Lovely Detective Labyrinth, also know as Fantastic Detective Labyrinth, has been on my extended “To Watch” list for awhile. In accordance with my usual rule, I watched the first episode, and was just barely intrigued enough to file it away as something I might watch later. Fast forward to more recently, I literally chose to watch it by random chance. I recalled my first impression, largely neutral but potentially pretty good.

…I was wrong.

I was so wrong.

I want those hours of my life back now.

Needless to say, I did not enjoy Lovely Detective Labyrinth very much, and my expectations had not exactly been sky-high.

With everything that was wrong with this anime… I don’t really know where to start.

Pretty much everything happened “just because.”

The “action” was atrocious.

Everyone’s intelligence was really quite lacking.

I was incredibly bored!

The main protagonist, twelve years old, glows when he’s using his super-secret, super-powerful magic skill of solving mysteries. Which, sorry, no. Just… no. You can have all the weird stuff you like, but when you are putting facts together and creating theories, it is not a subconscious thing, and you do not glow.

“Oh, but he’s listening to the universe and it’s telling him what’s happening and blah-blah-blah!”

The boy just stands there, doing absolutely nothing, just glowing, and characters are like, “Oh, wow, he is so powerful and intimidating!”

Basically, the dramatic aspect of this show is a complete flop. It plays out like that in every single scenario.

An evil mining company is causing allergies with their pollution, and instead of fixing it, they invest a massive fortune in holograms to make things look pretty and intimidate the witnesses, just by knocking on the front door. So diabolical! When the mining company is shut down by the courts, everyone who was sick is instantly and miraculously recovered! Because that’s how it works in real life, right?

The antagonist of the show turns out to be the protagonist’s father (because of course) and he is also apparently the brother of the boy’s butler and they both come from a long line of professional brain washers, and another brain washer’s servant is the sister of the evil brain washer’s servant and one of the good brain washer’s servants is the older sister of one of the students who befriends the protagonist as he transfers into their school but not really because he has private lessons with private tutors in private rooms and one of the tutors is brain washed to become a serial killer and so on and so forth.

A touch complicated and dramatic, yes?

But one of the “best” examples has to be when the evil father has duplicated the protagonist’s super-power and can predict the future now (and they’re both glowing, oooh, so powerful!) and there’s earthquakes and lava bursts happening (because of course) and their conflict is about to be resolved in whose prediction about the next lava burst is correct: will it be beneath the one or the other? The boy is certain he’s right, and he is, and his evil father comes to realize he is, yet he just stands there as his son (and a vision of his wife) beg him to move, like, three steps in any direction, just standing there, dying horribly in an inferno. And his servant stands by his side, also dying. Just… because.

It’s the climax that the entire show has built up to, and I’m just like, “Seriously? That’s the best they got?”

Beginning to end, Lovely Detective Labyrinth is a boring, unbelievable, over-dramatic waste of time.

There was, like, one time it actually made me laugh.

Rating: 3 stars out of 10.

Grade: F.

You might want to steer clear of this one, just because it’s so dull.

“I have no brain matter left in my skull, but I think I still have more than all these people put together…”