The Ones Within First Impressions

“I’ve always wanted to touch a panda!”

What even was that!?! The Ones Within is nonsense, plain and simple. I’m going to refer to it as a “death game” throughout the review, but I’m not even sure that term applies in this instance. This is that manner of intrigue anime where not a single character is willing to ask even the most basic of questions, like “Why was there a kaiju-sized panda?” or “Did we just interact with a real ghost?!?” I’m not even sure what the stakes are since the cast is too small to pull off a proper Danganronpa-style death game. I never thought I’d say this, but I need Monokuma to show up and exert a modicum of order on these proceedings. The premise of this series appears to take inspiration from Let’s Plays, but overlooks a core problem. It’s no fun watching a game play out when you don’t understand the rules, don’t know the players, and there is no clear sense of the stakes.

Death Games offer something of an odd subgenre in anime. The actual setup for the death game is usually considered moderately inconsequential. The Danganronpa franchise is more than happy to handwave away the majority of the “How did you set this up?” questions that are sure to arise, so it can focus on the central draw, the game itself. The Ones Within defies convention by choosing to have neither the overarching nor underarching narratives make sense. Our main character is Iride Akatsuki, a Let’s Player specializing in escape games who is invited to take part in a game called The Ones Within – Genome. He awakes to find himself lying in a forest alongside a girl of roughly the same age as him. As they attempt to get their bearings, they encounter a gigantic panda bear which they briefly flee from until Akatsuki decides to befriend Pandera: Friend of all Children. If there is one aspect that I will give the show credit for, it is the fact that Akatsuki’s cheerful, take-it-all-in-stride attitude is oddly charming. We quickly learn from a man in an alpaca mask (Because why not?) that a total of 8 Let’s Players have been picked to partake in life-or-death challenges (Because why not?) in order to get a total of 100 million viewers (Because why not?). While some of the Let’s Players are quick to lash out and even threaten the life of the game master, Paca, none of them are willing to actually ask the most reasonable of questions. And the “Deal with giant animals scenario,” is only the first of two “stages” in this first episode. The second involves a game of Ouija that makes even less sense than the giant animals did.

The production for this series is… passable at first glance. Silver Link is handling the production for this series, and they’re generally a go-to studio for below average to average production values. The technicals themselves don’t feel awful, but the directing has a distinctly amateurish quality to it. Character will abruptly shift locations in space either for the purpose of startling the viewer or to avoid having to animate kinetic movement. In one instance, several characters went from sitting in a classroom environment to having pounced on top of Paca in the blink of an eye, and I was left wondering if someone had forgotten to include a good 5 seconds of animation. Nothing moves or progresses fluidly in this show, whether it’s progression from scene to scene or even the movement of a character through a room. This exacerbates the confusion caused by the jumbled narrative, which is the last thing The Ones Within needs to have highlighted.

Before I wrap up, a few Notes and Nitpicks:

• No, I didn’t bother introducing any of the characters aside from Akatsuki or Paca, but frankly, they don’t matter much at this point. They’re all broad stereotypes who are in some way or another defined by the type of game they specialize in.
• Paca claims the penalty for not playing along is getting locked away in the “White Room” until they rest of the players succeed in clearing the challenge which is essentially an extreme form of solitary confinement. He illustrates this via… hologram, I think? I’m not willing to waste any cognitive power trying to explain away anything this episode does. No word yet on whether it has black curtains and is near a station.