just find helpless victimized characters rather boring and 'manipulative' in the sense that they are just there to make me drip a tear from my cock.