rriving at school one morning, late as usual, klutzy teen tech-head Keita Aono gets a surprise—there's a new girl in his class, and she's an old friend from his childhood. Excited, Keita tries to speak with her, but Hinoki promptly leaves. As Keita rides his scooter home later that day, a heavy rain and a general lack of physical prowess combine to send him tumbling down a flight of stairs into a subway-like cavern. The opening is an entrance to a new amusement park, "Bottom World," which was scheduled to open the following day. Unbeknownst to Keita, however, the opening ceremonies have been put off, as some 200 workers preparing for the grand opening have all been mysteriously killed.
Keita wanders further into the opening, and is dropped into Bottom World, where a series of spooky apparitions confronts him. In his increasing panic, he works his way deeper and deeper into the park. Ultimately, he winds up in front of a giant robot piloted by Hinoki, who is part of a team investigating the deaths. Unfortunately, her robot requires two pilots, but her partner has been acting strangely and ran off alone. To nobody's surprise except the characters', it turns out that Keita is one of the mysterious, rare "Dual Kind" types who can control the organic-interface robot, and his compatibility with it makes it far more powerful than it was before. But that doesn't help when he and Hinoki are attacked by a giant monster. The creature is more powerful than they are, and their robot's power system works only for short periods of time.
Before the creature can destroy them, however, a human figure with strange, particolored hair like Hinoki's appears and transforms into an elongated dragonlike creature to fight off the enemy. Keita and Hinoki see very little, as their robot is buried in loose rock, but its mission data is later recovered, and they watch, along with their handlers and backers, as the dragon-thing wins its battle. Though they have virtually no information, Hinoki's mentors posit that the shape-changer is an advanced type of human, adaptable and super-powered. They dub him "Betterman."
Much of the mystery, none of the style
Like other recent horror/mystery series, Betterman seems to be going out of its way to be as confusing and oblique as possible in the opening episodes. But unlike such titles as Gasaraki and The SoulTaker, Betterman doesn't accomplish this with beautiful images and creative framing and editing. It just piles on the undefined terms, throwing viewers into the midst of a story they're not equipped to interpret.
By the end of episode five, Keita and Hinoki have faced the same phantom threat a number of times, but absolutely nothing about its powers, intention or nature is remotely clear. Lacking solid exposition to dispense, the series falls back on weak comic moments, tech babble and, eventually, action sequences. But even the latter tend to be overly protracted and not very satisfying, since the godlike Betterman always pops out of his box to save the day when the protagonists are in danger of failing. The characters themselves are similarly unsatisfying—they're drawn like caricatures, and written as exaggerated, cartoony versions of the leads from Neon Genesis Evangelion. The only main character without a direct parallel to that series is Sakura, a pink-haired psychic who uses her "limpid channel" to glean things about the future, mostly so she can spout whimpering, creepy-sounding knells of doom that are useful to the characters, but quickly start to sound both histrionic and predictable.
Visually, Betterman is bland and muddy. The occasional camera tricks and use of still photographs as backgrounds ape experiments that were done better in Gasaraki, but still seem familiar from Ralph Bakshi films. A common effect that uses gray tones to simulate darkness just makes everything look shallow, colorless and dull. And the plot comes close to reflecting that. The story's only real intrigue concerns Betterman's nature and purpose, and his connection to Hinoki. The series creators (billed as Sunrise's collective in-house pseudonym, the ubiquitous "Hajime Yatate") clearly know that, and seem likely to hold out on that secret as long as possible. But the prospect of wading through more standard combat and precognitive gibbering to learn the truth is somewhat daunting, which doesn't bode well for a series that's meant to explore a central mystery.
The one piece of Betterman humor I really did enjoy was a recurring gag in which the head of the manufacturing corporation that built Hinoki's giant robot cracks jokes about how he's going to pad his expense accounts. The idea of overbilling a thoroughly straight-faced, world-saving secret society in order to get a free vacation is pretty broad humor, but it beats Keita's unsubtle lech jokes.
— Tasha
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