Released five years ago now, C³ was one of Silver Link's earliest productions, before they were renowned for… well, making a whole lot of shows exactly like C³. The show falls in the timeless “action-fanservice adaptation themed around torture/bondage gear” subgenre, which has more recently featured the legitimately underrated Severing Crime Edge. It's a simple template, and once you're familiar with the show's proper noun weapons and warriors, you'd probably be able to guess just where the story goes.

The premise here is that our world contains Worses, magical artifacts that imbue both powers and curses on their owners. While many of these artifacts are simply weapons or spiky leather outfits, some of them can actually take on a human form, and even gain humanity over time. Yachi Haruaki is a boy who, by virtue of his own immunity to curses, ends up taking in many of these Worses, and helping them break their curses over time. His newest charge is Fear in Cube, a former weapon now rebranded as Fear Kubrick, a young girl who's desperate to escape her violent past.

All of that exposition, and the true nature of Fear besides, are quickly established in a sequence of early episodes that seem to know the audience is used to this sort of thing. The narrative is easy to grasp, and lends itself to a very common template - lots of Worses who either are attached to or happen to be cute girls, lots of villainous characters on the hunt for those Worses, and one friendly, mild-mannered Haruaki in the middle of it.

The season covers three small narratives, likely corresponding to the first three volumes of the light novel, with each set of episodes introducing a new threat to Haruaki and his friends. These stories are unlikely to surprise you, and frankly, the dialogue can often be truly awful. The series' first villain only real defining feature is that she refers to everyone as a “bitch,” as in “let out an amusing scream as I crush you, bitch!” The other characters don't fare much better - in fact, the actual reply to that same line is “regarding the means of enjoying screams, I have hundreds of years more experience.” It's a mix of stilted and overwritten and just plain bad, lines that try for grimness or seriousness (“the dance of death is going to continue 'til the grave!”) but just come off as ridiculous. C³ is not winning any awards for its prose.

On top of that, many of the fundamental setups and gags are just tired and dull. The show repeatedly goes back to the “walking in on someone naked” well, along with the “walking in on other people in a compromising situation and misunderstanding it” one. There are cliche jokes and lazy fanservice gambits and characters who never rise above archetypes, and in the end, the overarching plot is itself fairly archetypal and go-nowhere. It's an adaptation of a presumably ongoing series, so don't expect all that much finality in its conclusion.

And yet, for all of those negatives, C³ is still a fairly entertaining ride. The fact that it rushes through three whole stories means you never really have time to get bored, and there are even some dramatic highlights here and there that actually work. The second arc hinges on a tragic romance that resolves into an unexpectedly healthy relationship between two minor characters. The third arc uses the show's side characters in a fairly interesting way, and eventually reaches a point of almost transcendent absurdity in its dialogue and weapon names. And by the end, the show's emotional core centers not on the limp romance drama surrounding Haruaki, but on Fear's understandable anxieties about her own identity. Even some of the incidental jokes are pretty effective, like the offhand cutesy accessories beloved by one particularly grim-faced character, or the way the protagonists ends up carrying a frozen teammate around for half an arc. There are plenty of fundamental choices here that help distinguish C³ within its genre.

Even the show's fanservice is a little more intelligent than you might expect. There's plenty of bouncing boobs and panty shots, but there are also sequences that play off the show's specific action motifs for fanservice effect. The final arc in particular features a legitimately shocking bondage-esque scene that intentionally treads the line between sensual and horrifying.

Plus, most importantly, the show is directed Shin Oonuma. If you've seen any of his shows, you should know what to expect. Oonuma takes many of the classic tricks often associated with SHAFT shows (theatrical framing, very overt symbolism, emphasized foregrounds, deliberate partitioning of the frame) and basically throws them around willy-nilly, making every single scene a wildly creative, if perhaps disjointed, sequence of unexpected visual highlights. Few scenes in C³ look much like what you'd get in a non-Oonuma show, and many of them don't even look like scenes from the rest of C³.

Many of these touches are legitimately compelling. Nearly every character gets their backstory relayed through cutout, storybook-style interludes, where the characters look like cut-paper fairy tale drawings overlaid with shifting, gemlike patterns. Shadows are often used to frame characters as trapped or separated, and many scene transitions are conveyed through clever match cuts. And the image of Fear's cube is omnipresent, ensuring the viewer is able to sense her preoccupations in a visual sense.

Other visual tricks are simply there, and just make the show more visually interesting. Every episode tends to have its own visual signature, for example - one episode uses ornate pencil drawings to capture heightened romantic tension, while another frames a hostage video against a relentless ticking clock. These choices don't necessarily elevate the ultimately low-tier writing, but they do keep things somewhat interesting even when dramatic interest starts to flag. From the rich colors to the wildly textured backgrounds, there's always something new to look at in C³.

The show's animation is significantly less impressive, though it pulls together for the major fight scenes. In the everyday sequences, the combination of the show's sharp-edged and frankly unappealing character designs and limited animation can make things jerky, but the combination of the restless direction and some key well-chosen peaks make sure the fights rarely feel like they're visually hobbled. And the show's music is diverse and strong, varying dramatically across a variety of instruments and often letting a single strong melody on piano or flute set a clear and specific tone.

Funimation's release comes with both bluray and DVD copies on two discs each. Extras are pretty minimal; there are no physical bonuses, and the on-disc extras are limited to the standard clean openings/endings and a very superfluous OVA episode, with no included dub. It's a fairly standard release suitable for a pretty middling anime.

Overall, C³'s story is very unlikely to impress you. The characters are mostly standard role-players, the dialogue can get outrageously bad, and many of the comedy bits are stale from the beginning. But things are far from unredeemable here, as both occasional glimmers of better storytelling and a strong visual personality put C³ a cut above this genre's usual fare. If you're not interested in a mix of action and fanservice with plenty of standard anime gags, you probably won't find much here - but if that's what you're looking for, C³ offers just that in a very unique visual package.