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R1 DVD Reviews
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Wednesday, 07 April 2010 00:00 |
 When alien lifeform Rynax takes up residence in the body of young girl Kurau, it’s a devastating blow for her father, who sees the daughter he loves become someone else, but for Kurau and Rynax it’s the beginning of a whole new life – but the unique abilities that Rynax gives means that others soon take an interest that may not be healthy for Kurau...
Apart from living on the Moon (although that's nothing unusual in the year 2100), Kurau Amami's was your average, cheerful young girl, until the day her father agreed to allow her to visit his work as a birthday treat. He was a scientist, dealing with research into a new kind of energy, so the opportunity to visit the labs was a real reason for excitement, but the visit changed Kurau's life forever. A freak accident leaft her playing host to an alien, energy-based lifeform - the Rynax. With her physical abilities augmented far beyond human norms, but no memories of the time before the Rynax joined with her, Kurau's life became extraordinary. The show then jumps forward 10 years, where we find that Kurau's a mercenary for hire - a job her augmented abilities make her ideally suited for - but she's no closer to finding a way to separate the Rynax from her body...
The key to separating the Rynax from Kurau is her Pair, lying dormant within Kurau – the Rynax had made a deal with Kurau’s father that once its Pair had awoken, it would work with him to find a way to separate the three of them into their separate identities – but as the years passed and the Pair remained dormant, Kurau and her father went their separate ways. Now the Pair has awakened, Kurau needs to get in touch with her father again – but there are others who are aware of the Rynax and the abilities it can grant, and Kurau’s suddenly finds herself a wanted woman.
The first episode of Kurau: Phantom Memory does a good job of making you think you’re getting one kind of show – and then in episode two it goes off in a different direction. You see Kurau’s father’s reaction to what happens to Kurau, his initial conversations with the Rynax while he tries to get his head around what’s happened, his internal struggles to deal with the combined Kurau-Rynax entity behaving more and more like Kurau used to (is it his daughter, or a monster who’s subsumed her? How should he feel?), and you begin to see how a story about growing up and identity could begin to flow from that. I saw that possibility as quite an interesting one – so come episode two, where we’re suddenly dropped into a story where Kurau’s a super-powered bounty-hunter, there was a mental clashing of gears while I tried to adjust to the show’s direction.
The big issue I had with this, is that bounty-hunter shows aren’t exactly rare, and initially at least there’s nothing done to make it look like the series was going to try anything different. The awakening of the Pair – into the human form of Christmas, looking just like the young Kurau – also didn’t exactly inspire me. From there, though, things began to change, as Kurau herself becomes the one being hunted (quite easily, it has to be said – Kurau’s skills at catching other people seem to be much better than her abilities to keep herself hidden), and her efforts to keep Christmas safe and free take centre-stage.
Kurau may go to great lengths to keep her host status a secret, but it would seem she’s not the only one of her kind – among the group chasing her, there’s even a term for them: "Ryna sapiens", a new form of humanity, and Kurau appears to be one of the strongest of them – and the shadier sides of society seem to want their hands on that power. While trying to avoid their pursuers, there’s also the promise made with her father to deal with, and that's the angle that the show eventually focusses on. That’s all very well, and you’d think that with her experience as an Agent and the abilities her Rynax part give her, Kurau would have no problem keeping herself safe – but for some reason, she makes elementary mistakes that keep bringing her to the attention of the authorities. Travelling under her own name, for example, or being a little too quick to unleash her Rynax abilities when it would have perhaps been wiser to keep a low profile, and those failings of judgment make the whole idea a little bit harder to swallow.
I’m also not much of a fan of Christmas, who seems to have "plot device" and "cute fanservice" written all over her – her sole contribution to the story so far has been to be the cue for Kurau to have to go into action, when her naivety lands her in trouble, and to act and speak in ways that make her as cute & appealing to the audience as possible. I like to think I’m above such manipulation – I like the idea of the Rynax pairs, but I never saw anything from Christmas that showed me why the Pair was so necessary, and that left me feeling a little cheated.
The villains of the piece are GPO, a global peace-keeping organisation set up in the aftermath of a world war who have taken on responsibility for rounding up any Ryna sapiens who are on the loose. Ayeka and her supervisor Wong are the faces of GPO for most of the series, as Wong leads the efforts to catch Kurau, with Ayeka acting as his able assistant. Ayeka in particular is given some decent development, with a look at her past going some way to explain why she’s so driven in her work (although not necessarily why she's so interested in the Rynax), but their capture efforts aren’t particularly creative and don’t do them any favours. There's also Doug, a former GPO investigator who has become a private Agent and has connections to Ayaka - he starts the series marked as a potential bad guy, but quickly transforms into someone who wants to help the girls. He has a remarkable knack for being in the right place at the right time that often comes in useful.
The early episodes of the series are something of a disappointment - while watching them, I found myself wanting to like the series but having a hard time engaging with the show and characters. It's only once Kurau is reunited with her father around the mid-season mark that the series begins to properly play its hand. The meeting of father and daughter is a mini-arc in its own right, with Dr Amami being a man whose life isn't going quite as he expected it to. He's been a tortured man since Kurau first left him, the work he's been doing on the Rynax has been corrupted by GPO and turned into something more sinister than he ever wanted it to be, while an accident on the Moon in which a number of Rynax escaped and 'infected' humans on the base has left him with a clinic full of people who live in fear of becoming part of GPO's next experiment. Kurau's return, and the help he gets from her in dealing with his 'patients', seems to give him his hope back and help him gain more of a backbone - so when GPO inevitably arrive, tipped off to Kurau's presence by one of the people she was trying to help, he's ready to stand up to them and fight for his daughter's safety, as a father should. This is a good passage of story - a long way from the science-fiction / Agent aspects of the show that were the focus of the story early on, and far easier to get into.
From there, the series gains a certain conspiracy element as the extent of GPO's involvement with the Rynax and Ryna sapiens becomes apparent, and the revelations that are eventually made over this are enough to significantly change the dynamic between some of the characters in the show's closing episodes.
Kurau has been a series that's has left me divided opinions for a lot of its run - it didn't seem to be making much effort to live up to its early potential, and the mid-season episodes with Kurau and Christmas on the run from GPO were simply an annoyance. As it moved towards the end, though, the series found its footing and started delivering stories that were engaging, entertaining, and in some ways thought-provoking, and the concluding episodes tie up that story very nicely. I would have liked to have been shown more about the Rynax, their true nature and origins, but while it's disappointing that that didn't happen it also doesn't detract from the good work that's done with this volume. Well worth watching.
For full episode summaries and screenshots, check out the reviews of the individual releases:
» Volume 1
» Volume 2
» Volume 3
» Volume 4
» Volume 5
» Volume 6
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