Corpse Party: Tortured Souls

Based on the classic PC game of the same name, Corpse Party tells the story of nine students who perform a ritual from an urban legend. Unfortunately, things go wrong, and they find themselves trapped in an alternate dimension in another school - Heavenly Host Academy, the cursed school ground with a history of gruesome murders.

Now, they have to seek a way out before they join the spirits of the damned forever.

Generally, there are two types of audience when it comes to anime adaptations - those who have followed the source, and those who didn't. The latter might find some amusement in the cheap gore and shock factor of the show, as "Tortured Souls" has been known to be one of the goriest entertainment among anime, often compared to the likes of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni and Elfen Lied. However, I feel that even if I haven't played the game, I probably wouldn't have gave a s*** about the characters either way, even with all those uncanny and gruesome manners of death.

Tortured Souls is a perfect example of a rushed anime. Five chapters lasting at least four hours of playtime (depending on your reading speed) are cramped into the four episodes lasting 30 minutes each. The writing is terrible, and the character motivations were utterly butchered due to either altered dialogue or scenes that were cut out. A notable example was the fight between Naomi and Seiko, where Naomi spews some impatient remarks that drive an angry Seiko away, making the latter look like a petty person (in the game, Naomi's insult is far more devastating because it involves Seiko's late mother). Because a lot of scenes were cut down, you have little time, if any at all to connect with any of the side characters. Both friends and enemies of the main cast are just shallow caricatures waiting to be murdered. The result is a lot of senseless and superficial violence that lacks the necessary context.

The ending to the series is a great display of just how little the writers themselves cared about the characters, going for a cheap shocking death the likes of B-horror movies rather than offer any form of closure. It's the final insult on the beloved characters of Corpse Party and the entire franchise, leaving me with a bad taste as a parting gift.

The animation quality also looks mediocre compared to many other anime, and not just horror ones. The animation looks washed out, like it's done with the cheapest technology available. The lighting quality is terrible, so it can often be hard to see the details. Even in terms of its much-praised blood and gore, it also falls flat on its face as it pales in comparison to Higurashi, where the very details of the gorged eyeballs and spilled intestines are shown in their full glory without cutting away. The gore in Tortured Souls, however, feels held back as if the animators don't really have the stomach to draw such grotesque images.

There are a few things that kept me from giving the anime the lowest score possible, however. The opening theme, for starters, felt much more emotional than the video game version as it balances between bleakness (its opening verses) and hope (its chorus). It's a nice choice of song that feels thematically appropriate for a horrifying story about the gruesome fate of innocent little kids. In spite of my earlier complaints, most of the scenes and dialogue were faithful in adaptation and only look bad because a lot of context was cut out. Last but not least, and perhaps the most surprising of all, the scene with Sachiko at the very end is also done far better than the game version as it provides a nice closure for the little dead girl as well, and it would have made me tear up if not for all the bad writing that came before.

As an adaptation, it fails on nearly every level. As a standalone anime, it's bad storytelling without proper pay-off. Those who seek two hours of cheap thrills could find them here in the forms of throwaway characters and b-movie gore, but there is so much of that already in American horror films I wouldn't know why you would put your soul through the torture (ba-dum-tss!). I regretted wasting my time watching this piece of s***, and I would advice horror fans to seek much more satisfying titles out there like Higurashi, Elfen Lied, Shiki, and even Umineko Naku Koro ni, another rushed anime that's much better made than this travesty.

5/10