This phenomenon of giving anime adaptations to seemingly random manga relics is certainly an odd one. In theory it’s kind of fun – in Psyren’s case, you have a manga that was quite popular and had a legion (albeit a small one) of fans ticked off that it was cancelled by Jump. But almost invariably – it’s most common with shoujo – they don’t get enough episodes and the productions are subpar and cheap. Psyren is shounen of course but the principle is clearly on-point, and while we don’t know the episode count (no way it’ll be enough for 16 volumes) we could write the “cheap” part in ink as soon as Satelight was announced.

Which brings us to this premiere, which certainly isn’t bad in itself. It has a very experienced director in Ono Katsumi so it’ll probably be competent. But it sort of makes you want to ask (again), “why”? Who’s being served by this? I’m happy the manga’s fans got an anime at last after 16 years, and for mangaka Iwashiro Toshiaki. But I can’t imagine manga readers are going to be pleased with a middling and abridged adaptation, and the material doesn’t seem exceptional enough to overcome that for general fans.

Overall Psyren comes off (to someone who knows nothing about the source material) as pretty generic noughties/10’s battle shounen. The titular Psyren is some sort of secret society that whisks people away to “Paradise” via red phone cards if they want to opt out of a collapsing society. Of course no young person uses phone cards now and phone booths are unicorns, but the anime makes only passing acknowledgements of that and we don’t see any smartphones around. The protagonist is Yoshina Ageha, a tough kid who sees himself as a jaded warrior for justice. He winds up going to Psyren despite the scary new reports because heroine Amamiya Sakurako is in trouble and Ageha can’t say no to a plea for help.

Needless to say this Paradise is more like Hell and nothing here is as it’s being sold. Ageha is fine – very much a stock protagonist of this sort of series but not egregiously annoying or anything, and I’d say just about the same about Sakurako. But nothing about the premise or the execution stands out – they’re just sort of as expected. There’s also the problem of the manga not having a real ending because of the cancellation, leaving the onus on the anime to rectify that. Perhaps Iwashiro will be involved in that. But right now I’m not seeing a whole lot that makes the prospect especially compelling. As usual with this sort of show I’ll give it another ep to change that, but with modest expectations.