ID: INVADED and Serial Killers in Fiction

Production

ID: INVADED looks more striking than anything else. The character designs are unusual and instantly recognizable. It’s a signature style that’s difficult to mistake. Whether you like it or not is a different story but I did. Moreover, the anime features a bevy of imaginary worlds. Which gives illustrators a chance to create all sorts of different and odd backgrounds, and animators a chance to play with physics.

It’s not perfect. For instance, the CG is sometimes great but other times a little invasive (ha!). I found a lot of the imaginary worlds in question (called id wells in the show) to be a bit disappointing. Not bad just kind of baren. Even though the production could have come up with literally anything they wanted, there’s a lot of mostly empty landscapes with just a few key features.

Personally, I would qualify the ID: INVADED production as interesting. There were some really great ideas and some attempts to set the show apart but not all of them succeeded.

As for the voice cast, they are independently good. What I mean is that found most characters to be well-acted. The voice actors really suited the characters they embodied. Kenjirou Tsuda‘s gravelly voice in the leading role perfectly communicated the weariness and depression of the character. But the cast had very little chemistry to my ear. In the context of ID: INVADED, it didn’t break the story or anything. It just occasionally felt like the connections between characters were a bit forced.

Story & Characters

ID: INVADED is the type of show that I like. But there were a lot of problems with it. For one, it’s riddled with plot holes. The character evolution is super inconsistent as well. It’s a plot-driven story so it is normal that the characters aren’t all that developed but some of them do change pretty drastically with fairly little justification from the events in the show. And although I did like the core idea behind Mizuhanome, the science is mostly babble that can get in the way at times.

I have seen the show compared a whole lot to Psycho-Pass, but I don’t really agree. I see why though. The two main characters really mirror Kou and Akane in background and general description. But that’s as far as it goes and the personalities don’t match up at all. To me, the first thing I thought of was this old Jennifer Lopez movie called The Cell.

I think that it’s a much better comparison, both in what the story is actually about and in how the narrative gets messy and seems to favour style (both visual and dramatical style) over substance at times.

It might be hard to believe after all this, but like I said. I liked ID: INVADED. I watched the whole thing after all. And I was often really looking forward to the next episode. Part of it is that I like both crime stories and mysteries. I say that but I didn’t put mystery as one of the genres and I don’t think it is.

ID: INVADED essentially follows the cast as they capture a series of serial killers by finding clues in virtual representations of their psyches (their id to be more specific) in a quest to find an ultimate mastermind called John Walker who is believed to be somehow creating these killers.

The two great mysteries of the show are: Who is John Walker and What exactly is the Mizuhanome. I guessed who John Walker was maybe around episode 3 and I figured out pretty much exactly what the Mizuhanome is about halfway through when we get introduced to a certain character.

As much as I would love to feed you some flattering tale about how my history with mystery fiction has honed my deductive skills, I can’t. I figured out who John Walker is simply because I thought the characters really looked alike. I’m not sure if that’s just me or if we were simply supposed to know and it was never a mystery in the first place. As for the Mizuhanome, it’s telegraphed so heavily it might as well have been explained to the camera.

But you see, that doesn’t matter. The way that ID: INVADED is constructed, the thrill isn’t in figuring out who John Walker is, it’s in seeing how the characters will react to that information and what they will do about it. It’s the same for the Mizuhanome. This leads me to believe that they weren’t really meant to be mysteries in the first place. Just plot beats. In the same vein as the revelation of Akihiro’s personal history.

One of the things that ID: INVADED does really well is pay tribute to serial killer movies. I think that serial killer is a genre on to itself. And there is a rich history of them in fiction from high concept psychological dramas to schlock horror. And ID: INVADED subtly references a whole lot of them. It’s one of the rare tales where there isn’t just one serial killer for instance, which allows them to show all the popular archetypes.

We have the tormented genius who’s calm and collected at all times and speaks pleasantly and eloquently while saying horrific things. There’s to quiet stoic that seems entirely disconnected from the world, the narcissist who believes that killing others is his right and privilege, the masochist who truly enjoys watching people suffer as well as the intellectually deficient one who is tortured by a drive to kill they can’t control or even really understand. There’s even a copycat thrown in for good measure. And of course, the idealogue who believes they are doing something to make the world a better place!

It was great seeing the same cast react to all those different archetypes and even having the killers occasionally react to each other. That’s not something that’s been done a lot and I hope it gets explored again because the potential is amazing.

Now this isn’t a classical investigation series. There’s not much chance that you will figure out the identity of the serial killers before the story tells you as most of them are introduced when they get captured. Besides, what we do see of the investigations are the id wells which are more or less dreams. Logic and physics sort of break down in them so drawing your own conclusions is very difficult. At least it was for me.

But the pacing and narrative beats still follow an extremely fast-moving investigation series and it draws the audience in. Like I said, I really wanted to know what happens next on more than one occasion and I think a lot of my fellow bloggers had the same experience.

Ultimately, ID: INVADED is an action-heavy psychological drama with a few cool ideas that aren’t always executed very well. But when they work, it can be quite compelling.

You might like this anime if:

You enjoy tortured characters. You like serial killer stories.

I save all my screencaps on my Pinterest and you can find more there if you are interested. But I still like to show you a few in the post. If you’re like me, screencaps are something that really helps you decide to watch an anime or not.