Oh boy, so No.6 has an anime adaptation. To put this review short, the first half was great, but the second half fell apart the ending was rushed. This adaptation would really have been a lot better if it had three more episodes.
Don’t get me wrong, the adaptation nor the plot wasn’t terrible. With only 11 episodes, there is little reason for you not to watch it if you are interested in LGBTQ or sci-fi dystopias. My gripe with the anime may merely be because I read the manga first.
Up until the end, the anime followed the manga pretty close. Things diverged after Shion and Rat find out about Safu and decide to infiltrate the correctional facility. In the manga, Rat, and Safu visit the cave people and the Elder after the Manhunt, and Shion and Rat were dumped in a massive body pile in the correctional facility. Rat and Shion end up visiting the cave people by crawling through a crack in the wall. Slight plothole here since it doesn’t make sense for there to be an exposed cave in the middle of the correctional facility leading to dissidents? The anime actually fix this issue by having Rat and Safu visit the Elder before the Manhunt. In the anime, Dogkeeper and Rikiga play a larger role in getting them deeper into the facility by gaining access to a terminal.
By moving the “cave people” placement and when Shion learns about Rat’s tragic backstory of being the lone survivor of a genocide that eliminated the “Forest People,” it lessens how emotional the entire correctional break-in is on Shion. In the manga, they took time to have Shion grieve as he witnessed a literal mountain of dead bodies and then learn about Rat. At one point in the manga, a victim even asks Shion to end his life because he was in so much pain. In fact, Shion comes to the edge of a mental breakdown multiple times and even contemplated ending his life. Since the anime pacing was way too fast, we don’t get to see as much of this, and instead, it jumps past all that important character development and land at a point where Shion instantly became decisive ok with killing.
The anime ends quite abruptly compared to the manga, which gave slightly more closure. In the anime, both Shion and Rat were shot and injured pretty badly while trying to flee to the ground floor to make their escape with Dogkeeper and Rikiga. Shion was shot in the heart while saving Rat, and it doesn’t look like he will make it. After fumbling to the ground floor, Shion is essentially passed out practically dead, and Rat won’t leave his side. So what happens? Their best friends, Dogkeeper and Rikiga, flat up, left them to die at the correctional facility. Dogkeeper saying something like, “the one with something to protect always loses.” After their best friends abandon them, Elyurias magically appears, heals both of them, finishes destroying the outer wall of No.6, and vanishes. The anime then goes to a cut scene where everyone is outside looking at the outer wall destroyed, and the very last thing we see is Rat kiss Shion with no dialog whatsoever — plus, the kiss was swift.
I’m not saying that the manga’s ended perfectly; it too was rushed, but it at least gave characters more time to process the events, and it gave more closure. In the manga, Shion wasn’t fatally shot; only Rat was. Rather than his friends abandoning him like in the anime, they all stuck together and made a daring entrance into No.6 to get Rat the medical treatment he needed. Rather than have Elyurias magically disappear, Rat and Shion went downtown to have Rat sing the song of wind to calms Elyurias and make a deal with her. The deal promised Elyurias that they would do better to protect the forest in the future. In the anime, all Elyurias did was exact revenge on No.6. By going downtown to face Elyurias, we actually face our antagonists — the mayor and the head researcher responsible for all the inhumane experimentation. The anime never even introduced us to the antagonists. In the anime, the enemy was always just “No.6”.
The ending in the manga gave more closure between Rat and Shion. They kissed, and Rat said that he promised to come back for him, but he wanted to do traveling. Shion, in the meantime, became responsible for rebuilding the city — specifically, he was in charge of revitalizing the forest.
The start of the anime was excellent. The visualization of the city, the technology, etc, were all excellent. It is a shame that they didn’t follow the manga closer because it would have had such a more satisfying ending than it did. Not to say it was bad if I didn’t read the manga, I probably wouldn’t have complained hence much. What is tragic is that it would have only required 1-2 more episodes to include everything that they left out from the manga.