A.I.C.O. Incarnation

Though it wasn't great, A.I.C.O Incarnation definitely was not bad or mediocre. It wasn't great either though. It was OK. Netflix has been pumping out anime like crazy so it would be easy for this title to slip under the radar. The story takes place in the future where Artificially Intelligent Cellular Organisms (AICO) are created to advance humanity's medical knowledge in the hopes that one day they could make human beings immortal. However, an incident occurred that created the "Burst" a mass of cellular organisms that swarmed over Kurobe Gorge, consuming anyone and anything in its path before its advance is halted but not reversed. Aico Tachibana is just a normal school girl until she (quite literally) runs into a recent transfer student named Yuya Kanzaki, who, after a daring escape from several government spies, reveals to her that she was in a car accident that nearly killed. Her father, Yura Tachibana, created a duplicate body and brain for Aico. A complex and and top secret surgery was performed that switched the brains of Aico and the duplicate, placing her brain in the duplicate body and the duplicate in the real body. It was successful, but the surgery made the duplicate brain panic and create malignant matter at an alarming pace. In order to stop the "Matter" that has filled the gorge, Aico, Yuya, and a group of mercenaries have to traverse through the gorge and reach the research facility to perform the same surgery and stop the burst once and for all.

I thought that the story was just the average sci-fi plot that didn't show me anything new, with the secondary characters being blander than a bag of rice. But the animation more than makes up for these problems, and we can all thank Studio Bones for this. Bones has been going above and beyond the call of duty in its titles like "Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood", "Mob Psycho 100" and most notably " My Hero Academia", and this show is now different. The action scenes are wonderfully choreographed and with "Matter" seeming bright and alive, making you feel that it has a mind of it's own. Thought some other animation studios would have cut corners and used copious amounts of CGI, Studio Bones goes that extra mile in providing a vibrant setting with wonderful animation. Thought the plot and characters were not great, I kept watching to see those beautifully rendered scenes and backgrounds. If your bored and looking for a binge watch on Netflix, look up this title

A.I.C.O sets forth a fairly simple story of a girl essentially trying to return home after a catastrophic event called the burst consumes a portion of Japan. The burst is a huge growth of living cells that seems to be out of control and set on destroying everything in it's path.

This review contains NO spoilers and personally I'd recommend not reading too many reviews as it's better to watch and enjoy without too much prior knowledge of what is going to happen.

The story does run fairly slow but is designed to give you chance to understand all of the main characters. There is plenty of action the whole way through and small clues are left throughout as to how the story may or may not pan out.

The animation is fluid and great and the voice acting was well done and suited to all the characters. I noticed other reviews stating the voice acting was bad (referring mainly to the dub) as I watch all anime in it's original Japanese dialect I decided to go back and watch the last episode dubbed to see. I think it's important to note that when I have got into an anime in Japanese and then see a dubbed episode I don't normally like it as I've become accustomed to the voices. However in this case I was surprised that the dub voices were well matched for the main characters. I can only assume the voice acting issues were not from the actors themselves but perhaps from needing to fill or shorten sentences to match as closely as possible to the anime visual mouth movements. For example if a sentence is long in Japanese but in English only ends up translated to ,"I want to help", then the director will need to add in words to match the visual speech aspect. This can result in a less natural flowing attribute to the language used and ultimately the anime can suffer for this.

Overall I think A.I.C.O deserves 8 stars. I couldn't help but binge watch to satisfy my craving of what happens next. It kept me interested the whole way through with the first few and last few episodes being the most interesting.

If you're looking for the best version and have no problems with reading subtitles then watch the Japanese dub.

This is a decent anime. Well-crafted (although one does get really tired of The Burst after about almost immediately). The story is unique and the characters, although anime-cliche, well-enough created. Some of the dialog is a little cheesy, but that's not unusual in an anime.

The real problem is toward the ending, where the plot gets somewhat confusing (as in "who is what at this point?") and is both anti-climactic and somewhat predictable. For several episodes it seems to be a repetition of "dodge the Burst kill the Burst evade the Burst shoot the Burst" ad nauseum. Still it tends to remain interesting throughout. The rather weak ending drops this down to an "above mediocre" level, but doesn't place it in my list of "good anime".

They could have had a much stronger, better and more satisfying ending (really, there were no limits to the different endings they could have used), so the somewhat dull choice they made was rather poor writing overall.

Worth a watch perhaps and not "bad anime", but just not up there with the greats.

This anime explores some moral issues with the possibilities that the future brings us. Clever, creative, and beautiful!

While I agree that the english dub version, let's just say- could be improved, it had a lot good going for it. The story is enough to keep the viewers attention, and there were more than enough plot twists and story details to keep me interested. While I don't think this was a truly fantastic anime, I do think it's worth the watch. Just don't watch it in the english dub.