AKA: トリアージX

Genre: Action-Adventure/Ecchi

Length: Television series, 10 episodes, 23 minutes each

Distributor: Currently licensed by Sentai Filmworks, and also available streaming on crunchyroll

Content Rating: TV-MA (Violence, sexual content, fanservice.)

Related Series: A 25-minute OVA in 2015

Also Recommended: Burn Up Scramble, Dirty Pair

Notes: Based on the manga series written and illustrated by Shōji Satō, serialized in Fujimi Shobo's shōnen manga magazine Monthly Dragon Age.

Rating:

Triage X

Synopsis

It's always "opposite day" regarding the Hippocratic Oath for some mega-chested medical personnel (along with two similarly-endowed younger women- an "idol singer" and a high-school girl), who all belong to Black Label, a group of vigilantes that address bad guys as "lesions" or "tumors" that "must be excised" just before they gun them down in cold blood. Oh, and there's the customary lone teenage boy (for the intended audience to identify with.) And if you think this sounds bad NOW, just wait until we get to the review...

Review

The first scene in Triage X is of a pair of gigantic breasts with a few narrow strips of cloth across them. The "camera" backs up a bit and we find they belong to a woman ultimately identified as "Dr. Yuko Sagiri". She says she's (un)dressed like this because she needs to "photosynthesize...Vitamin D", but she's sitting in the deep shade of an umbrella. We'll later see that she's supposed to be an expert with a sword, though given her physique I would expect a major challenge would be simply reaching around herself to grasp one. Yuko's rather- uh- extraordinary in the size department, though I'll defer to Stig's judgment that with all that she's not quite in the stratospheric reaches of some of the Eiken women. And it's true that, in turn, none of the other Black Label women are in Yuko's league, but they are all well above normal in the size department- more like Sekirei-league, for them. (I think there are less than a half-dozen women in this show who are in the more "normal" cup range, all of them minor characters.)

I'll introduce the others, and the general scenario, as best I can- some things were a bit hard to figure out. I gather that the general setup is that most, possibly all, in the group have passed through the surgical hands of Dr. Masamune Mochizuki, after being critically injured (and losing loved ones) due to the activities of criminals. Dr. Mochizuki marks the targets for destruction, and dispatches his team on their missions of murder. (But I guess it's GOOD murder, so it's all OK, right???)

Our young male hero (?) here is Arashi Mikami, who's now equipped with limbs and heart taken from the body of his friend (and Dr. Mochizuki's son) Ryu. Apparently Ryu's body parts came with his spirit attached, and so Arashi often has conversations with, and gets advice from, his dead friend. Naturally, Arashi is a very serious sort, usually quiet when not outright grim.

His classmate (and fellow Black Label vigilante) Mikoto Kiba is smitten with him in spite of his dour attitude. Mikoto seems to have the closest thing to a sympathetic personality in any of this, but she lost me when she copped a position of moral superiority toward another vigilante that was working for a different boss; hey, aren't you guys both in the same business? The show also tries to create SOME sympathy for Sayo Hitsugi, a nurse, who apparently spent a lot of time with Arashi during his physical therapy, but who has...well, a rather serious recurring condition.

Rounding out our already rather "rounded out" cast are Oriha Nashida, that "idol singer", who gets featured in a couple of episodes in a scenario largely ripped off from the original Die Hard; and Miki Tsurugi, identified as an anesthesiologist by Wiki (after the manga, probably; if this was explicitly stated in the anime, I must have missed it), who's the lady-with-the-big-guns (among other oversized things) a la Maya in Burn Up W/Excess.

Now at this point you might think there is still some hope that a show like this might be resuscitated with a good script, but the show's frankly terminal; I'll detail just a few of its ailments:

-One character gives a little speech of regret before walking off to self-immolation; we don't see the character's head or face during this, which is probably just as well, since in the preceding scene the person got an arrow shot through their skull from a crossbow at close range, so actually seeing them might emphasize just how utterly impossible it would be for the character to walk or talk at all at that point.

-The show's villains are cartoonishly evil, which is rather crass manipulation by the script to assuage any doubts we might have about the appropriateness of Black Label's "cures". We're talking slavering, maniacally-laughing, utterly over-the-top,Looney-Tunes-without-Merrie-Melodies behavior here, and, really, one is grateful to Black Label not so much because justice is served, but rather because there seems to be no other means short of murder to get these chuckleheads to knock it off.

-A detective named Tatara wanders in on one of these villains, while same bad guy is torturing a young woman in front of her own father. Tatara seems utterly unconcerned about it, which led me to conclude he HAD to be a corrupt cop, but no, we're told he's dedicated. IF so, this scene is pretty much utterly inexplicable. Seriously. Perhaps he's given to hallucinations, and therefore doesn't trust his own eyes???

-Speaking of torture, the show DRIPS with sexual sadism toward women. The manga's creator, Shoji Sato, is a well-known hentai artist according to Wiki (known outside that genre for such things as the character designs in High School of the Dead.) Crunchyroll of course optically censors the show like crazy, but we still see whippings and ball gags, and there was ONE line which I considered quoting, but decided it was a bit tasteless for THEM, involving a male character's assessment of his own sexual prowess toward another character, and his genitalia; I won't say it, even though it's really only slightly more off-color than what one hears in presidential debates these days...

-Of course, we also have a gang of villainous females, also equipped with giant breasts, that they also tend to display uncovered, or barely covered. (Bad memories of Phantom Task from Infinite Stratos 2 were recalled.) These bad girls call themselves Syringe, mirroring Black Label's obsession with medical terms (strike team called Ampule One, etc.), but everyone seems to have missed the opportunity for a little truth-telling if they'd all called themselves Implant.

-And even the closing animation won't let go of the show's recurring theme: we see Mikoto on her motorcycle, her head well protected by a helmet- and her body clad only in a bikini; she leans over as she drives, so her pendulous- uh, appendages can rhythmically bounce for us.

Take my advice, please; don't spend any time with Triage X. Just leave it to die. It already reeks like death, anyway.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present (though NOT proudly) possibly the worst anime series I've ever encountered. It's not even good-natured, as many other rotten series at least try to be. — Allen Moody

Recommended Audience: If you've been paying more attention than Detective Tatara can seemingly muster, you know why this is ADULTS ONLY.