Oh god. It’s been a while since I sat through such a mind-numbingly boring series as this one. Usually I obviously try to avoid these kinds of shows, but for the Melody of Oblivion I was lured in because I like a good mind-screw once in a while. What I got instead was a good sleep. You know, with series as Kurokami you can at least watch them for the good action, but Melody of Oblivion simply has nothing that makes it even worth watching, aside from a few weird ideas that never really get anywhere.

This series plays in a world in which humanity has lost a big war against the so-called “monsters”, which is something that the narrator is very keen on reminding us of in case we forget. The problems start right with the main character: even for your typical male lead, this guy has the personality of a potato. It’s more fun watching paint dry than to watch this guy on screen. On top of that, he probably has one of the flimsiest back-story I have ever seen. The first episode of this series simply starts off with him as a regular high-school boy, through the course of the first arc he gets his obligatory super powers (shounen series), and then he simply leaves on a journey. Why? We never know. In fact, he spends the entire freaking series fighting for no possible reason.

This might be excused if you know, he didn’t have anything better to do and just was fighting monsters to kill the time (which seems to be the case for nearly all of the side-characters in this series by the way), but no: he has a female love interest. Romance can be a beautiful thing: it can enrich characters and make you care for them. However, when the characters in question are a bunch of cardboard boxes, the romance simply becomes way too obnoxious. The lead female really isn’t much better than her male counterpart: she has no power of herself, so she continuously plays either the damsel in distress, or the love interest that watches from the side-lines while doing nothing but worrying. Their relationship becomes even more painful to watch when they’re together, simply because the male lead is such an incredible pussy that he refuses any advances that the lead female makes on him and instead he goes out fighting monsters (which obviously leads to lots of useless and pointless angst).

Well then, the series consists out of a number of arcs (eight in total), which feature the two lead characters arriving into a town under the influence of a so-called “monster agent”. These arcs however, all look like each other and do way too little to stand out, or even be interesting. They drag on for way too long. The monster-agents themselves are also incredibly dull and stereotypical bad guys who all fit in the same mold. The only one I even remotely liked was the Bobcat guy, but that may also be because he got the least amount of airtime out of all of them.

If I had to mention a highlight, then I’d have to say episode 25, but that’s more in the sense of “so bad it’s good” than that it actually redeemed some of the boredom. It’s a hilariously bad episode, with more recycled material than actual new footage (heck, I even suspect that there were just two minutes of new footage in total in that episode); it’s a completely nonsensical episode in which the creators pull all sorts of idiotic plot twists out of their asses, but it was the only episode of the entire series that was really what it was meant to be: entertaining.

As for the mind-screws that this series seems to be known for: it really isn’t that special. All this series has is one of the worst soundtracks out there, along with a bunch of weird images that make no sense and are just inserted for the heck of it. The series is completely nonsensical, hardly anything has a satisfactory background (the explanations that are there don’t make any sense more often than not) and the series closes off with an incredible amount of plot-holes still left open. You can see that the creators wanted to do something different with this series, and in a way I appreciate that, but at the same time they forgot one important thing: make this series interesting.