Release the Spyce - Reviews

The show started out really strong with amazing tunes and an awesome Mission Impossible vibe it but it dropped down to just a very mediocre level shortly after its impressive start. Most episodes actually feel like fillers and it's struggling to maintain that high level of the first few episodes. The animations are pretty solid, the fight scenes can be quite impressive but that's where it all kind of ends for me because its actual story is really not that impressive.

Release the Spyce is a story about a girl named Momo being recruited into a spy orginisation fighting an powerful evil group named Mouryou who plot in the shadows and are already doing harm to the city to further their unknown master plan. The spy's use a product called Spyce to enhance their physical abilities however this is only effective on pubecent girls. Being taken in by someone she admires to the point of it practically being a girl-crush Momo must struggle to find her place within the originasation and be useful. While her special ability to taste if people are lying helped her get in will she be able to preform her duties as a spy in the field? With Momo learning the ropes from her mentor. In passing we get glimpses of other characters and their personalities. While Momo is filled with selfdoubt over her ability soon she finds herself working against Mouryou in all her capacitity as a spy while fawning over her senpai. This show has a lot of shoujo-ai/yuri subtext, be aware.

Animation and Sound

Release the Spyce as quite insistent animation across it's run only accross a few bits of the penultimate episode does the quality slip particularly noticebly however as a whole the series is not spectacularly animated and will impress few at the same time it's cute artstyle and consistent animation is not a determent to the series as a whole being sufficient to get the story across without being distracting. The series music feels somewhat hippy with poppy songs that give the series sort of it's own rather distinctive feeling being unusual enough to be striking but not strange enough to be distracting. While mostly a bright series the songs do largely fit the action on screen. The voice acting accross the board is very decent but not immediately striking mostly due to the dialogue being what it is. 

Character

The character writing in this show is a notably shallow for a show in this setting. Momo herself has an arc dedicated to selfdoubt which lingers on as it's resolved and most girls get their own episodes of sort. And while the characters are mostly fun Momo herself is almost painfully unremarkable being yet another main character that's somewhat of a mild audience surrogate. Yuki, her mentor is unremarkable for most of the series and her backstory that's eventually revealed doesn't particularly strike you in the heart. Most characters suffer from lack of real meaningful character establishment during most of the early episodes in the series. They start interacting with Momo as if they've known her for a bit already somehow but don't really drop hints to who they are and were they came from due to the nature of their conversations being mostly about being spies and not themselves. Fuu leaves a strong impression due to being fairly straightforwardly tsundere-esque. Hatsume's sub-plot just feels tagged on and doesn't feel like it's emotionally involving with how it eventually goes toward the end of the series. Goe as a silent character actually gets pushed aside so much that when it was her chance to have the spot light it just didn't really even add enough depth to the character to make her more than a two or three note. Mei is probably the most charming of the mix but also lacks real depth while she's established as an open free spirit her character doesn't really get much more rigid than that. Overall the characters just lack that extra push to make them dynamic. Most characters have 2 or three attributes that are established that basically represent their entire personality. 

Conclusion

Overall in my experience the series suffers from flat unremarkable character writing with what I feel is little depth and thought to the writing. It feels like this series goes down a list of plot points without really filling in the blanks meaningfully. The atmostphere isn't really consistent either. Episode's that feel like they're meant to be comedic have this serious tone to them that just doesn't really work with what is happening on the screen. The intermission on the beach being a glaring note of one. It is the most indicitive example. Most of the series has the same problem to a lesser extent; the dissonance what is happening on screen and how serious the series seems to take itself. The victory feels underserved as does the emotional arc leading up to it. The battle against the final boss feels tagged on at the end of the series and what happens thereafter feels liek it's supposed to invoke an emotional response however it feels tagged on as well. painfully predictable and meaningless. 

ps: If you're looking for an anime with cute girl spies Princess Principal is a better bet than this show. 

drugged up lesbian ninjas fighting a hundred year old turf war in modern day

Studio Lay-duce’s 2018 James Bond-esque romp with teen girls is lousy plain and simple. It is simply hard to believe that this nonsense came out just four years before such sublime material as “Spy x Family” (2022 WIT Studio/CloverWorks) or Lycoris Recoil” (2022 A-1 Pictures). It is like something from another era and was dated the moment it appeared. It follows the fortunes of an under-dressed teen-girl paramilitary vigilant group called Tsukikage in some fictional Japanese city. They are fighting a perpetual war with an archetypal mega-crime-syndicate who seeks to take over the world with a chemical weapon that turn people into drones. The girls attend High School during the day and fight evil crime lords at night from their enormous and secret underground base.  They get recruited and are trained to become ultra-able Ninja style agents in a few weeks. They are all so incredible whilst their enemies are all so inept. It is so cliched. The girls are terribly yuri-moe to the point that they must have been teleported in from an alternative universe. The action is far more Hanna Barbera than “Mission Impossible”. Whole episodes have all the sophistication of Scooby Doo whilst the ending is highly predictable. “Release the Spyce” might as well have been about stereotypical magical girls with wands. Badly written and lacking sophistication, it is hard to find one saving grace from this entire car crash. Just dreadful. Do not waste your time.