Kurogane no Linebarrels

tl;dr: A mech anime with a pretty great character arc for the protagonist but that is lacking in most everything else.

This anime is one that’s greatest strength, it’s protagonist, started out seeming like it’s greatest weakness. It starts with the standard premise of a random student suddenly gaining powers and becoming a hero, in this case with Hayase Kouichi becoming linked to the mech Linebarrel. What makes this anime unique is that unlike most anime with similar premises where the protagonist is just luckily inherently heroic and capable of acting as such, Kouichi is anything but. He starts off incredibly self-centered and immature, wherein even ... though he rants on and on about being a hero of justice, he’s clearly just doing whatever he makes him feel cool without any regard for the effect his actions would have on anyone else, basically just going on a complete power trip and reacting violently to anything that hurts his fragile ego.

There is background given on why he became the way he did, and though I’m sure many will disagree, I felt it was written reasonably well and justified properly. In general power corrupts even strong willed individuals. Thus, I definitely don’t think it’s unreasonable that a lot of power abruptly and without any explanation or structure being given to someone that’s always been powerless to the point they have a psychological complex about how powerless they are would result in how Kouichi acts. I mean, that’s a pretty typical trope really, just one that is usually used with antagonists or side characters and not the main protagonist, but I think that’s what makes it interesting.

Over the course of the anime, Kouichi definitely changes tremendously. There are a few major events that result in massive sudden changes, but just as importantly is that there’s a pretty slow and subtle shift that manages to stick over time. That in and of itself isn’t that unique, but what I liked was how much he changed while also staying mostly the same. He’s just as obsessed with being cool and acting like a hero as he was at the beginning of the anime. However, what he perceives as cool and as just has changed tremendously and now he actually does seem cool. He’s still pretty self centered and does whatever he wants without really listening to others, but what he wants to do actually feels like what a real hero would do. His growth isn’t that of his actual core character changing at all, rather its more in the direction of him originally only talking the talk but eventually being able to walk the walk. His character arc is straight up him just gaining experience and practice. That’s it. But that simplicity still resulting in such a massive change is what makes it impressive and overall I think it holds up the anime reasonably well.

Unfortunately, nothing else in the anime really managed to do all that well. There are attempts at giving character arcs and depth to the rest of the cast but ultimately I don’t think any of them worked and there weren’t any other characters that felt well fleshed out. There’s various relationship development as well, but outside of the romance between Kouichi and the main heroine Emi which was tied intrinsically to Kouichi’s character arc, that was all incredibly lacking too. That’s not to say they didn’t try. There clearly were attempts made to give at least something to pretty much every character. However, there just wasn’t enough content and in the end nothing really landed. The same applies to the combat, wherein it just doesn’t explain abilities or power ups properly and thus everything just seems sort of random.

The plot was also kind of a mess. Firstly, the pacing is all sorts of weird, especially in the first half. It’s strange how much happens without anything happening at all. It feels a lot like long running shounen that are padding things out with fillers and such in order to not catch up with the manga, but that makes no sense for a two cour anime that seems to be trying to tell a complete story. That’s not to say that these parts are bad, the random humor and such are definitely amusing. But in the absence of what felt like much more critical content needed in regards to fleshing out characters and such, it felt like having so much was incredibly unnecessary.

Secondly, what the plot ultimately builds up to was way too messy in too short a period of time. The majority of the plot of the anime is simple enough that there aren’t really any major plot holes, just a lot left unexplained. But towards the end the final twists get kind of ridiculous that they result in a level of dissonance that’s hard to ignore, and that’s coming from someone that’s really good at ignoring plot holes and inconsistencies. If things were more spread out amongst other plot events, or if there was a stronger emphasis on characters that the anime had successfully built into investment in, it would probably have been a lot easier to just gloss over things. But here it pretty much just feels like it’s giving you a straight infodump with loads of clear issues that are right in your face and that makes it kind of hard to pretend they’re not there.

The ending is pretty standard and has the typical ride of emotional beats you would expect from such an anime. They don’t hit as hard as they should due to the aforementioned lack of proper development in most of the cast, but overall I think it worked well enough and almost hit all the right notes. There’s one incredibly major exception to that in that the ending doesn’t give closure at all on Kouichi and Emi’s relationship, even though it would have been so easy to do so. I thought that was because it was going to go in the epilogue OVAs, but nope, that left things hanging awkwardly as well. Whyyyyyy? Just kiss already damn it.

