Akira wakes up hundreds of years later to find his dead girlfriend's face on an android, and the show commits completely to the devastation of that moment. The opening two episodes are built like a precision strike on your chest, all gorgeous animation and suffocating emotional weight. After that, it loses the thread and stumbles into side quests that don't matter. Watch it for the premise and the craft, understanding going in that it peaks early and never climbs back.

As fear of artificial intelligence pushes society toward unrest, Akira Himegami stands beside Towasa Oumagi, a gifted AI pioneer who faces constant prejudice. When a gunman attacks them at a shareholders meeting, Akira is shot. He wakes from cryogenic sleep centuries later in an abandoned lab amid a ruined city, with no idea what became of Towasa. A father and daughter take him in, and he learns that civilization has slid backward under OWEL, a worldwide organization that controls knowledge from the old era. After OWEL captures him and moves to execute him, an android named Yugure cuts down his captors, rescues him, and asks him to marry her. Her face is identical to Towasa's. Blending action, romance and science fiction, the drama weighs the meaning of love in a society reshaped by technology.