Ranked #649

Needless

Typically shounen style action series are not usually my thing. I find them to be completely silly and juvenile and cater to a demographic that I am just not a part of. The posturing and trash talking, the ridiculous reversals of fortune, and the long drawn out nature of the fighting usually cause me to lose interest. Honestly I am surprised this appeals so much to teenage males, who typically have the attention span of a goldfish. However, initially Needless seemed to be different, and appeared as more of a parody and comedy with an extremely enjoyable female lead. Eventually though it loses its way and falls victim to the things that doom many of its brother anime; trying to be and do too much instead of sticking with what was working.

The plot, initially is about as basic and nondescript as they come. Needless is set in a post apocalyptic world in which a new race of super powered humans have emerged, possessing fragments of power that give them mastery over a certain skill such as fire, gravity, and magnetism. These fragments apparently have all come from a common source, a god-like being known as the Second. These altered humans are known as Needless. But there is a hard and fast rule however, while some fragments are more powerful than others each Needless can only possess one. It all sounds like it an interesting take on the superpowers genre, and it a lot of ways it is though the way that the powers are used begins to get annoying after while (more on that later). All is not well in the world of the Needless though as they are threatened by the extremely powerful Adam Arclight and his followers in which they face extinction from his scheming. Only the mysterious Adam Blade and his band of resistance fighters stand in the way.

Needless is chalk full of slapstick comedy, action, blood and death, explosions, fan service, and machoism. Fans of these are likely to find plenty to like. The real problem with the series as a whole is the pacing of its storyline. Things move along quickly in the first 1/3 of the series. Perhaps a bit too quickly, which may have lead to the problems it suffers from for most of the middle and late portions of the anime. The heroes find themselves trapped in a room where they must do battle with Arclight's strongest followers. The battles are action packed but they drag out...forever. The story comes to a crawl and these battles seemingly go on forever as almost half the anime is taken up by this one fight and set in this same room. The shocking plot revelation made during this arc is obvious to anyone with any degree of sophistication. Once our heroes finally manage to get out the rest of the series is almost completely taken up with flashbacks, plot building, and adding a conspiracy arc. While this made Needless' story infinitely better and more complex it again felt to me like a complete reversal once again in the theme. To me it was like the director couldn’t make up his mind. Did he want to create an echii action parody, a straight shounen fighting anime, or a complex story about genetic research and political intrigue?

A small rant is in order on the battles. I know that it is a staple of this kind of series to yell out and name all of your attack moves and special abilities, but really is it that hard to come up with some names that make some sense? After hearing "Little Boy" or "Dean Drive Fox Hound" uttered for the billionth time I just wanted to shove a pair of scissors into my ears. And seriously what the hell does Dean Drive Fox Hound supposed to fucking mean anyway? It’s nonsense!

The real tragedy is that what they were doing at the start was working. The best part of Needless is the characters, in particular Eve Neuschwanstein (try saying that ten times fast). She’s got all the body measurements to make her a fan favorite, but she has a hilarious and quirky personality to go along with it to make her memorable. She stupid, can’t remember anyone’s name which leads her to "shorten" people’s names into nonsensical words. She has a really cool special ability called Doppelganger, which allows her to change herself into basically anything of the same mass as she is. Unfortunately as the series progresses she tends to disappear more than a main character should from the action, thus taking away a lot of the appeal for the show for me since I really enjoyed her. Also her Doppelganger ability is used in ways over the course of the series that seem to be inconsistent with what the ability should really be able to do.

As for the other leads, Adam Blade and Cruz Schild the results are not as good. Blade is a silly and typical shounen male with an over-the-top character design complete with an unoriginal and clichéd personality (basically think TTGL's Kamina). Unless you love 12 pack abs and these kinds of stereotypes or this is the first anime you have ever seen, then you’re unlikely to be impressed by him. That being said he does have his moments of comedy gold and he is not completely without merits. Cruz is also a typical anime boy who reminds me of another TTGL character, Simon (the young version) in both looks and personality. Though he seems to have more sense than most of his shounen brethren, and stays out of trouble for the most part and leaves the fighting to those with powers. His greatest attribute is that he’s probably the only person in the show with a brain.

