YMMV / Terror in Resonance

• Awesome Music:
  • Terror in Resonance opens up with the haunting "Trigger" by Yuuki Ozaki (from Galileo Galilei).
  • "Alois" being played (The second half at least) when Sphinx seizes the nuclear bomb in Aomori.
  • "is (feat. POP ETC)", the song from the motorcycle scene near the end of Episode 4, is a notable one.
  • Then there's "von (feat. Arnór Dan)" from Episode 9's Ferris Wheel scene.
  • The song used at the end of the final episode, "Bless (feat. Arnór Dan)" is another memorable song from the soundtrack, especially when heard in context.
• Awesome Animation: The animation is very fluid and detailed. Notable in the aforementioned motorcycle scene. The show does a lot of camera tricks not normally seen in animation in general, like blurring for field of depth. This gives it a much more live-action look.
• Broken Base:
  • On the anime as a whole really. It has received as much praise for its animation and music quality as it has criticism for bad writing and characters.
  • The ending is divisive, too, with some feeling the last half of the final episode does an Ass Pull and feels very rushed.
• Complete Monster: Shunzo Mamiya is the mastermind behind the Athena Plan, abducting orphans with savant syndrome and autism to be subject to horrific experiments where drugs are being continuously pumped inside their bodies. Out of the 26 orphans experimented on, 23 of them died, with two escaping his facility and one receiving brain damage as a result. When a government official tried to expose Mamiya's involvement in the Athena Plan, Mamiya has him killed. Mamiya then creates an atomic bomb with the intent of using it on any country that opposes him, uncaring about the high death toll. While Mamiya claims to be doing this for the betterment of Japan, he is rightfully called out for being a Glory Hound, only seeking power and recognition for himself.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Despite her scrappy status to a group of fans, Lisa is heavily shipped with Twelve due to the amount of Ship Tease they got throughout the show, even though it sunk with Twelve dying in the end of the story.
• Genius Bonus: Nine and Twelve are a number away from being 9/11.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Shinichiro Watanabe was quite aware that a show about terrorist attacks in a contemporary metropolitan environment would resonate with American audiences. The first two episodes of the show were given an exclusive premiere at Anime Expo 2014 (complete with a special video message from Watanabe himself), a full week before it even started airing on Japanese TV.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The presence of a EMP blackout brings to mind a story ran by the Japan Times that North Korea can potentially do an EMP attack with its nukes.
• Memetic Mutation: "Yer kidding!" ^note Five's awful Engrish stole the show every time it happened, and it has become one of the prime examples of bad Engrish in anime to the point that even non-viewers of the show will recognize the phrase.
• Narm:
  • As mentioned above, Five's grasp on English is in a class all of its own.
  • While lacking Five's atrocious engrish, the distinct British accent of her American co-worker, Clarence, can also reap a few laughs.
• Rewatch Bonus: It seems at first that the terror targets don't make sense since Sphinx had wanted to take out the conspirators behind the Athena Plan such as the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building or the Roppongi Police Station. Later on, Shibazaki reads up on the profiles of the Governor of Tokyo and the chief of the station. That same scene also mentions that those two were also involved with the Rising Peace Academy's activities.
• The Scrappy:
  • A sizable contingent sees Five as a detriment to the plot, and associate her introduction with a fairly realistic terrorism drama featuring morally ambiguous protagonists and antagonists suddenly turning into a Death Note-style battle of wits against a cartoonishly villainous rival archetype.
  • For some people, Lisa Mishima is plain unlikeable, in part because of her personality, and in part because she has not really added anything to the main plot.
• Tear Jerker: The ending. Twelve is shot and killed and Nine quickly dies after.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Lisa is a major character who is implied to have divorced parents and eventually ran away from home...and then it was never explored again, not even in the ending was her whole family situation brought up, so there's no confirmation if she went back to her mother or started living independently.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The protagonists are super-smart teenagers that are committing wide-spread terrorism (and one girl that is stuck in the middle and is mostly useless), while the antagonists are a bunch of corrupt government officials, company executives, the somewhat ineffective people trying to investigate the situation, and a super-smart teenager that is essentially an L Expy to the protagonists' Light (and that turns what remains of the series into a race to see who can top each other in amorality). There is a very serious lack of people to cheer for.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: The entire story can be read as a subtle Take That! to the recent changes (as of 2014) the Japanese political system is experiencing under the Liberal Democratic Party, such as the willingness to change Article 9 to redefine what the Self-Defense Forces can or cannot do, while it tackles the question on whether the JSDF should have nuclear weapons to defend itself from attacks perpetrated by rogue states or terrorists who launch attacks against Japanese interests. The way the FBI operates in Japan is also a criticism of Japan's willingness to cooperate with the West (and specifically, of how Japanese foreign policy is overly dependent on America), never mind that the task force is led by a psychopathic agent with a questionable past. Some of the comments made by Shibazaki regarding Sphinx's possible status as Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters is a reference in the 1960s-1980s when leftist groups conducted violent attacks against law enforcement and corporations and at the time, were seen as heroic figures for standing up to their abusive ways while being seen as a way to check against government policies that were morally illegitimate. That said, Shinichiro Watanabe's special video message at Anime Expo 2014 told us this anime was a story he had been wanting to do for a long time, several years in fact, so while some of the above is definitely intended, some of it may have been simple coincidence.

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