It contains interesting ideas and sincere character points. It's okay. You could definitely do worse. However, it didn't particularly grab me and the show's ultimately a bit bland. Its most interesting aspect is its Phil K. Dick concept, but they drift away from that.
The protagonists are three teenagers I wasn't that interested in. (Or are they slightly older? Oh, I don't care.) They're childhood friends, known as RGB because of their colour-coded anime hair. SHUTA AOI (blue) wants to protect the neighbourhood and has superpowers. Running, jumping, strength, etc. He can leap off tall buildings, hit the ground like a meteorite and keep running. KOUKI SUIDO (green) wears glasses and is clever and calm, i.e. he's boring. RAN AKAGI (red) is into skateboards and graffiti, which I guess might make the show a little edgy in Japan but made me personally less interested in him. The show's celebrating graffiti as a form of cultural expression, which in fairness I've never seen before in anime. There will be a Graffiti War, fought by painting over another gang's graffiti, and so on.
The boys are serious about what they do and have known tragedy. "We will now begin the first anniversary memorial mass for the Takara Elementary School Fire."
That Phil K. Dick angle is a KANAE system that tells the future. Our heroes get sent detailed, accurate prophecies, i.e. dilemmas. They'll face grim choices. Should they do one thing (people will die) or another thing (different people will die)? There will be solutions involving snipers, etc. Our heroes angst and don't always get it right. It's the trolley problem, basically, a famous thought experiment with its own wikipedia page. A runaway train trolley will kill five people unless you divert it on to another track and kill someone who'd otherwise have survived. This discussion matters in AI and self-driving vehicles and has all sorts of variants, e.g. violent ones where the "kill one to save five" option involves pushing someone off a footbridge, or even perhaps having an innocent person executed for a crime they didn't commit. Alternatively, what if the person you're considering killing is a child? Or your mother? Or even yourself after time-travelling from the future?
I tested this on Misaki and Natsuki. Misaki killed the "one" in all cases I presented and got so enthusiastic about trolley problems that she started making up her own in the bath, while Natsuki didn't choose. (Incidentally, in 2017, someone staged this in real life with people who believed real people were going to die. Five of the seven test subjects didn't pull the lever.)
Anyway, this show has potentially intruiging ingredients. It's grotty, urban and Trying To Get Down. It's aware that sociological issues underpin crime. There's political horseshoe theory. Anarchists oppose a surveillance state that might be a bad thing, perhaps, for reasons that aren't clearly articulated. The KANAE system is intriguing, but its prophecies are being given to idiots and the show chickens out of saying whether or not this system's a good idea or not. Instead, it short-circuits the discussions with a DEAD GIRL WHOM EVERYONE LOVED. I quite liked the emotional weight of the finale and that dead girl, but the show's juggling several intellectual balls without following through on any of them.
Incidentally, the animation director Kiminori Itou thought the production was collapsing and said so week-by-week on Twitter. "I'm aboard a sinking ship! We're about to go under! Hahaha!"
There are a small number of female characters, some of whom are buxom and occasionally get discreetly naked, but... (a) no nipples, and (b) the show isn't going for that kind of audience anyway, so it feels like Another Anime Ingredient Thrown In Half-Heartedly Because What The Hell.
It's a bit of a mess. The show had lots of ideas, but didn't convince me with them. One could ask hard questions about the KANAE system, for instance, but the last episode tells us about a "KANAE system v2 based on open public opinion". What? Well, golly gee. I'm sure online popularity polls will save as many lives as a machine that can see the future. That said, though, I don't dislike the show. It contains some worthwhile stuff. The characters aren't bad. The ideas had potential. A lot of this show is perfectly decent.
"A child born in Shantytown only has two futures to dream of. One is to become a criminal and rule over the town with money, or the other is to become an artist and break away from this town."
