Eden of the East

"Noblesse oblige; I pray for your continuing service as a savior."

“Eden of the East” is a 2009 Production I.G. anime, directed by Kenji Kamiyama. It follows Akira Takizawa, a man who wakes up in front of the White House with no recollection of past events, who only has two things: a gun, and a phone with 8 billion Yen.

How can one describe “Eden of the East?” A romance? A drama? A psychological thriller?

The answer: none of the above. “Eden of the East” works best as a mystery focused on its characters, hence the strongly written and endlessly likable cast. Even when its core mystery falters on some level, the characters are always there for us to root for, which is consistently timely when all else fails.

One other strong point of the series simply has to be the music. Created by Kenji Kawai, the soundtrack of the anime ranges all the way from upbeat electronic pieces to stunningly good orchestra melodies; in fact, some could say that the music is a little too good, as it even overshadows certain scenes that it’s featured in.

However, the aforementioned scenes are boring in content not because of the music, but what is going on underneath the surface.

One such scene belongs to episode 10: the second to last episode, which has an incredibly long exposition scene that nearly insults the viewer with a barrage of blatant information and info-dump. Not only does this happen in specifically this episode, though; many other scenes, for no apparent reason, have characters say things they wouldn’t have ever spoken in real life. They only seem to exist for one reason: to (unintentionally) disrespect the viewer.

Despite the occasional dump of information, it seems as if not enough data was even given, which leads to the main problem of the show: it isn’t complete. With so many sub-plots untouched, and with so many questions unanswered, it feels as if there was an unaired episode that was never brought to fruition. The creators seem to have noticed this, however, as there are two sequel movies that were made after the initial air run. Per contra, this doesn’t still excuse that fact that the television anime was not finished.

“Eden of the East” is an oddity. Does it have good characters? Yes. Does it have great music? Of course! However, even with those two positives, it’s hard to fully recommend “Eden of the East” to any broad audience; it just ends up unfulfilling (and even insulting) at times.

5/10- Recommended only for specific audiences, “Eden of the East” has good characters, but fails to complete their arcs properly.