▸Is there a typical school setting? ☑
▸Is the protagonist a pussy magnet? ☑
▸Is there a beach or hot spring episode? ☑
▸Is there a love interest story that goes nowhere? ☑
▸Is there unnecessary fanservice in the cover photo? ☑
▸Is the lead easily flustered by anything involving females? ☑
▸Does it go from tensionless fights to school rom-com at the drop of a hat? ☑
▸Is there some kind of a pussy beta-male protagonist with a "unique"/hax superpower? ☑
▸Is there a lot of instances where your lead is viewed as a pervert due to stupid misunderstandings? ☑
▸Is there at least one obligatory scene where this meta-male either walks in on a girl changing or accidentally gropes them? ☑
If you answered "yes" to most, if not, all of those, then congrats! You've just found yourself a mouth-breather tier anime title. Either that or you've accidentally watched this piece of garbage, Absolute Duo. Absolute Duo does absolutely nothing new. It's the same cookie-cutter assembly-line product regurgitated yearly from the anime industry. With a few slight tweaks here and there, and a fresh coat of paint to mask the stench of unoriginality, these titles are excreted out by the dozen on constant demand. Absolute Duo is just another statistic.
Why bother writing a compelling narrative when excessive info-dumps and monologuing could do the trick? Why bother to make something with a modicum of artistic expression when you would just flash a few pantsu to win over mouth-breathers? Why bother trying when the audience being pandered to don't even demand anything more? It's hard not to be sardonic about titles like these, especially when the problem stems far deeper than simply "the studio's fault." And in the case of Duo, what we have here is a symptom of audience complacency. Here's a world that exists byways of audience participation to do all the legwork for it. The show doesn't try because it's effectively harvested a viewership that doesn't expect it to.
The world of Absolute Duo is that of a dystopian future. A detail that's rendered entirely pointless given that it all takes place in a high school setting, with the purpose of even addressing the nature of the world's construct only coming to play to allow these teens the ability to wield supernatural weaponry—no, that's not a joke, the show is really that lazy. And as is the tradition for these kinds of stories, we're given hints of a manipulative government faction. We're given hints at a budding school romance. We're given hints that the powers in the show have something more behind its mechanics than what's being told. We're given hints at a troubled backstory for our protagonist. We're given A LOT of hints but that's all, as this is yet another "read the manga" kind of title, where its entire purpose of existing hints towards being an advertisement for the source material. An ugly-looking, drably produced advertisement at that.
The color placement is flat. Its environment evenly lit, like the backlight of a computer monitor or the glow of a tracing table. This is an anime that can't be bothered with the trivial task of having a personality. It would much rather slouch about. Cardboard cutout characters designed with no discernable feature from its usual counterparts. Personalities equally as stock-piled, their behavior as lackluster as the color choices used to bring them to life. Not a single characteristic that expresses passion. Just a heartless product pumped out by the iron presses of a studio machine looking to make a quick profit with as little effort as possible.
It's hard to find anything here worth mentioning, as the only thing interesting about Duo is just how much it manages to fail. All you simply have to do is look at all the genres it's supposedly made up of and see it misses the mark with all of them:
▸It doesn't work as a school title since the school is just a backdrop and was never truly utilized.
▸It doesn't work as a romance since nothing ever happens between the main love interest and the protagonist.
▸It doesn't work as an action title since the fight sequences were barely animated with any sort of energy or dynamics.
▸It doesn't work as a supernatural show since none of the power mechanics or lore gets fleshed out beyond face value.
▸It doesn't work as a harem since the protagonist is a typical beta-male that freezes up at the thought of a woman's touch.
▸It doesn't work as an ecchi title since it's not titillating, made worse when titles like Queen's Blade exists with amazing "plot."
This is a title that quite literally fails at everything it attempts to cover, and as such, I can't see how this could be anything less than a waste of 4 hours of your life.
Overall: Duo/10
Absolute Duo is Absolute Garbage. It's a cheaply made cash-grab that serves no other purpose than selling the source material it's adapted from. A quick glimpse into the ugly side of the entertainment industry, showing just how far a studio is willing to compromise its principals to make a quick buck.
