The art of Psycho-Pass has some good designs but the glossiness and mismatched textures prevent it from feeling real. And the writing does something similar: it has intelligent ideas, but also a deep-running vein of stupidity.
The science is nonsense, which hurts for a gritty cyberpunk police procedural. The guns take the time to announce what they're doing before firing, kill in the messiest way possible and if they decide to be lethal there's no way to dial them back.
Which leads to the core problem: the Sybil system is not just bad, it makes no sense from any angle. I can believe that an electorate would accept the police monitoring aptitudes to violence and acting on that, for all its inherent risks. But we see agents kill civilians who would be normal after having the time to calm down. The guns and drones follow rules that encourage them to kill anyone who doesn't surrender instantly and the agents have no discretion, which makes it odd that any criminals have been caught alive. There is not even a pretence of fairness, and if this isn't public knowledge, with the free dissemination online it would be so very quickly. The reveal halfway through is framed as the dark secret of the system, but really doesn't make it any more evil, just fallible.
This is not a necessary evil or good ideals gone corrupt, it is like water running uphill and there is no reason for the audience to sympathise with people accepting it. It is so bad that making the story into a struggle against it would not have helped, it would be a hollow fight against a strawman regime.
For the rest... The protagonists are fine, though only two show any change over the first season. They explore the difficulties of having to work supporting an unjust system. Except there's no good reason why they don't help bring it down.
The villain is by far the best thing here. He is sociopathic, sadistic and manipulative, yet lends all this to serve his anarchist cause for the good of society. But it feels like he is restrained from making a full case against this terrible system.
If you can swallow this, the show offers some ideas on the individual's relationship to society and the psychology of modern crime. Some of the crimes investigated are quite clever. It is also possible to see Sybil as a satire on Japanese society. But that does not make it any more believable.
A clever story hampered by a premise that beggars belief
The art of Psycho-Pass has some good designs but the glossiness and mismatched textures prevent it from feeling real. And the writing does something similar: it has intelligent ideas, but also a deep-running vein of stupidity.
The science is nonsense, which hurts for a gritty cyberpunk police procedural. The guns take the time to announce what they're doing before firing, kill in the messiest way possible and if they decide to be lethal there's no way to dial them back.
Which leads to the core problem: the Sybil system is not just bad, it makes no sense from any angle. I can believe that an electorate would accept the police monitoring aptitudes to violence and acting on that, for all its inherent risks. But we see agents kill civilians who would be normal after having the time to calm down. The guns and drones follow rules that encourage them to kill anyone who doesn't surrender instantly and the agents have no discretion, which makes it odd that any criminals have been caught alive. There is not even a pretence of fairness, and if this isn't public knowledge, with the free dissemination online it would be so very quickly. The reveal halfway through is framed as the dark secret of the system, but really doesn't make it any more evil, just fallible.
This is not a necessary evil or good ideals gone corrupt, it is like water running uphill and there is no reason for the audience to sympathise with people accepting it. It is so bad that making the story into a struggle against it would not have helped, it would be a hollow fight against a strawman regime.
For the rest... The protagonists are fine, though only two show any change over the first season. They explore the difficulties of having to work supporting an unjust system. Except there's no good reason why they don't help bring it down.
The villain is by far the best thing here. He is sociopathic, sadistic and manipulative, yet lends all this to serve his anarchist cause for the good of society. But it feels like he is restrained from making a full case against this terrible system.
If you can swallow this, the show offers some ideas on the individual's relationship to society and the psychology of modern crime. Some of the crimes investigated are quite clever. It is also possible to see Sybil as a satire on Japanese society. But that does not make it any more believable.