The rest supporting cast is a mix of some very entertaining and memorable characters and more shounen stereotypes. With the exception of Disc, the rest of Blade's team of resistance fighters is uninspired. The ones who really shine are among Arclight's subordinates. This starts and ends with the Pretty Girl Squad of Mio, Setsuna, and Kushinashi. I found their antics to be the most amusing of any of the characters in the series. They are probably the objects of the most fan service, next to Eve, but for the most part it’s all pretty funny and just doesn’t feel as pointless as it usually is in other shows.

Artistically Needless is an uneven experience. The animation of the fights, action, and special effects are all topnotch. The service is well done, at least amongst the females, and they are cute and not too ridiculously proportioned. However the men are awful. I am on record as being a firm hater of bishies and effeminate men. While the men in Needless are certainly manly, they basically look like bishies on steroids. The fact that all of them looked pretty much the same (does anyone in the future wear shirts?) and the silly looking cartoonish muscles and impossible body builds took away from the art overall.

The absolute worst thing about this series is the music. The first OP "Modern Strange Cowboy" is without a doubt the silliest song I have ever heard and the worst example of Engrish lyrics gone wild. The second OP is not near as bad but still not that good and both the ED themes are average at best. Also the commercial break teaser halfway through is laugh out loud silly with the retarded sounding "Needless" being overacted by various male cast members. The acting overall is decent, but again the male voice actors over play their parts so much that they just sound silly.

Overall my final opinion on Needless mixed. I did enjoy many aspects of it, but it had more potential than it delivered. The schizophrenic direction and pacing are too much for me to ignore. Your enjoyment of Needless is likely to depend on your own personal tastes. If you love shounen action then you might want to give this a chance. I found it to be an average series at best.
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What happens when you have the spirit of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann piercing the core of s-CRY-ed while evolving with the essence of Akira? You have Needless.

Needless is an anime that proves itself to be a Frankenstein of themes headed by the commonalities, clichés and characteristics of the shounen genre. It borrows from and builds heavily on action anime of yesteryear, offering nothing new to the genre. It is loud, over-the-top and full of itself... yet Needless manages to do something that a lot of anime are incapable of doing: entertain its viewers.

It is actually very much like any other shounen, most particularly the series s-CRY-ed; if one were to give a description of s-CRY-ed, you basically have a summary of Needless. Sceptical? "A group of super-powered rebels who live in the dilapidated, wild outskirts of a futuristic city battle against those who run the show". This is exactly what Needless is about (and it is exactly what s-CRY-ed is about too). But then, Needless does not try to copy as it so heavily imitates so many typical shounen tropes that it manages to become something a little different. Initially.

It revels in the machismo. It goes bigger and bolder with the clichés of fiery fights and hotheaded heroes. In fact, there probably is not a moment in the series where a character speaks without shouting his dialogue. The downside about this series is that it lacks so much originality that it just seems like hot air blowing all over the place without real emotions (like that found in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann) or real thought (like that found in Akira) behind it.

But that is not to say Needless tells a bad story. While the rebel theme is done to death in nearly all forms of media and the mutant people storyline never really gets old, Needless manages to be interesting not so much for its main storyline but for its side stories. The main plot seems to cover Adam Blade's attempt to kick the butts of a pharmaceutical company (it seems after the third World War, Japan is run by guys who sell band-aids and do human experimentation projects). The side elements manage to be a whole lot more fascinating than Adam fighting Arclight; how unfortunate that the subplots in acquiring comrades and battling against various minions are far more interesting than the main story.

