Ranked #709

Jormungand

My understanding of arms dealers came after watching the excellent film "Lord of War". Nicolas Cage plays a Ukrainian-American arms dealer who sells guns like AK-47s, M-16s and a M-60 Machine gun to warlords and rebel groups. The movie is great as it portrays a balanced view of the arms dealer, and how inane our world is.

Arms dealing is rampant in this current age. With the Drug War across Latin America along with Middle Eastern revolutions and a Taliban insurgency in West Asia, the need for arms dealers is higher than ever, and these wars gave rise to people like Viktor Bout who sells AK-47s to dictators like Charles Taylor and Muammar Gaddafi. It is evil, manipulative and horrifying and his recent arrest became a morality tale about the nature of war and how people like Viktor Bout are making the world a worse place to live.

Jormungand came a few months after Lord of War, but it's also excellent. And the anime adaptation aired the same month Viktor Bout received 25 years of prison in the United States. So it's pretty co-incidental that both the manga and anime came at a time when stories of arms dealers reached the news.

The story is about a group of arms dealers led by a Genki girl named Koko Hekmatyar (Shizuka Itou). Her ragtag crew is like the A-Team of arms dealers, and their ways of running the business is as carefree as the Googleplex, but with more explosions.

The series begins with Koko bringing a new member of the team: A former child soldier named Jonathan. He's about 10, hates guns but joins an arms dealing group to find the dealers who killed his parents. Koko, along with Jonah and her crew of badasses go around the world selling guns and partying. It's k-On! meets Lord of War and Micmacs, and that's the best summary of the story.

Animation wise, the animation's nice. Pretty sunny, but since it's by White Fox then the lens flare is expected. The character designs are done by by the key animator from Steins;Gate and it shows.

The direction is pretty good, especially when it's directed by the director of Katanagatari and School Days. Yeah, about that: Keitaru Motonaga should stick to directing for White Fox since all his other works are pretty bad. His career reminds me of Martin Campbell's career: a hit or two in a resume of crap.

The music's nice. The OP sounds like something from a Prodigy/Pendulum concert, and the ED is done by the excellent Nagi Yanagi. The entire score is done by Taku Iwasaki who remains great at what he does. His attention to surrounding and action makes him great, which is why he's the best action anime composer ever, since he does stuff like Gurren Lagann, Yakitate Japan and Ben-to.

The one flaw about this story is character development. So far, Koko, Jonathan and Koko's colleague Valmer (voiced by Sayaka Ohara) has given us a glimpse of what they are and recently we get to see Jonathan's backstory and Koko's brother. And that's about it. There is a backstory about the most recent villain group in the series, but that was not as exciting as it should be. I wanna see more of that Lehm guy (voiced by Unsho Ishizuka) and more of William Nelson (voiced by Kenji Nomura). The series could have been better if each episode revolves around two characters hanging out with each other, like Community. Seriously, the character dynamic in Community is what TV character relationships should be like, especially in anime. (Koko's brother reminds me of evil Jeff Winger for some reason).

Overall, Jormungand is a decent anime about arms dealer. It's not as great as Lord of War, but it's good for lots of action and a great staff which makes the series much more enjoyable. read more

First off, for a "gun" anime, its knowledge of firearms and firearms users is incredibly poor. Sure, it names off things, but for the most part, *real gun users use nicknames in combat*. It makes for incredibly clunky dialogue, where they shout out "He's got a Negev LMG" or "Mi 24 Hind D" said out in full. They'd say, "Hind, take cover!" or "Target, machine gunner, 9 o'clock". There's no addressing the amount of bullets one can carry (in episode four the bad guy guns down an entire opera house with what looks like one nutsack, and that does not hold enough to gun down as many people as shown with one shot-one kill, let alone firing like a moron), there's no tactics, people take stupid shots (god knows how many times they shoot at held guns, a stupid shot to take under almost any circumstance), and nothing in it gives the idea that the people who made the show or manga have any knowledge of guns beyond their statistics.

If you think that's semantics, it's because good gunplay (if it was there) would be the only saving grace, seeing as the writing is atrocious. The females are otaku-bait, everyone's a philosopher (and a bad one at that), talking is always a free action in supposedly high-pitched gunfights, the three storylines shown thus far are worse than Black Lagoon at its most ridiculous, and it just has nothing going for it.

Trust me, I wanted to like this show. I wanted a good gun show to come out. But this is far from it. Hell, High School of the Dead was better about its guns. And when you lose to HSotD at anything other than pantyshot counts and size of boobs, you know you aren't doing well. read more