Kaiba – Review | Nefarious Reviews

Japanese Title: Kaiba

Similar: Kino’s Journey

Watched in: Japanese

Genre: Mystery Science Fiction

Length: 12 episodes

Positives:

Weirdly creative in design.
A strange tale of memories and mental manipulation.

Negatives:

You have to love the abstract art and surreal narrative to enjoy.
Little music, repeats often.
Though the world and monsters are creative, they aren’t detailed or explained much. The weirdness simply is.
The child-like art makes the few promiscuous scenes creepy.

Kaiba is a man on a mission to be the best at children’s card games, and he’s going to do it with or without the rules because he’s got money! …wait, wrong anime. Actually, Seto Kaiba entering into Kaiba the anime wouldn’t be the strangest thing that happens in this show. Kaiba is a surreal trip into a world of memory manipulation expressed through abstract art that you will either love or hate.

Kaiba (hole in his chest) lives in a society where the wealthy barter and trade for memories. After death, a person’s memories are stored into a chip, whereupon it can be implanted into a new body to live again. Memories can also be deleted or added as needed – out with bad, in with happy – to improve one’s life. In essence, you could theoretically live forever. Authorities kill people on a whim, bodies turned to sludge and their memories transferred to the mainframe in wait of a new body.

Kaiba wakes up in a strange corner of society, suffering from amnesia and embarks on a journey to recover his memories, the pendant around his neck with the picture of a girl his only clue. On his journey, he encounters a variety of characters from a memory smuggler to a space sheriff. Kaiba isn’t sure which memories are real and which have been altered.

The art in Kaiba is unusual, wildly different from what people expect when they think ‘anime.’ It is inspired by old anime – very old – like Astro Boy old, and you must love this style in order to enjoy Kaiba. The abstract art matches the abstract narrative. The style and themes hold consistent throughout the series. My major complaint with the art is the child-like character design being dissonant with the events of the narrative. These characters look like infants, yet there are several promiscuous scenes that some may find disturbing (others will probably laugh). We are told that they are adults, but the character look and sound like children. Using female voice actors for almost all male characters really didn’t help with convincing the audience of character age.

Ultimately, Kaiba is a difficult anime to discuss without going into spoiler territory. If you love the surreal or just want to watch one of the stranger shows out there, then Kaiba is for you. One episode is all you need to decide if it’s worth your while or not.

Art – Medium

Weird abstract art that you must love to enjoy this anime. I would personally never use it.

Sound – Medium

A serviceable voice track accompanied by slow, psychedelic music. Most tracks consist of 10-15 second clips that loop endlessly to create a song. It feels as if each track makes an appearance every episode, which gives an air of…cheapness.

Story – Medium

A strange tale of a boy searching for his lost memory, which succeeds at its core, though the world at large, the lore is left unexplored.