The art for Needless is one of the biggest problems in the series. The first thing you will notice is the generally ridiculous and horrid character design. All the men with the exception of Cruz Schild have necks that are thick like tree trunks. It just looks so stupid that these guys are so overly-muscular. They look like action figures: plastic and inhuman. It does not help that every man has the same body size and shape. They all seem six feet tall with multiple-pac abs and frightful hair. Another horrible aspect of the art is the costuming. Needless' characters look like prog rock rejects from the 80s. One character has a coat with collars so wide that it looks like a glider attached to his shoulders. The girls are fortunately spared from heinous designs, but they all seem moe and generic, and honestly, they are designed so blandly and atypically that in years to come, they will undoubtedly be faces forgotten if someone ever showed you a picture. The one good thing working for Needless is the comic book colouring of the anime. While the designs are bad, the animation is fairly good, and the colours all jump out at you.

Possibly the worst thing about the series though is the sound aspect. Needless has some OP and ED themes that are terribly ill-suited for one another, but curiously reflect some of the priorities of the anime. The cheesy metal OPs reflect all the macho shounen fighting elements while the cutesy EDs highlight all the silly and lolicon-based humour of the series. The seiyuu generally give stagnated performances. While they all spend a lot of time tearing their vocal chords screaming/shouting at each other, that is all they do. There is no range. The only emotions you get are anger and cocky bravado. And that is it. One thing about Needless though is the noticeably questionable naming schemes of everything from characters (Adam and Eve? Oh come on, now) to attack names ("Little Boy", despite its historical connotations, is just a silly attack name, honestly. Same with "Dean Drive Foxhound"). It induces laughter more than anything else to hear a grown man screaming, "Little Boy!" at his opponents.

As for the characters, none of these guys or girls are going down in anime history as icons in any way despite their heroism. While they are not bad characters, they spend so much time just ignoring their own growth that it is sad to see them pretty much fine staying exactly the way they are from beginning to end.

Blade is the "cool guy" of the series with some lolicon tendencies which are a bit annoying but he serves as decent comic relief. The problem with Blade is that he is not an empathetic lead at all. At least, not in any of the present action. In flashbacks, he proved to have more personality and likeableness, and it just makes you wonder what happened to him in the present. The problem with Needless is that the characters are not so much characters as they are just vessels for their cool abilities. Out of the bad guys, it is only Saten who manages to be interesting for a little while, but it is the Pretty Girl Squad that steals the spotlight, providing more chemistry and comedy than a lot of the others do in the series.

The curious thing is, the protagonist of the series seems to be Cruz, but he is usually kicked to the side whenever Blade shows up. Cruz's special trait seems to be his deduction abilities, but most of it is not the work of mind mastery--he is just showing basic common sense and logic. Though compared to some of the other characters, that makes him Albert frickin' Einstein. The real show stealer is Eve, a competent, cool fighter with a bad naming sense and worse memory. She manages to be one of the main reasons to watch this series, yet like another important female in one of the most "epic and manly" anime ever made, they misuse her and ignore her in later parts. Which is a shame, since she is hands down the best character in the entire series, having the more interesting past, cooler powers, and a better personality.

Needless, in spite of all its clear weaknesses, still manages to be a darn exciting anime to watch. The powers are extremely cool and it has a strong sense of comedy in it. While the fights get repetitive, they do not get dull. In fact, there is one particular arc in this series that is possibly the best thing about it, where tons of people and their powers clash and it literally becomes a huge battle of stamina. But again, it seems Needless does not understand the concept of "Enough is enough!" because this fight also manages to drag on about three episodes longer than it should. By the end of it, the characters miraculously are not exhausted, but you as a viewer will be.

Plus, the serious tones the anime adopts later on makes you question things about the story that you just would not have bothered thinking about in the first place. For one thing, it makes you wonder from where half the science even comes (but the parody-Wikipedia page that the scientists apparently utilise seems to be the answer).

Again, this is not a bad anime. It is just not a particularly great one. Despite all its attempts to make a mark in its genre, it will be forgotten in the passages of time. As it stands, present day and present time, this anime is lots of fun if you ever feel like remembering what it felt like when you thought wrestling was real and when after-school action heroes were a staple part of your TV diet.

If you have a hankering for a mindless shounen, then you need Needless. read more