I am not sure why writer Chiaki Konaka chose the 100th minute to lay even the simplest bit of information on the audience, but by then I was confused by Texhnolyze, and worse, I was bored.

Texhnolyze opens with “Rogue 1: Stranger” (incidentally, all the episodes are called Rogues) in which we jump between dialogue-less scenes of a guy fighting another guy, a girl with a ceremonial kitty mask, and a different guy walking down a flight of stairs. This goes on for nearly thirty minutes without a single syllable of dialogue. Once the guy on the stairs meets the girl in the kitty mask and the guy in the fight flings some girl with a robot arm across the room things really kick into high gear when another nearly silent character appears and the guy fighting the other guy then throwing the girl with the robot arm that he was just having sex with getting his arm cut off by yet another guy.

There, I just saved you thirty minutes of pointless viewing.

Doesn’t sound like it makes a hell of a lot of sense, because, well, it doesn’t. So, if you buy Texhnolyze just reread that mammoth sentence and skip to Rogue 2.

Once we actually get into the story it’s a little more complicated, but not much. Lukass is a city built far underground reachable only by a mammoth stone staircase. Lukass, and the outlying and now abandoned rural area, is ruled by a ruthless mafia gang named Ogana led by their cybernetic Executive Director Onishi. He routinely pits many of the smaller gangs against one another to maintain power. The closest rival to Ogana is The Salvation Union and they set up a hit on Onishi. There is some talk of a flesh-cult that rejects the rich and powerful class’ penchant for cybernetic limbs, the Texhnolyzed limbs. They don’t make an impact at all in the first four episodes so I am guessing it’s fodder for later in the story.

We also meet Ichise, he’s the now armless and legless fighter guy who spends the better part of three episodes hobbling around Lukass on a crutch. He’s found by the woman that Texhnolyzes limbs. She makes a new arm and leg for him and imbues it with the cells of Ichise’s dead mother that he carries around in a little flask.

Finally we get back to Ran, the girl in the kitty mask, who can see the near future… well, not actually, but she sees one of any number of possible futures. Her grandfather and she rescue Yoshii, the guy on the stairs, and feed him. Yoshii and Ran head to the city.

For any more information we’ll have to wait for the second DVD in the series.

Texhnolyze comes from the same gang that created the weird Serial Experiments: Lain, and the excellent Hellsing, and the origin shows often in Texhnolyze. The visuals, in fact, look like Lain walking around with the characters of Hellsing, only not talking, and not making a hell of a lot of sense.

The animation by Madhouse is good, but that’s to be expected from Madhouse, only there are so many places where the show just stops and lingers on a minor character sitting in a chair, or standing, or looking at something that the whole exercise seems padded and poorly paced. Serial Experiments: Lain was slow but Teknolaiz is stagnant.

I liked the character design Texhnolyze also follows the recent trend of simplifying the character faces and expression so that everyone has a really clean and very realistic look, think Last Exile or Someday’s Dreamers. However, the overall look of the series is very gray and dark, as if the gang at Madhouse only had dark colors to work with most of the time. They mix some CGI in with the traditional animation, mostly when Ichise’s arm and leg being assembled in a tank, and even then it’s not totally obvious.

The soundtrack is sparse, save for the title and closing credits, which only ads to the stagnation of the story.

Dystopic fiction relies on the viewer to understand their own world well enough to see the contrasts with the dystopia, and to make the dystopia well defined enough to warrant that comparison. Good dystopic fiction should also allow the viewer to ask questions of the society presented and receive answers either directly from the material or through inference.

Here’s my question and answer session for Lukass:

Why is Lukass is an underground city?
Don’t know.
How did the mob come to rule Lukass?
Don’t know.
Are there any benefits to the mob running things?
Don’t know.
How does the mob maintain order among the everyday population?
Don’t know.
What is the economy based on?
Don’t know.
Can people leave Lukass?
Don’t know.
How do the characters fit into Lukass?
Don’t know.

The bottom line is, Texhnolyze could be set anywhere. For a while I thought Lukass was a metaphor for post Soviet Eastern Europe, mainly Russia, then I figured it didn’t matter. None of the dystopic details have any meaning at all, the contrasts are unnecessary because the society doesn’t differ all that much from what we see everyday.

Geneon releases Texhnolyze with the following features: anamorphic widescreen, Japanese and English vocal tracks, subtitles, an interview with the character designers, and alternate dialogue outtakes (I can’t imagine why, there are only about ten lines of dialogue in the four Rogue total).