Hamatora Episode 1
What They Say:
“Minimum”— Otherwise known as “small miracles”, is a special power that only manifests within a few, select humans. Those who possess this ability are called “Minimum Holders.” 2014: Yokohama. The detective duo of Nice and Murasaki, otherwise known as “Hamatora,” wait again today for work with their friends at a table at Cafe Nowhere that they use as their agency. Suddenly, a job they receive seems to have a weird connection with the serial killer that their police friend, Art is searching for.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Created by Yuki Kodama of Blood Lad fame along with Natsu Matsumai, Hamatora is a planned tihrteen episode series. The project is getting three points to it at the moment with a manga adaptation which will be written by Yukinori Kitajima while Kodama does the artwork, an anime adaptation that’s being done by NAZ and a game as well. Multimedia approaches are nothing new these days but when you do see them, you know there’s a fair bit going on with the project and some money behind it rather than just a simple adaptation in hopes of finding the next big thing. Particularly when a game is in the mix with FuRyu developing it for the 3DS.
The series revolves around a small group that calls themselves the Hamatora. They’re people with some abilities that aren’t the norm though they avoid being superhero style in nature. The Hamatora works as a kind of jack of all trades jobs group that handles some of the weird cases out there and other requests that come in. In the first half of the episode, we get thrown at a number of different characters and the kind of approach they take as well as the banter and rivalry between some of them as a pair of jobs come in. One job has them trying to stop a serial kidnapper of college girls in the area while the other has them figuring out how to open a large safe that only its own knew how to open before he died. The family wants to get into it, which certainly makes sense.
Not surprisingly, the show works a connection between stories and we see how that unfolds as those working on the jobs start to see the connections and there’s a fair bit of dialogue about it. It’s kind of standard detective fare in a way with some creative little twists because of the conditional powers that exist but it also plays to things outside of the usual high school or younger realm that we see for such things. Unfortunately, the show as it unfolds here really doesn’t offer anything unique or particularly catching when it comes to what it wants to do. We get a nicely animated show with some great backgrounds, decent character designs and solid enough animation when it wants to get active. But it doesn’t offer compelling characters and I’ll easily admit a touch of frustration with the goofy names we get for some, like Nice and Birthday. But the main problem is that after watching the episode, I didn’t get any sense of connection with any of the characters and the two connected stories weren’t all that engaging either. It’s not a good sign when you get to the end of the episode and you don’t even want to bother remembering the names of any of the characters.
In Summary:
Hamatora is a by the numbers production that has that whole by committee feeling about it in order to serve a larger purpose. I don’t doubt that the people behind it worked hard and came up with some creative things to put into it, but the nature of the project is not a personal passion one is the feeling that it has but rather simply a job. It has some good moments, though they’re few and far between, but the show as a whole is one that feels like it’s just another cog in the machine rather than something you can really rally behind. It’s got the polish and production qualities one would expect but it’s a series that didn’t click in the slightest for me and was largely unmemorable by the end of the episode.
Grade: C+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.