A tale of mob crime, torn loyalties, bitter betrayals, and giant zombie monsters and the bullets that vanquish them, Gungrave is actually a video-game based anime and a work of Trigun creator Yasuhiro Nightow. After Trigun but before Blood Battle… Blockade Battlefront… you know, that show with the awesome premise that is hugely disappointing. I hope you enjoy my first 26 episode anime review in a while!
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It’s a bit vaguer in this episode given the circumstances of the plot details. The events of the past few weeks have been a bit more impactful than had already been revealed. However, it is kinda confusing because we ended the last episode with Orga and Mika brandishing some great resolve to do whatever it takes to bring peace…
…Yet it deflates rather quickly moments after they arrive back on Mars. While McGillis and Mika go off to do their thing (the former gets a pass because the head Gjallarhorn guy on Mars owes him one), Orga is faced with more financial hurdles. Accounts are frozen, nobody wants to talk to them, and news of their involvement with McGillis is broadcasted. Orga being Orga of course, buckles under the pressure and instead of giving a St. Crispin’s Day-esque speech about taking down Arianrhod, announces a chance for any and all reluctant Tekkadan members to leave. A lot of them are outraged at this, yet at least we see Zack’s bellyaching go somewhere when he announces he’s leaving.
The Tokyo Project is, well, mostly just like dozens of other 80s and early 90s anime OVAs with more action than personality, kind of just going through the motions for most of its hour run. At least, it is until that bizarrely scifi final act where the characters take on a walking tank! It’ll have you screaming, “Snake? SNNNAAAAAAAAKE!”
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Looks like the McGillis/Tekkadan faction will have to take a rain check for their final victory. After Shino’s failed attempt to take out Rustal once and for all, the faction makes a tactical retreat to regroup, lick their wounds, and hopefully end it the next time. I say ‘hopefully’ because by episode’s end, after scenes of implications of how big a practitioner of 4D Chess he is, Rustal has not only torpedoed McGillis’s chance to regain his forces, but to strip him of his position in Gjallarhorn before the preview without firing a shot. Man continues to be a shrewd operator, and to his credit gives us more of a reprieve for reasons I will cover later on.
SPOILERS
This is peak Gundam space battle episode here. Intense combat abounds as everything blows up and gets killed, with Tekkadan and McGillis struggling as best they can given the onslaught of a superior force. This episode pretty much lays threadbare how on a knife’s edge they are all on at this point, and with an opposition like Rustal Elion, one wrong step and SLICE.
Speaking of Rustal, he is the star of this episode, and is quite the Big Bad in terms of last space battles in Gundam. Sure, we’ll probably see McGillis and Bael be the endgame boss, yet in older Gundam shows he’d have already been against our heroes at this point and be the one bringing the pain. However, all we get is Rustal Elion and quite frankly it’s a breath of fresh air. Endgame space battle Gundam villains usually run the gamut from Hitler-esque (Gihren), bellicose (Gyn Ghingham), to sadistic psycho-bitchy (Katejina). Rustal looks to be the more normal out of all of them, since he doesn’t embody much of those character traits, and if he does it’s very tapered down by sheer force of discipline. Also, the rather solid character design that does not reek of bishounen malevolence or a hideously ugly mug that screams “I’M EVIL” helps too.
The Gokusen is about Kumiko Yamaguchi, a new teacher at Shiroken Academy, a high school for troubled boys. Her class is full of delinquents and ne’er do wells, underachievers that can be violent, even bordering on psychotic. Boy are they in for a lesson, though, because teacher isn’t some wilting flower, she’s the ojou of a yakuza family, and she takes her job seriously, even if she isn’t always! The question is, can she keep her students and the school staff from discovering her criminal background? Why does a yakuza princess even WANT to teach?
The reason for the article title is predicated on how unhinged Macky acts throughout the episode. If it is not using his mastery of Bael to force the non-aligned parts of Gjallarhorn under his thrall, it’s being able to unflinchingly prevent a despairing Almiria ready to turn a knife on herself after botching her childish (I don’t mean this as an insult, she’s still young after all) attempt to kill Macky. The scary part is I do not even know where the play acting stops and the craziness begins, since Macky is so dedicated to his craft. Does he WANT them to think he’s crazy? Or is it his true honest form?
In this episode, I take a look at the four part OVA, Dominion Tank Police, that features what seems like the inevitable future of American police militaritization (Japan will just go the Patlabor route)! But is this send up of 80s hyperviolence a social satire or just a parody that identifies with its captors? I hope to sparse the mixed messages from this old “classic” I first saw on Sci-Fi Channel’s Saturday Anime block.
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SPOILERS
For the first time, I couldn’t really find ONE good image from this episode. So like I did with Escaflowne, here is this episode’s Four Perfect Shots. Seriously, it’s really goddamn pretty. In fact, those aren’t the most perfect of shots. Also no, don’t get mad that one of em is Galli-Galli, you pretty much knew the moment he spoke under that mask Vidar was Galli-Galli. The true pleasure though, is what happened to him during the interim between seasons.
So Macky’s plan to seize Gjallarhorn’s HQ goes off without much of a hitch, with the help of Mika and Barbatos Lupus-Rex-Ou-Rey-Roi-King. It has been a long time coming, and this episode doesn’t mince about delaying his movement too much, not only in his coup but also in FINALLY revealing his past. It is as dark as you would expect given his chibi-self’s dourness and implications of abuse. In the latter’s case, boy he has had a lot. There is no innocent, young, rogue in Macky’s past who was slowly driven to the dark side, but somebody who was already there and just moved deeper and deeper into it as time went on. One would wonder if it wasn’t for their friendship with each other, Orga and Mika would have ended up the same if they were on their own. However, this question is neither here nor there in the long run, since we are at the beginning of endgame, and they are where they are, and Macky is where he is. It’s not exactly the most original out there (I was thinking of Griffith throughout his flashback), but it is effective, and very welcome that we now know what makes Macky tick.
It’s another year, and it’s time for the first brand new episode of Otaku Evolution of 2017! In this video, I look at the 1984 sci-fi-action-comedy-curiosity, Birth! It was once released by Streamline Pictures as Planet Busters, but the version I’m reviewing is from the more accurate ADV release from the early aughts. It’s a really strange feature that boasts of talents like Hideaki Anno and Joe Hisaishi, but besides some interesting visuals, it’s a whole lot of nothing!
