Code Breaker

By: Robert Murphy

  

The story begins with a girl named Sakura Sakurakouji who is riding the bus late one night when she sees a blaze of blue flames and people being burned alive around a boy of about the same age as her. Fearing what has happened she runs to the scene only to find no bodies remained, no flames and no boy to be seen anywhere around. However, to her surprise the next day in her class they receive a new student, Rei Ogami, a boy who instantly catches the eyes of every girl in the room but none more so than Sakura. After initially throwing himself off the scent of Sakura, she catches him in the act once again burning people alive (bad people) with some kind of power he has and Rei in turn threatens to kill Sakura if she tells a soul about his work. But Sakura for whatever reason responds to this by following Rei around to try and prevent him from killing more people that he perceives as bad and by those who employ him as a Code Breaker, people who do not exist and are above the law because they don’t believe in them.

When I first saw commercials for the show I was initially very excited to get to watch Code Breaker and once I learned the ground story and overall premise, that didn’t change. It was kind of a tee-hee moment to call the characters with unique abilities in the show Code Breakers because that is in fact what they are; these people are above the codes that people live by. Also each Code Breaker has their own unique abilities that have been granted to them with six Code Breakers all together killing the scum of the world who have no right to live. It is a very black and white view with no middle ground much like the views of Kira in Death Note, you do bad things like sell drugs and kill people then you die no matter if you are someone like a cop with a few kids, evil is evil. Unfortunately, I got more behind this idea in Death Note than I did in Code Breaker for some reason; maybe it was the cocky kids who were dishing out the punishment or what I can’t say for certain.

Now I will say that Code Breakers is something that you have to wait a bit to get into fully, the first half of the thirteen episode series consists of the odd relationship between Sakura and Rei. Sakura follows Rei around on his various jobs in killing people in order to stop him which is a noble thing to try and do but she mainly ends up giving a long winded speech to the bad guys that doesn’t work and then Rei burns them all. Rather than stopping this Rei continues to let her follow along and she continues to try and stop him each time and she apparently never learns which annoying because she’s supposedly the smartest student in her grade. This got very repetitive for me and quite mind numbing to the point where I almost stopped watching but I trudged on for more scenes of Rei who was so hard to get a bead on as a character.

My patience paid off in another way as well when the show finally picks up more, we get to meet the main antagonist in the story, an ex Code Breaker named Hitomi and this is where we meet the rest of the Code Breakers. Now don’t be discouraged by the fact that they are all attractive dudes, we aren’t in a reverse harem type anime each character has a degree of depth and story to them along with some awesome powers. Some interesting fights also take place between Rei and Hitomi who have a past together but also has an interesting story behind him leaving the Code Breakers and attacking them now. Sadly though this really couldn’t save the show for me, good action can only take you so far and it didn’t do enough to make Code Breaker great.

In conclusion, I feel like there could have been a lot more done to Code Breaker, maybe if it had more episodes or maybe if the characters were a bit more engaging, who knows. I was hoping for a bit more from the show honestly but there is a good level of action and the overall background was quite interesting and leads to some dark toned scenes that I probably shouldn’t of liked as much as I did but oh well, sue me. While the good does outweigh the bad it wasn’t enough for me.

Good:

The Code Breakers all come with unique powers making for some great action scenes

A dark, Death Note, style and premise that got me interested from the get go

Bad:

Characters had depth but not nearly enough

Sakura was such an annoying and naïve character who was initially more appealing but soured

I am not one for the whole pretty boy thing especially when they’re supposed to be professional killers for a hidden organization not teenaged heart throbs

Scully Rating: 5.0 out of 10