I love HypMic because of its banger tunes.

It’s not a music project without bangers and Hypnosis Mic brings the goods in this department! Whether you want tunes to dance to or mellow tunes to study to, HypMic has a song for every mood and then some.

I love HypMic for its complex plotline and how multiple media can be developed concurrently through some level of coordination.

The upside of this is you can see the same plot beats covered in several media formats…The downside of this is that depending on how much information the staff have at the time of developing said media, there can be significant deviations in what story is being told (particularly when Ramuda is concerned).

This leads to “unbalanced” media – where your high expectations from one arm of the media mix consistently aren’t met by another arm. This seems to be a problem for followers of the manga and drama tracks in particular when following the anime, as the anime seems content on being silly and not really caring about the greater plotline of Hypnosis Mic as a whole (see: the fact it has, as of episode 3, not adhered to the aniki post-2nd DRB plot point for Buster Bros, the fact Samatoki is characterised by being extremely violent when he does have his calmer moments in other media).

On that note, the participatory nature of the series not only affects the fandom, but also the storyline.

It’s like a Choose Your Own Adventure series, but it has lasting effects! I wanted to study this through the series’s promotional material (in tweets as well as advertising copy) so badly, I almost did a research project on it!

The fandom’s opinions are also reflected back into the voting – for example, it’s cited that the winners of the 2nd DRB were thus because one member’s life was at stake. The winners of the 1st DRB were possibly even voted against in the 2nd DRB because some of the fans had redistributed themselves towards being fans of other teams or alternatively, people didn’t want to see the same winner twice so they can see other teams win. (Also note the stage play has some different outcomes to the main canon – as of the time of writing, Buster Bros has won a stage play DRB, whereas they have not passed beyond the semifinals of any DRB in the main canon.)

Note there is a downside to the voting system – it becomes a popularity/”most people’s consensus” contest as to who to vote for. For example, Doppo is known to be extremely popular with the fanbase at large, which led directly to the 1st DRB victory. However, the flip side of this is hardcore fans of a certain division won’t care about the quality of the music being delivered. They’ll just shell out for their division regardless so they do their part in the voting process…(I’m guilty as charged when it comes to Matenrou *sweatdrops while smiling*.)

This whole thing about the voting is significant because for most series, the participatory nature of the series only extends to, at best, fandom activities, such as sending in fan mail or writing fanfiction. The closest thing I can think of from the days before Hypnosis Mic is how the 39 Clues had an online forum where participants would collect cards and decipher codes to try to win prizes, with no impact on the storyline provided in the books if someone won anything. However, HypMic took that a step further by being – to my knowledge – the first series where the voting system continuously affected the canon storyline. (As noted, Paradox Live has a similar system, but it came after HypMic.)

I love HypMic because it teaches you about translation and rap, among other topics.

From saunas to a mystery plotline to even ghostbusting (on two separate occasions!), Hypnosis Mic spans a variety of genres in its songs. On that note, it’s also good at teaching how exactly rapping works in Japanese – since Japanese has only 52 syllables, it’s not easy to see how that works to someone who’s not already familiar with the language – and if you’re not paying attention to the actual Japanese, you’re probably still consuming a translation of it, whether that be official translations of project-related news from the project’s website (I still don’t know who’s responsible for those), fan translations of songs on the wiki or the anime on Crunchyroll.

I love HypMic because it’s insane. (In a good way.)

ARB, in particular, excels at this kind of…I call it “controlled stupidity”. You can get any kind of storyline from it…and when I say “anything”, I mean it. Some of the things that have happened in ARB events include:

• going to the moon after almost being hunted down by prehistoric creatures
• an alien fighting a ghost
• a car chase after a cow gave birth

…and that’s not even the end of it! Aside from rap battling anyone and anything and the annual body swap events, there’s also the main story and story cards (cards which have little scenarios depicted in them and those scenarios are treated like other story parts of the game…meaning more in-game currency once you finish reading/skipping through them).

I love how nuanced its characters are, after exploring the different media for information about them.

Take Jakurai as an example. Jakurai can seem a bit standoffish at first because he’s rather emotionally restrained, but he’s frequently depicted as friendly, respected and on good terms with most people (Ramuda being the notable exception). However, give him liquor and he becomes rowdier than most other drunks, while he also (rather innocently) throws Hitoya, his childhood friend, under the bus with stories about their past. He’s also talented in many areas, such as sushi-making and playing piano.

There are still some notable unknowns regarding these characters, too, but I trust those will be discussed someday. For example, one of the big unknowns still left in the storyline is what exactly Jakurai did as an assassin, which is stated in several versions of his character profile and hinted at in several media…but not much has come of it, as of the time of writing this post.

I love it because it’s niche.

HypMic is so popular within Japan it regularly hits the Oricon charts, but outside of Japan, people likely won’t have heard of it, for better or for worse. This makes the currently-airing (as of this post) Rhyme Anima+ a bit of a hard sell, because it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of “I don’t understand it, so I won’t watch it” either through not watching season 1 (you’ll need to have watched season 1, episode 1 to understand that character of the day is back in season 2, episode 1) or just not trying the series in general.

…It’s fair enough if pretty boys spitting bars aren’t your jam, but there is a reason why this series has shonen and josei manga adaptions – it’s a hard sell at first and sometimes the itch it scratches can be quite specific (for example, I only play Good Moring, Ikebukuro in the mornings due to the premise of that song being a morning radio show), but the audience it can reach is beyond just people who like to check out music, anime or voice actors.

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That seriously doesn’t begin to cover it all, but the deeper one goes into this series, the more it pays dividends as you learn about a whole variety of topics with it, whether it be gambling (from Dice) or how the Japanese navy has a tradition of serving curry every Friday (from Riou).

So I’ve written pretty extensively on this project, but have I caught your attention? Why do you like it, if you’re an existing fan?