Nougami Neuro is a demon who loves to chow down on mysteries and puzzles. His problem, however, is that he has eaten every available mystery in the demon world; thus, he travels to our world to feast on the energy from crimes committed by humans. To access these mysteries, he teams up with a high school girl, Yako Katsuragi, whom he disguises as a young detective while Neuro masquerades as her assistant. Together they solve mysteries; always in the back of Yako's mind, however, is the greatest mystery of all -- who murdered her father?
Nougami Neuro is a weird series. That much should be obvious from the synopsis. But that isn't really the half of it. Take the climax for most episodes, for instance: When the murderer is revealed, he or she normally morphs into some animalistic representation of the crime, and they just go batshit crazy on everyone. I'm not sure if this is meant to be metaphorical, or if they're actually turning into animals and somehow this doesn't freak out everyone else in the room, but it never stops being strange.
The series is also quite dark in the weirdest possible ways. For example, the motivation for the show's first crime is that the murderer was insulted that a fellow chef called him out on his shitty food -- which he was loading with heroin and other drugs to make it more addicting to the customers. Seriously, what the hell?! The really dark moments always come completely out of nowhere, too.
Personally, I think the show has to be relentlessly bizarre to be entertaining, because the mysteries are a complete joke. It's always obvious who the killer is; however, the audience doesn't really get the satisfaction of solving the mystery, because Neuro constantly pulls the solutions out of his ass, and there are rarely any clues that would point the audience in the direction of said solutions. The episode structure does not often change, either, except for a few multi-episode storylines.
That basic structure is probably the show's biggest weakness. The worst of the episodes are quite monotonous and a labor to watch. When the mysteries are simultaneously showing themselves to be beneath you (because the murderers are so easy to spot) and trying to be smarter than you by concocting a convoluted solution that nobody (save Neuro, of course) could possibly guess, then what fun are they to watch? I saw the series with Miss Anonymous a few weeks back, and that is definitely what got me through the series. I don't know that I would have actually finished it were I to watch it on my own.
On the positive side, though, the characters can be fun, even if they don't have much depth and are quite repetitive in their actions. Neuro is a refreshingly dark character; because he's a demon, he is pretty much an unapologetic asshole, even when he helps out Yako. Yako, meanwhile, is an energetic lead who thankfully never gets annoying. There's also another assistant, Godai, whom Neuro and Yako claimed after taking their detective office from a group of yakuza. (The weird part about him? He seemingly goes the entire series without realizing that Neuro is a demon, even though he is not an idiot. Hm.)
Nougami Neuro isn't really a great mystery series ... the stories are mostly entertaining for how goofy and bizarre they are, and not for their fantastic writing. The villains are mostly a bunch of nutjobs. (I don't think I'm out of line in saying that the favorite of Miss A and myself was the goofy foreigner, David Rice.) Even the longer, more involved arcs aren't really great or anything. I'd only recommend the series if you're watching with other people so that you can bask in the weirdness together.
If you like this, then watch ... : Shion no Ou doesn't have goofy dark mysteries, but it is a great mystery series.
