A show that really put me off with its excessively convoluted story and setting was Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere. Some of the ideas in it seemed interesting, but to me the show completely failed to present them in an interesting or coherent way.

I watched TEXHNOLYZE all of the way through, but don’t remember anything about it. ERGO PROXY, which I got halfway through, was something I could stick with… but the anime kind of lost its way, more preoccupied with Re-l’s random encounters with lost cities while on the run than with actually discovering the truth about her corrupt home city.

There are also plenty of anime series’ that aren’t deliberately or overtly obfuscating but still manage to be miraculously confusing because the story dynamics or character dynamics are duly in compatible. I had a serious problem with FRACTALE in this regard, where characters literally refuse to explain what’s going on until the last one or two episodes. The second season of DARKER THAN BLACK is problematic too… giving the audience multiple parties (“culprits” or whathaveyou), and kind of just mashes things together at the very end. STARSHIP OPERATIONS is kind of fun, but if I remember correctly, is unnecessarily loaded with hard sci-fi techno babble. Also, Akiyuki Shinbou…

On the whole I enjoyed Penguindrum and its density of ideas, but its over-abstraction obfuscated some of its expression, IMO. Sometimes I wanted it to be straightforward.