Psycho-Pass

Psycho-Pass (Japanese: サイコパス? Hepburn: Saiko Pasu) is an anime television series that was
produced by Production I.G, directed by Naoyoshi Shiotani and Katsuyuki Motohiro and written by Gen Urobuchi. The series was aired on Fuji TV's Noitamina programming block between October 2012 and March 2013. The story takes place in an authoritarian future dystopia, where omnipresent public sensors continuously scan the mental states of every passing citizen. Collected data on both present mentality and aggregated personality data is used to gauge the probability of that citizen committing a crime, the rating referred to as that citizen's Psycho-Pass. Authorities are alerted whenever excessive ratings are detected, and officers of the Public Safety Bureau are dispatched with weapons called "Dominators", energy pistols that modulate their power in response to the target's Psycho Pass. The story follows Shinya Kogami and Akane Tsunemori among other members of Unit One of the Public Safety Bureau's Criminal Investigation Division.

Psycho-Pass originated from Production I.G.'s interest in making a successor to Mamoru Oshii's achievements. The series was inspired by several live-action films. Chief director Katsuyuki Motohiro aimed to explore psychological themes in society's youth using dystopian storylines. Multiple books and movies influenced Psycho-Pass with the most notable being the 1982 American science fiction film Blade Runner.

The series was licensed by Funimation in North America. A second season began airing in October 2014, with an animated film released in January 2015. A manga adaptation has been in serialization in Shueisha's Jump Square magazine and several novels, including an adaptation and prequels to the original story, have been published. An episodic video game adaptation called Chimi Chara Psycho-Pass was developed by Nitroplus Staffers in collaboration with Production I.G. New novels and another manga were serialized in 2014.

The first anime, Psycho-Pass, was received generally positive in both Japan and the west with critics praising the characters' roles and interactions set in the dystopia. The animation has also been praised despite issues in latter episodes which required to be fixed in the DVD volumes of the series. On the other hand, the second series, Psycho-Pass 2, received mixed critical response stemming from its heavy use of gore as well as the new villain.

Plot

Psycho-Pass is set in a futuristic era in Japan where the Sibyl System (シビュラシステム? Shibyura Shisutemu), a powerful network of psychometric scanners, actively measures the minds and mentalities of civilised populations using a "cymatic scan" of the brain. The resulting assessment is called a Psycho-Pass (サイコパス? Saikopasu). When the calculated likelihood of an individual committing a crime, measured by the Crime Coefficient (犯罪係数? Hanzaikeisū) index, exceeds an accepted threshold, he or she is pursued, apprehended, and killed if necessary by police forces. Elite officers labelled "Enforcers" are equipped with large handguns called "Dominators"—special weapons that only activate when aimed at suspects with higher-than-acceptable Crime Coefficients. Enforcers are themselves selected for innately high Crime Coefficients, marking them as "latent criminals"; they are overseen by police Inspectors, who have the jurisdiction to shoot them with their Dominators should they pose a danger to the public.