The visuals were very much a mixed bag. The animation was pretty good and the art quality was also decent enough. However, the art style just straight up didn’t work a lot of the time, especially when an emphasis was put on characters faces or expressions, and thus despite it not really feeling budget, it still didn’t look very good. The mech fights had pretty great choreography, however the fights were all CGI, and this anime is from 2008 when mech CGI was nowhere near as good as mech CGI is these days, so it looks pretty bad. The soundtrack was solid, the use of insert songs in the last third was especially great. The OP has a pretty hype song that fits the anime well so I’m fine with it being used for the entire anime. The visuals for it are also solid, and they have some minor changes as the anime progresses to reflect the changing plot, but they’re so minor that it makes it feel off that it didn’t change more. The EDs had solid enough songs, and decent enough visuals, though I would have to say I preferred the first over the second in both regards.

Overall I'd rate Kurogane no Linebarrels 6 out of 10. There were numerous basic ideas lined out, but no major, developments occurred further on.

Review may contain minor spoilers, but nothing that will affect viewability of the show. (KnL = Kurogane no Linebarrels)

First off, the art used in this series was good. Nothing outstanding, but no shortcuts seemed to be taken. Every aspect from characters, through environments and special effects were easy to understand and I personally had no problems seeing what any of the displayed aspects were.

Next up were the filler episodes. No surprise here, seems like most of series tend to have some at ... one point or another. However thing I liked about filler in KnL is that it pinned very nicely into main arc of the series which is a rare phenomenon.

When it came to character performance in the story, there were many clichés, but they were fairly enjoyable. Constant changes and twists in character standpoint may have been exaggerated, but I wouldn't say that they interviened in overall image of KnL.

Now here's several things I disliked in this series. First and foremost, this isn't a spoiler of any sort, but repetition of "Hero of justice" throughout entirety of this series, was quite a nuisance. Phrase tossed around everywhere and used to fill dialogue gaps and reason character actions became quite repetitive and truly became rather annoying after some time. Nonetheless there were some background put to support this 'catchphrase' eventually.

Another aspect of KnL is its' interpretation of ecchi. In comparison to other parts of the series this didn't take up too much time or was significant in any way, but overall seemed like a tool used to keep viewer watching the show. Personally didn't mind it, but the timing, and reasoning for it all, was just ridiculous and appeared almost as a desperate technique.

Story wise there isn't much I can write about without adding spoilers. However few developments throughout most of series made episodes quite dull and repetitive. Although ending was quite informative and interesting. Most of questions I've had stored up have been answered and surprisingly, it made me wanting to watch a short sequel or something of such basis.

Lastly there were few things that I found quite dumb about KnL. Beginning with the group of people series is following (Read synopsis). Even putting their age into consideration, average intelligence level is nothing impressive. Character group importance is quite big taken everything story presents into examination. Thus I was expecting intelligent people dealing with situations in distinct manner. Which as you may understand now did not happen. At least not in my eyes. Moving on, creators made an attempt at spicing up the relationship between the characters. Some of those attempts worked well and others were a pathetic flop. Now when it comes to this point, it is difficult being subjective and I'm sure different viewers will perceive this differently. But from me, I'd say effort was there, but it was overexerted on wrong occasions.

To conclude the review, just like I wrote in the beginning, I'd give KnL 6 out of 10. The negatives outweighed the positive aspects, but thats not to matter. I did enjoy watching Kurogane no Linebarrels, although repetitiveness, and certain parts might have made it a drag to watch the series. I'd say that you should watch KnL yourself to see whether you'll like it or not, but a definite recommendation is something I would not personally give.

This show is just horrible. The MC is so poorly done that I am horrified I even gave 3 minutes of my time as he kill's any enjoyment of the show. I am not sure if it was a very poor attempt at humor but w.e it was it was just horrid. One part he is literally yelling his name out then when another pilot in a different calls out his name he gets confused on how she knew his name. Meanwhile as he is yelling he is Justice he is slaughtering people. The artwork and sound was passable and the story might have ... had potential but.....You really can't expect to do well with a main character like that. It looked like they did a bunch of drugs and got drunk and then did the script while hallucinating.