Id:Invaded
ID: INVADED
ID:INVADED イド:インヴェイデッド
The Mizuhanome System is a highly advanced development that allows people to enter one of the most intriguing places in existence—the human mind. Through the use of so-called "cognition particles" left behind at a crime scene by the perpetrator, detectives from the specialized police squad Kura can manifest a criminal's unconscious mind as a bizarre stream of thoughts in a virtual world. Their task is to explore this psychological plane, called an "id well," to reveal the identity of the culprit. Not just anyone can enter the id wells; the prerequisite is that you must have killed someone yourself. Such is the case for former detective Akihito Narihisago, who is known as "Sakaido" inside the id wells. Once a respected member of the police, tragedy struck, and he soon found himself on the other side of the law. Nevertheless, Narihisago continues to assist Kura in confinement. While his prodigious detective skills still prove useful toward investigations, Narihisago discovers that not everything is as it seems, as behind the seemingly standalone series of murder cases lurks a much more sinister truth. [Written by MAL Rewrite]
Synopsis
The Mizuhanome System is a highly advanced development that allows people to enter one of the most intriguing places in existence—the human mind. Through the use of so-called "cognition particles" left behind at a crime scene by the perpetrator, detectives from the specialized police squad Kura can manifest a criminal's unconscious mind as a bizarre stream of thoughts in a virtual world. Their task is to explore this psychological plane, called an "id well," to reveal the identity of the culprit. Not just anyone can enter the id wells; the prerequisite is that you must have killed someone yourself. Such is the case for former detective Akihito Narihisago, who is known as "Sakaido" inside the id wells. Once a respected member of the police, tragedy struck, and he soon found himself on the other side of the law. Nevertheless, Narihisago continues to assist Kura in confinement. While his prodigious detective skills still prove useful toward investigations, Narihisago discovers that not everything is as it seems, as behind the seemingly standalone series of murder cases lurks a much more sinister truth. [Written by MAL Rewrite]
Characters
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Trailer
Recommendations
Reviews(20)
SingleH
March 22, 2020
Id:Invaded is a riveting enigma, an epic mystery, a shocking psycho-thriller. It meticulously places you on the edge of your seat only to mercilessly kick you off into the deepest depths of the abyss of contemplation. As soon as you’ve gotten over its hideously graphic imagery from unthinkable gore to appallingly creative torture, you’re buckled under its poignantly resonant character trauma if not whiplashed into pure blood-boiling hype by its abrasively awesome insert songs and mind boggling visual action. Its story is all genius, perplexing, and entrancing, and the characters who inhabit its irreplaceably unique structure imbue it with a fiercely unforgettable sense of identityinherent in their almost confounding amounts of esoteric conversation and characterization just oozing with degrees of implicit meaning little artists have even the creativity to come up with. The more you think you’ve wrapped your head around it, the more it wraps its head around you, leaving you with the natural assumption—having gone this many layers deep into the mind of a screenwriter so mad—that it was all just a dream, and to escape, you need only wake up. An attempt at explanation would be daft, and an attempt at description would span infinity and eventuate in intense subjectivity. What one may find to be a bog-standard sci-fi murder mystery on paper will—I promise you—come to surprise even the most jaded of pseudo intellectual keyboard warriors and utterly scar any casual viewer with its shell-shocking ego. Being a narrative which quite literally invades the id of its ever-astounding cast of eclectic personas, from broken officers to perverse serial killers, it builds itself around the minds of those thoroughly intentional and cavernously deep characters written to clever perfection and results in a totally arresting presentation of psychotically malleable ideation turned to somehow solid environment, both of which rocket up and down in visual prominence until the only thing you have to ground yourself is your own body, a being far detached from the mental breakdown in front of you, lashing itself dangerously outside the bounds of your screen with its enchanting sense of maddeningly immersive wonder. Call it confusing or call it possessing, at the end of the day it stands as a statement of thought so unforgettable at face and unbelievably impervious to plot holes or forward criticism save production nitpicks, mere impress doesn’t even being to do justice. Atop its labyrinthine writing and audacious conceptualization stands the freshly iconic visual direction of a true master, thunderously flaunting one visual metaphor after another all whilst juggling the countless ideas said writer bloated its context with to begin with. At once minimalistically elegant, at once overwhelmingly provocative, Id:Invaded is a feast for the senses which it doesn’t subvert, and its feverish changes of pace and betrayals of expectation all find themselves accompanied by cinema sensibilities which can only be described as sublime. While the concepts it asks you to accept out the gate are more than their fair share of freakish, never does the show break its own rules or perforate its own plot, and seeing as said concepts are presented with such acute realization of the writer’s intentions, their believability is unquestionable and their sense of immersion almost dubious in light of their exciting air of unreality. The more its science fiction morphs into pure psycho-fantasy, the more its cast of already human characters evolve and devolve into remarkably affecting icons of expert thematic execution and equally exquisite empathetic