Arriving recently on blu-ray from anime juggernaut Sentai Filmworks is the 2019 action sci-fi series Revisions. Hop into your mech and let’s fight some gross, mutant robot things!

Daisuke is an off-kilter high schooler who has fixated on an incident in his childhood where he was confronted by a being from the future and told that he must protect and save everyone. When an incident referred to as Shibuya Drift occurs, transporting a large chunk of the city into a future populated with hulking robot monsters called Revisions bent on death and destruction, Daisuke feels vindicated and sees this as his path to becoming a hero. But not everything is as it seems, and when his reality he has based his whole life around comes crumbling down around him, will Daisuke and his friends be able to overcome all odds and save humanity?

Revisions comes to us from director Gorou Taniguchi who also brought us the likes of Code Geass, Planetes and s.CRY.ed, so he definitely knows his way around a sci-fi action premise. For whatever reason though, Revisions just doesn’t feel like a fully baked series, especially in its first half where Taniguchi really needs to pull us into the world and get us invested in these characters. Right off the bat, our lead Daisuke is extremely unlikable in his single-mindedness about what we as an audience perceive to be a fairly small incident from his childhood. In fact, I found it hard to believe he would still have friends the way the show portrays him acting on a day-to-day basis before the Shibuya Drift even occurs. And after it, his smugness and self-delusion seem to ramp up to eleven. As far as his friends, they are mostly given pretty generic one-dimensional personalities early on. I see a lot of series do this and I think it’s a kind of anime short-hand to move the plot along. Like the show is saying, “hey, you knows these guys right? It’s the childhood friend who may harbor a deeper feeling of love than our protagonist expects, the middle-of-the-road normal best friend that acts as a counter balance to our lead’s erratic behavior, etc. You KNOW these people. So let’s get on with it!” The series does do a lot of legwork in the latter half of the series to redeem our main character and make him a little more even-keeled and relatable as well as fleshing out some of the secondary characters in meaningful ways. But unfortunately, some who may end up liking the series might have bailed on it by this point. The general tone of the show comes across as a kind of hybrid of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Madoka Magika with our lead Daisuke even looking and acting a lot like Shinji from Eva. In theory, there’s promise there, but I just don’t think the show capitalizes on it.

On the positive side, it does have some very interesting mecha exo suit designs (called “String Puppets”) as well as the organic cyborg monster look of the Revisions (these in fact remind me of Evangelion’s angels) and the CG-animated action is well-executed and effective. On the flip side, the show makes the mistake of using the same cel-shaded CG animation on the characters as well, giving them a stiff and unnatural feel which I found immediately off-putting when they were in motion.

On the technical side, the transfer looks nice as one would expect from a recent, digital anime. The action scenes really pop especially. The audio options are interesting in that they included the original Japanese stereo 2.0 track as well as a new 5.1 mixed English dub. It really makes me feel torn since I generally prefer subbed over dubbed anime but with an action-driven show like this, it really does take advantage of the surround sound mix on the Dub track. These are the kinds of tough choices I just find it hard to make… The extras are the usual clean OP and ED animations and assortment of other Sentai trailers. But this show doesn’t really have much else they could’ve included like additional OVAs or specials, so that seems appropriate.

Overall this one is a little hard to recommend to the average anime fan due to it’s weak characterizations and awkward animation style. But I will say that if you are a big fan of mecha action, you may end up enjoying it purely for the action scenes which are quite well done.