YoshiKyon

7/10

I really wanted to love Kaiba. When this one was recommended, it was the one I knew the least about from wyrm, someone I almost expected an off-the-wall suggestion from, and it didn't disappoint on that front. It falls a little short of where I'd hoped it'd land though, unfortunately.
This one came as a part of my "watch 12 shows in 12 months" recommendations through my Discord server:

• Shinsekai yori
• Plastic Memories
• Vivy: Fluorite Eyes Song
• Kaiba
• Bloom Into You
• Princess Tutu
• Redline
• Monster
• Saint Onii-san
• Haikyu!!
• So I'm a Spider, So What
• In Another World With My Smartphone

The general premise here is a world where memories can be removed from the body and either can be bought or sold. Valuable bodies can be sold to the wealthy to keep them younger and more desirable, and unwanted memories can be removed and/or replaced. And if the show were just that, it'd have been an incredible thing from start to finish, but the overarching plot of the main characters mostly doesn't care about that, and it's a shame, because they honestly had a great thing going there.

The rest of this will go into some spoilers below.

The first thing I have to note, separate to any plot or world discussion, is the art style. To be blunt, I hated it. To be generous, it looks like it's inspired by classics 60s anime, but it mostly just looks dated and childish, with ridiculous features or proportions changing during animation. I'm sure someone, somewhere, will love this style and see it as an intriguing choice, but to me it just looks shoddy and ugly - it's the animation in particular that drags it down, the art style can mostly be ignored but there are some really jarring movements that cut into the enjoyment of Kaiba.

Anyways. The show explains almost nothing immediately - the firsts episode starts with the main character, Warp, being flung into a high-speed chase from the start, and introduces the world and concept without ever delving into backstory. This, it turns out, is a conscious choice to hide a lot of the plot twists and character drama that comes out in the last few episodes, which feels appropriate given that the whole show is about the significance of memories. When those twists and turns do reveal themselves, though, it feels late - the show spends a lot of time going between side-stories and doesn't leave itself much time to elaborate on the many characters it gets wrapped up in the ending. As a result, the end feels rushed, and it's pretty unsatisfying - not in a 'sad ending' kind of way, I'm not commenting on what actually happens in the ending, but in a 'things feel unresolved' kind of way.

It wouldn't feel so bad for the main cast to have a story that falls short, but the rest of the show does such a good job with character and story. The side-stories mentioned are mostly fantastic, and the cast are endearing in ways I really thought they wouldn't be - there are characters introduced who you're clearly meant to love and end up hating, and characters you're meant to hate who end up being likeable, and all of it is handled so smoothly that it really feels like getting to know each of those characters. Those side stories are also wrapped in so much despair - not openly, but just implied enough that it lurks under every story's resolution - that it does a fantastic job in building this world that's meant to be so hopeful and yet is corrupt to the core.

As usual in ratings, the numbers themselves mean very little - a 7/10, to me, is usually something that's good and watchable, but not particularly memorable or noteworthy. Kaiba is the opposite, in that it's incredibly memorable and shows so much promise, but it just falls flat on so many counts that the overall product is merely 'good' and never quite lives up to what it could have been. And that's a damn shame, because what this 'could have been' is one of the most memorable worlds and concepts out there, but the animation and the resolution really hold it back.