English Dub Review: Housing Complex C “Optical Illusion”

Overview: Kimi, a cute, bubbly, 9-year-old girl, lives in the idyllic seaside town of Kurosaki, where she enjoys hanging out with the town’s mostly-elderly residents. But after a surge of new people, among them 10-year-old Yuri, arrive to the town, spooky stuff starts to happen. Weird monsters can be seen lurking in the shadows, there’s a creepy guy obsessed with Cthulhu, and there’s some mysterious girl in the past that seems to have a connection to the goings on in the present.

Our Take: The action is definitely frontloaded here. We get a bold, energetic opening with oodles of violence and gore. We see a flashback of two women being chased by an army of soldiers, with one of them violently dismembering anyone she comes across. Then the other casts an evil spell that causes the army to die horribly. It’s a very exciting opening, so it’s kinda jarring that the rest of the episode is slow and down to earth, with few supernatural elements and very little horror.

The episode is mostly just the cute antics of Kimi as she wanders around the housing complex and checks out its basement. The whole episode is very mellow and light in tone, and while there is still a tinge of darkness to be had, it’s more interested in building tone at this point. There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to get things off with a slow simmer, I just believe that the way this episode goes about it could be better executed. And as this is a four-episode miniseries, I think that it should pick up the pace a little bit.

While Kimi is adorable and her antics are fun to watch, none of the other cast really gets much time to shine at this point, not helped by the fact that a lot of them are cranky old geezers. They might improve later, but Kimi and Yuri get all the focus here, with the rest of the cast not having much to do. There is one fakeout with the new residents that I thought was pretty funny, but aside from Kimi, none of them get much development yet either. Hopefully, that changes soon, I think this is the type of show that could benefit greatly from an ensemble cast.

Technical aspects are well done, but not spectacular. The animation looks aesthetically pleasing and the character designs are very down-to-earth. No wild neon hair here. The voice cast also did a commendable job here. Xanthe Huynh perfectly sells Kimi’s childlike innocence with her delivery, and Kayli Mills gives the shyer Yuri a solid performance.

The end of the episode clearly shows that things are going to escalate rapidly later on, but Housing Complex C gets off to a middling first impression. Though I’m sure the show has a chance to rapidly improve as the supernatural elements truly come into play, it’s a slow burn at its current pace. Maybe too slow-burning. I’d expect this opening out of a 13-episode series, but not a 4-episode one. I’m interested in how it’ll turn out, but maybe its time could have been better spent in the end.