Color me confused.

I’ll get to my main issue right off the bat – I have no clue what’s happening, why it’s happening, or why I should care about either of those things. Look, it’s definitely not a bad thing for any show to keep a few cards up its sleeve, and if it’s a mystery show, I’d expect nothing less. However, that doesn’t need to translate into total bewilderment on the part of the viewer, and when I have little to no idea what’s going on even after the initial twenty-odd minutes, I’d say something’s gone wrong somewhere along the way. To be clear, it’s not that I find the base premise of Kami no Tou/Tower of God particularly complex – it’s that the execution of that premise is chaotic as all hell. Even if I knew the first thing about the plot going into this (which I didn’t), the storytelling comes across as messy at best, and pointlessly convoluted otherwise.

Given that, it’s pretty hard to say much more about the series, other than point out the so-far weak characterisation; we know next to nothing about Rachel (or Rahel, as I heard it?), while Bam (Yoru? – the fuck is with this translation) seems fairly cookie-cutter bland, other than the fact that he idolizes Rachel/Rahel to the point where he’d literally die for her at any given moment, and that he apparently has a “cute face”. There’s a few other characters, but who knows whether they’ll still be around by the end of the next episode or how important they’ll be to the plot if they are.

Production-wise, things are… interesting. The art style keeps switching up from loose and almost sketch-like to a more conventional anime look, and while I actually quite like both styles, the inconsistency is distracting. On the other hand, the music is excellent and I’m ready to sign up for more of it immediately. And just as a side-note, I can tell by the OP alone that 15-year-old me would’ve been all over this show. It’s just so dramatic and so angsty that even if I can’t really take it seriously, at least part of me feels like I should like it even all these years later.

Do I actually, though? The jury’s still out on that one, but at this point, I’m tentatively giving Kami no Tou one more episode to see what kind of substance, if any, it has buried under this tower of confusion.

Rating: 5/10