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I started watching Eden of the East primarily because I heard that the mangaka from Honey and Clover was involved in some way.  I believe the connection is that the characters were designed by her.  If you look at the screenshot, you can see that the main character, Takizawa, bears a striking resemblance to our favourite crazy, talented, but secretly thoughtful Morita-sama from Honey and Clover (one of the greatest anime characters in this decade).  That’s not only in appearance – his aloof personality is also reminiscent – and Eden is a lot more interesting to watch with this atypical lead.  Of course, I soon found out that beyond that, there isn’t really any similarities between Eden and Honey and Clover. But despite the impression you might sometimes get from my blog, not everything has to be like Honey and Clover. So I continued watching the show.

Eden is more of a plot-oriented show that deals with the details of a “game” involving near-magical cellphones which grant their users any wish.  The catch is that they must use it to “save” Japan, or else they will be killed by the “Supporter”.  Not my usual kind of show.  But I do believe that this show had some great potential and there was clearly a lot of care put into it, but at the end, I didn’t really feel satisfied.  Sometimes it felt like we were getting plot revelations for the sake of plot revelations – in other words, forced in a way that didn’t seem very natural or interesting.  It seemed like the writers knew how to insert clever-sounding dialogue but not how to sustain a sense of dramatic tension in unraveling a storyline.  The best stories of this type are those where an initially scattered and mysterious plot which falls into perfect cohesion by the end.  That never happened here.

The characters, particularly the lead, are endearing at first, but also relatively static.  The female lead isn’t particularly irritating but not really all that likable either.  The male lead piques your curiousity but neither are developed all that much throughout the series.  Nor is the relationship between them developed in a convincing matter.  And whereas Haibane Renmei used a fantasy-type setting/premise to delve into some deeper questions, I never felt like Eden ever really was anything more than just an entertaining piece of fiction despite wanting to be more.  And if that’s all you need, then there’s nothing wrong with that.

Now having said that, the series isn’t over.  As far as I recall, there are movies in the works that conclude the series.  So I don’t want to make any final judgements, but taking the anime series by itself, I can’t say that I would elevate it beyond “good”.  It has good animation and other technical details, the writing is sharp, so I think that there are a lot of people who may enjoy this if they are fans of the genre.  Personally, I say that it is a watchable series, but it hasn’t impacted me on any greater level.  While I have to wait until the movies for the final word on this, I don’t think it’s on the track to accomplishing that either.   1/2