Bright pink and blue neon lights. An overcrowded city at night. The typical cyberpunk protagonist steps one foot into a rather sizable puddle of water on a beaten-down street. They're chasing after someone as the camera quickly swaps angles into the next shot, one of them on a manhunt eventually going down a long alleyway, only to find their suspect looking for a futile escape from a complete dead-ended street.

Those familiar with cyberpunk/neo-noir media have seen this setup so many times before. Psycho-Pass doesn't completely abandon these all-too-familiar tropes the viewers have come to expect from this subgenre of sci-fi media, but it does offer a fresh take on the concept of a futuristic crime drama.

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The anime manages to circumvent quite a few recognizable tropes of the style in a manner worthy of praise for its originality.

10 It Doesn't Just Emulate Blade Runner

For as many similarities as it could have aesthetically to Blade Runner, Psycho-Pass decided to focus on the "what-if's" of technology in different aspects of society advancing further. For example, Blade Runner has a heavy focus on automating the bottom-line of workers tasked with more laborious and dangerous jobs in the distant future of November 2019 (far-out, huh?).

Meanwhile, Psycho-Pass has a heavy angle of automation in the social roles of government and crime-fighting. It chooses not to focus on androids and the concept of sentience almost at all as a theme.

9 It Doesn't Just Emulate Ghost In The Shell Either

ghost in the shell anime

Inspector Akane Tsunemori is by no means a Major Kusanagi-style badass with an iron mind and will. She isn't even old enough to drink. Akane very much feels like a naive early 20s adult who is learning to grasp the basics of the Ministry of Welfare's Public Safety Bureau (MWPSB) as she is thrust into new situations fresh out of her Sibyl career assessment and subsequent schooling.

This is in harsh contrast to Kusanagi's character, specifically in the 1995 movie of Ghost In The Shell. Kusanagi struggles to identify herself, being human born, with the functions and behavioral inclinations of humanity as a whole.

8 Its Dystopic Leanings Are In A Creative New Direction

The cruxes of many plots within cyberpunk media rely on being just futuristic enough to follow the automation of the late 20th century workplaces to fully automized endpoints. To a lesser degree, they explore how that would heighten and change the nature of corruption inside governments to very anarcho-capitalist endpoints, in accordance with the author's views.

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However, Psycho-Pass as a concept chooses to focus on the direct convergence of automation and how the nature of governing a civilian body is handled in a far-future perspective. This includes how an individual is tasked with social responsibility (formerly "jobs" and "careers") and how crime is prosecuted. A major theme of this show is the offloading of these responsibilities from the civilian population almost entirely, and the growing pains from a very rocky implementation.

7 It Takes A Risk Using More Fantastical Future-Tech

dominator psycho pass

The Dominator hue-assessment gun is the 2nd most important tech from the show. To offload more complex ethical decision making on the behalf of the Inspectors, Dominators go through a connected assessment of mental "hue" for those individuals that the gun is pointed at.

This sits close to a conversation about what differentiates "Enforcers," the "bloodhounds" of the police force (who often have cloudy hues themselves), from Inspectors. The Sibyl System prefers to keep the latter unclouded and performing checks on the mental state and current wills of said Enforcers as their main task. The Sibyl System itself is what decides almost everything about a person's propensity for in day to day life, including assessments as a "latent criminal," as well as different career leanings a person may have.

6 It's Just As Much Of A Psychological-Thriller

Contrary to sweeping shots of a strictly 1980s envisioning of a future taking place in the now current day, positing philosophical questions about AI and sentience, Psycho-Pass is more interested in providing a psychological thriller story about how MWPSB members working under the Sibyl System tackle crime.

This show shows how some learn to skirt the bounds of the system in new forms of organized crime. Psycho-Pass highlights how members of the MWPSB (namely Shinya Kogami) are affected personally, instead of posing questions of AI's ability to become sentient, an idea more commonplace in other entries of the genre.

5 It's More Of A Crime Drama Than A Cyberpunk Anime

Shinya Kogami's backstory may be among the most gripping pieces of this universe's story. Once an Inspector, you come to learn about a case that caused his Hue to become so clouded that he was demoted to an Enforcer, and why the case took such a hold on him.

Unlike the psychological thriller angle mentioned prior, Psycho-Pass also gives due time to the case Kogami never gave up. His eventual findings and reopening of the case become one roller coaster of a plot point leading back into the show's initially contextless opening sequence.

4 It Makes You Legitimately Question Who Is Right In The Sibyl System Situation

This show poses hard-to-answer questions about behaviors of those under extreme mental stress, combined with the ability for their technology to detect said stress.

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After isolating future Japan's borders so none may leave or enter, in order for the Sibyl System to avoid overloading itself (and also avoid complicated international political situations), it's difficult to find an alternative to this dystopic automation of a justice system. Given that everyone is far too in the know about each other's mental "hue" states and the fact that some people are fine with this system, it's removal is complicated by those who prefer it. If it were overthrown, what choices and chaos do that present to this society's situation?

3 It's Grounded In More Relatable Problems Of Today's Society

Psycho-Pass lives and breathes the problem of how to deal with mental illness and instability as a society. It also tackles the current political division of how an authoritarian style of policing should be implemented, and how many freedoms and rights a civilian body is willing to give up for peace of mind.

As far-flung into the future with the technological backdrop and metaphors as this anime might be, this cuts to the heart of proposed issues of crime in society. It attempts to address it at a proposed mental instability root in its own future-fantasy sort of way.

2 You Witness The Inner Workings Of The Future Police Forces

In how many cyberpunk anime do viewers become intimately familiar with the functioning of the justice system right off the bat? In fact, that is the core to understanding the motivations of each of the main characters in the show.

While the true inner functions of the Sibyl System are kept hidden until the latter third of Psycho-Pass, the guiding narrative functions by bringing viewers along with different Inspectors and Enforcers. The characters face moral dilemmas of a futuristic police force's function in executing the will and decisions of the Sibyl System and its assessments of Crime Coefficients and "hues" of various civilians in the show.

1 It Adds A Splash Of Horror To It All

Akane hides from harm in Psycho-Pass Anime

For the lighter notes of the show (like Akane and Masaoka going through CommuField cosplay meetups for information), there are also rather gruesome ones. An example being when Akane is cornered into disbelief when a clear criminal kidnaps her friend and threatens to kill her right in front of her eyes, all while her Dominator refuses to allow her to stun or kill the man.

So Akane really has to watch her friend die. To make matters worse, this case actually requires her to relive those memories while connected to a machine, so that they can put an image of the man's face together. Don't get it twisted; while this world seems almost free of violent danger, it becomes apparent that it is not.

NEXT: Psycho-Pass: 10 Real-Life Philosophies That Influenced The Show