C – The Money of Soul and Possibility Control ~ A Rather Nice Financial Anime

I realize that this might be far too late since I didn’t get to finish watching C – The Money of Soul and Possibility Control (which I shall now call [C] henceforth due to its inconvenient name being too long to type out or to even copy and paste) until after my laptop was finally fixed a while ago. Anyway, back to your regular programming (assuming that I’m not hooked onto my Steam games or catching up on fixing up my photos). [C]‘s synopsis is as follows:

The Japanese government was rescued from the brink of financial collapse by the Sovereign Wealth Fund. For its citizens, however, life has not improved, and unemployment, crime, suicide, and despair are rampant. Kimimaro is a scholarship student whose only dream is to avoid all this and live a stable life as a civil servant. One day, however, he meets a man who offers him the chance to make money fast. From then on Kimimaro is drawn into a mysterious realm known as “The Financial District,” where people engage in supernatural battles for the possibility of money.

[C] is a fascinating action, drama anime with its main theme being finance. As far as I can tell, there has been no anime series with finance as its theme, so [C] was a nice change of pace and refreshing. This anime series has some great strong visuals, and the animation has been nice (although there have been some use of CG, which I flinched at briefly, but nothing too major).

However, for all its nice animation and strong qualities, [C]‘s main strengths lies within the characters, who each has his/her own cause and motivation. The main character, Kimimaro Yoga, is your typical average teenager boy who merely wishes to become a civil worker just so he could have a stable life, and as an Entrepreneur, he had very little motivation and was just a rookie. Throughout the series, it may seem like he’s lacking development, but it all comes together in a grand finale with Yoga making his decision, deciding to protect his asset, Mashyu, and take back the future.

Now, I want to point out a character who I really got interested in and was the one who hooked me into this series from the start: Masakaki. Masakaki would be the “Kyubey” of this series, except that he has much more personality and can be characterized as a mad hatter. His genteel manners belies a more sinister nature, and while no one knows his true motives, he certainly is a schemer (or a trickster or whatever you want to call him). Masakaki is now easily one of my top favorite anime antagonists, which includes the likes of Vicious from Cowboy Bebop and Izaya Orihara from Durarara!!.

The story is decent; the beginning to the end has been a really nice well-paced story, and there hasn’t been anything that detract from it. The action does get cheesy and Pokemon-esque at times with attack moves being called out and some cliche attacks, such as Mashyu’s fire-based attacks (we need more original attack moves instead of some flashy fiery explosions or flames!). Even so, the interactions and the action do still ties in very nicely with the story. But there are still some elements in this series that have been left unanswered. Just what is the Financial District? Who is and what does Masakaki do? Who was that god-like being at the end? We’ll probably never know this, but the intrigue and the ending hint does signal a possibility for a second season.

My overall rating for [C]: it was a nice, decent anime series for me. The visuals are amazing, and the characters were great. But the story was a bit lacking, and the action does get cheesy at times. Nevertheless, if you are looking for a different anime that’s not generic as all the others, [C] is a nice refresher, unique anime series focused on finance, which appears to be rare in the anime industry.

P.S. I must say that Mashyu and Masakaki are my favorite characters in this series, the latter being a compelling mad gentleman and the former being so alluring!