development. Be it crying in pain, smiling in wry, or celebrating in hype, Id:Invaded will move you in sincerity, and I bet my life you won’t even comprehend why, how, or by when. Well, that’s about a lifetime’s worth of poeticism I just wrung out of my naturally prosaic fingers, isn’t it? Id:Invaded, no matter how much I love it, is just so hard to comprehensively write about—let alone critically review—such was the only way I saw forward. When I said an explanation would be daft I wasn’t kidding, and the man, the powerful fucking figure who let me not be kidding was Otarō Maijō. I expect the name Ōtarō Maijō to go over peoples’ heads as much as I expect this thickly bibliographical paragraph to turn what little of you are still reading away from this review, but to not discuss this man would be to deny the very source of the unhinged identity this show defines itself with. As bracingly weird as Id:Invaded is, Ei Aoki is not a weird director. As I’m sure many are aware given the immense popularity of many projects he’s helmed, he’s a grand director known for his sweeping perspective shots, wide frames, and foreground focus, and while Id:Invaded most certainly uses his directorial skill to its fullest extent, no one would ever in a million years walk away from this show with those aspects having been the most memorable. What completely overshadows Aoki’s personal mark is Maijō’s. Which isn’t to say Maijō’s work is better than Aoki’s, it’s more to say Maijō’s is so mentally unbalanced and deranged, even having seen some outstanding cinematography, your biggest takeaway from the experience is what in the hell you could even call that scripting. Id:Invaded is confusing in structure, execution, purpose, and is esoteric as all hell, being nearly impossible to see the immediate appeal of or the immediate intention of outside of surface level actions and fetishes. You’ll often find yourself not knowing what the point of something is, and I honestly think 50% of people who watch Id:Invaded will hate it, and to them I have no harsh words. Characters are as insane and non-relatable as I imagine Maijō himself to be, and his characterization still hits you like a train to the face. The very first sentence of the very first work of Maijō’s I ever read was “my mom is a piece of shit,” and in Id:Invaded, you watch a character deride someone to suicide, watch on contently, and that character is portrayed as being the good guy—and IS the good guy. But this was all exactly what I expected. Maijō is off his damn rocker. He’s a cult author even in Japan and has been since his early 2000s debut, and very few of his works have been translated into english, so the only people who will have likely known about him prior to now are freaks like me deep into the Faust style lore of Japanese literary culture. Since finally founding his long deserved personal studio, TROYCA, Aoki began getting more interesting writers behind his direction. I don’t know if this has gone well for him per se, but it certainly has been interesting. In 2014, Aoki brought on The Butcher, Urobuchi Gen, to write Aldnoah.Zero, and unfortunately, Urobuchi was swamped with the Psycho-Pass 2/Psycho-Pass Movie production quagmire to write any further than the original concept and scenario, and while that foundation and inciting incident were the best parts of that show by far—if not the only good parts at all—his minimal involvement likely left Aoki with some regrets. However, in 2017, Aoki vindicated himself by bringing in legendary mangaka, Rei Hiroe, and had him write the entire screenplay for Re:Creators, and it was easily the most uniquely conceptualized and thereby daringly well produced spectacle I’d seen in years. Aoki is clearly wanting to one-up himself creatively after his past critical and popular successes, and how else to accomplish this feat than bringing on the single most certifiably insane author-turned-screenwriter the industry has ever seen. What’s weirder (and the sad reason I couldn’t put a ten out of ten on this review), is how bizarre and sometimes even downright ugly Id:Invaded looks. Seeing as the pre-production and planning for this work began a whopping eight years ago before TROYCA was even around to launch Aoki’s new oddities, he had to get it off the ground at whatever studio would take it, hence NAZ, and seeing as switching studios once an obvious alternative arose would be notably bad optics, Aoki committed. In the end, they got to a point in the latter half of the production where they literally had FIVE people doing the genga for the entirety of episode twelve. That’s less animators than a student film has, and what we got—at least in that piteous context—I dare say is good enough, especially with such incredible visual direction never leaving the screen. Now, I fully admit to cheating this game. I have the unique means to look across the room I’m currently sat in and see a shelf carrying Asura Girl and both volumes of Faust, one of which contains Drill Hole in My Brain, so I concede to bringing a gun to a knife fight. This isn’t me being an elitist, scoffing at the thought of casuals or newcomers—or even long time, truly authentic fans who’re just too young to know the industry’s older names—getting filtered by their first taste of even remotely high-minded media. No, this is me reflecting genuine concern for any normal, thinking human being who's about to unknowingly drown themselves in the literary ravings of a barely professional madman given a platform bigger than ever before by a creator outrageously gaudy enough to employ him in an effort to make a statement, only to make a statement so schizophrenic, nothing can be learned from it other than a lesson as to what happens when the wielder doesn’t know the power of the weapon he’s naively placed in his own two hands without the viewer willing to bravely dive deep into the barrel of said smoking gun, whether one thought the viewing of said weapon’s discharge to be utterly badass or fundamentally terrifying. Personally, I thought it utterly badass. Thank you for reading.
