Tactics Review - 77,5/100
Well, I guess it’s time for me to check out another one of Hiroshi Watanabe’s works. Tactics can easily be viewed along with Suteki Tantei Labyrinth and Matantei Loki Ragnarok as his “supernatural detectives”-trilogy, featuring Shinto, Post-Apocalypse and Norse Mythology respectively. Out of the three, Tactics has the least original premise (after all, how many series about Shinto are there already out there?), it’s still a pretty decent series.
This series is actually pretty un-typical of Hiroshi Watanabe: his series usually are a very strange combination between really good and really bad, but Tactics instead is a pretty solid series. Whereas Suteki Tantei Labyrinth’s cases were really crazy at times, the cases that the lead character of this series needs to solve are well built up, logical, genuine and not really stupid at all.
The cast of main characters also is pretty interesting for a shoujo series. For once the lead character isn’t a teenager, but instead a folklorist, who has been properly schooled in the occult and happens to be able to see youkai. It makes sense that the guy would then try to make his money with exorcism. The rest of the lead cast complements him really well: no two characters feel the same, and they make up for quite a varied and enjoyable cast.
So, why the relatively low rating? Well, it’s pretty much a case of wasted potential. What we have here is a series without any major flaws, but which also lacks any major highlights. While Suteki Tantei Labyrinth was memorable for me because you’d never know what kind of stupid plot twists it would pull, Tactics for the most part isn’t memorable at all. The different episodic stories do the job of not getting you bored, but they don’t make any impact either. I really feel that the creators could have gotten so much more out of the lead characters than what they showed in this series.
The bad guys this series are also pretty pathetic. They hardly receive any development, their reasons for being evil are even shallower than your average bad guys, and they suffer from the “I’m about to kill you but I won’t because I want to see you grow stronger”-syndrome. Characters as Rosalie also appear way too late in the series to make any real impact.
Still, while this series isn’t your typical Hiroshi Watanabe-Trainwreck, it does have one very typical element of his series: a surprise ending. Like usual the episodes leading up to the finale are a bit too stuffed with angst, you’re about to give up on the series, and then it suddenly closes off with a really good (or surprising) ending. The ending of Tactics made up for a lot of the balance issues that I had with this series. It was really good and the only big highlight of this series for me.
So overall, this series is wasted potential, but it’s good to see that Hiroshi Watanabe is also good at writing solid story-lines, without the usual stupidity that you can find in most of his other works. Out of his supernatural detectives trilogy, I’d still prefer Suteki Tantei Labyrinth, but if you’re stuck with this series on a rainy day, then you’re not going to get bored.
| Storytelling: | 8/10 |
| Characters: | 8/10 |
| Production-Values: | 7/10 |
| Setting: | 8/10 |