Psycho Pass: Sinners of the System-Crime and Punishment

Inspector Mika Shimotsuki and Enforcers Nobuchika Ginoza and Yayoi Kunizuka are deployed to the northern facility of Sanctuary to return an escaped criminal.  What is built as a new kind of peaceful paradise harbors dark secrets run by a woman who perceives herself as a savior of Latent Criminals.  When the investigation unearths more than expected, Mika and Gino find themselves Public Enemy Number One against a brainwashed society that will do whatever it takes to keep its peace.

Psycho Pass: Sinners of the System is billed as a trilogy of stories set at various points of the Psycho Pass timeline.  For the next three weeks I’ll be covering all three chapters individually, starting with todays post Psycho Pass 2 and Psycho Pass: The Movie entry.  There’s one big hurdle going into this one story: the fact that it centers on my favorite Psycho Pass pain in the ass Mika Shimotsuki.  While she’s a much better character in Psycho Pass 3, this is still a while before that  Does Crime and Punishment begin pushing Mika towards that more tolerable state or is she still the same whiny brat she was in Season Two?
 
Mika is the X factor in this tale and your enjoyment of it will depend on how much of her character you can stand.  While I’ll admit, she’s not as terribly written as she is in Psycho Pass 2, that’s doesn’t mean Mika hasn’t lost many of her more annoying attributes.  Honestly, she was at her best when actually living up to her potential as a true investigator and trusting her partners to carry out her orders while leaning on them for support.  Mika’s attitude towards Latent Criminals also changes throughout Crime and Punishment, leaving her in a very different head space at the end then the beginning. It’s a nice tease of the better person she becomes in Psycho Pass 3.  However, Mika is still Mika which means a lot of melodrama and overreactions.  At times, I think Mika is better suited to a Pheonix Wright courtroom than being a Police Investigator.  She’s definitely no Akane Tsunemori but Mika handles herself well more often than not.
 
For this being billed as a Mika/Ginoza team up, it was surprising to see rest of the post Psycho Pass: The Movie team at play.  Yayoi gets to tag along on the trip to Sanctuary and kick a little ass in her own way.  Meanwhile Akane is still doing what she does best back on the home front with the rest of Unit 1.  It’s always a pleasure spending time with these characters and it doesn’t feel like everyones been shoehorned in just for the sake of shoehorning.  The whole team plays a vital role in the investigation in Sanctuary.  But this is Psycho Pass so action is still necessary among the well written societal debates.  Enter Ginoza, who gets to flex his muscles and cybernetic arm against another guy who looks like he was plucked from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex to fight him.  The fight scenes are still choreographed to look real when everyone isnt getting flung across a battlefield like ragdolls, and Dominators are still a source of extremely bloody fun.  Goes to show why Psycho Pass is still a nice blend of philosophical debate and 90s style gory action.
 
As for the story, it’s a decent one.  The idea of a huge convent for Latent Criminals to interact with each other and better themselves through various therapies is an experiment you’d think would have been studied more before Sybil tried to take things to the international stage in Psycho Pass: The Movie.  If anything, we don’t explore this supposed new Eden enough but the cracks in the concept are evident and shady kind of from the get go, not helped by the way too chummy personality of the Warden and how shifty her associates look.  The story also shows us what a bunch of mentally interconnected Latent Criminals are capable of. It’s scary not just from a horror perspective but also an ethics side, utilizing brainwashed convicts to keep the peace when they don’t know theyre only making things worse.  As I said, it’s a nice environment for Mika to grow a bit more seeing just how perverse Sanctuary really is and how determined it makes her to expose its truths for the sake of justice.
 
Chapter 1 of Psycho Pass: Sinners of the System is basically a bonus Season 2 OVA episode that’s far above anything presented in Psycho Pass 2.  Mika can be grating but the story marks the beginning of her evolution into her far more competent and bearable Psycho Pass 3 counterpart.  The ethical debates are as strong as ever and Sanctuary presents a nice stage even if it’s not as thoroughly explored as it could be before the action revs up.  And it’s nice to see Akane and the gang back in action after Psycho Pass 2 left them with nothing but misery.  All in all, not a bad first entry in this mini anthology of Psycho Pass short stories. 
 
8/10
 
One chapter down, two to go.  Next Week we head back to the days of Psycho Pass’ First Season (maybe even futher back than that) as we welcome back an old friend and hopefully get some proper fleshing out of a character who’s kind of just been around for much of the franchise.  Psycho Pass: Sinners of the System continues with First Guardian, Next Monday right here at the Gundam Anime Corner.