Key the Metal Idol

Are you a fan of this show? What do you think about it? Key the Metal Idol is a show about a robotic teenage girl named Key. Following the death of her creator, she must make 30,000 friends in order to become human - if she fails, her batteries will run out and she will die. And so, she sets out for Tokyo so that she may find a way to make enough friends to save her life. As it goes on things become much more complicated, but saying any more would be spoiling it. It's an interesting show in my opinion and I think any Lain fan who hasn't watched it should give it a shot. Key has a lot of similarities to Lain, but Lain is overall a superior show just because it tackled its more ambitious themes with better success than Key did. Still, I think it's unfair that this show has mostly been forgotten by time.

soykaf, it's been on my backlog forever with bubblegum crisis. I really should get on with it.

>>2922 The visuals and music/sound are quite nice; consequently, I think the best thing about it is the OP. The plot, themes, and characters, though, are sorely lacking, in my opinion. I can't recommend watching it to completion. As someone who was directed to it by a similar claim of its similarity to Lain, I was disappointed. It gave me the impression that an untalented writer was attempting a work in the vein of NGE or Lain (although it predates both). It's fine if you need your 90s anime fix.

Oh man, this show used to be the soykaf back in the olden days of English internet anime discussions. I remember people would have Key as their waifu and got upset when they heard about doujins involving her. And that people used to think the ending was the ultimate mindfuck even though in hindset it really wasn't that hard to understand. The people who dubbed it put a surprising amount of effort into it; they even remade the songs! I guess the fact that you can only find this show in the form of soykafty English VHS rips transferred to DVD with JP audio pasted on top is why people have mostly been sleeping on it. If someone bothered to make a BD release from the masters I think it would get a decent second wind.

Can confirm, the copies on the net are generally pretty soykafty. i enjoyed the show in spite of the low quality I found it in, and its rather primitive version of the kind of identity mindfuckery that NGE and SEL later accelerated. I would say it was an influence on both NGE and SEL to some extent. But i cant say exactly how. Then Again, I enjoyed it also as a rare treat, difficult to acquire and of significant rarity as far as 90s anime goes. The idiosyncrasies and sometimes crude character design and setting development only added to the experience. It was in spite of it's flaws, a good show, though not quite great. I would list it about as high as golden boy on my list of favorites, which is somewhere in the top third. Though the specifics of why it is there are a different matter.