PSYCHO-PASS: Mandatory Happiness

In fiction the idea of Pre-Crime, stopping a criminal action before it even happens, never leads to the utopia it was intended to create. The Japan in Psycho Pass: Mandatory Happiness is no different.

In the not too distant future Japan becomes an isolationist country and through heavy-handed mental health laws and practices strives for a completely happy and balanced populace. Every individual passes through the Sibyl System, a process that quantifies a person's merits and place in society, what vocations they would be best suited to and this is all combined in a colour coded Psycho Pass.

This pass is measured as a Hue. The clearer that hue the more mentally stable that person is considered to be - stress, fear and anxiety can cause the hue to become cloudy, the cloudier it becomes the more likely an individual is to become a Latent Criminal, someone who is likely to harm themselves or those around them.

Enter the Public Safety Bureau, a law enforcement agency in which Inspectors (public servants with clear psycho passes trained in criminology) are teamed up with Enforcers (latent criminals that are essentially used as tools to prevent their Inspectors' hues becoming cloudy during difficult cases). Both are armed with a sidearm called a Dominator, a gun that can scan an individual and calculate their crime coefficient. Depending on the state of this metric the gun will authorise the user to shoot - a paralyser for people with a low crime coefficient or a lethal shot for those deemed a risk to the public.

The anime asks some very difficult questions, as does the visual novel Mandatory Happiness. This game centres around two new characters who work alongside the stars of the anime, and every decision the player makes will affect the outcome of the narrative. The story focuses on a series of cases connected to a stolen cyborg body and an entity known as Alpha, which has a mission to bring everyone in the world unending happiness.

A most noble objective, which of course goes horribly wrong...