Kenran Butou Sai: The Mars Daybreak

This is about as cookie cutter as you can get. Mars Daybreak features our carefree and free-spirited male lead Gram finding his own mecha that gets attracted to him for whatever reason and he tags along with the pirate crew aboard the Ship of Aurora in the hunt for ancient treasure on the planet of Mars. Basically, the series mixes around adventure and comedy in its focus on Gram and the Ship of Aurora crew as they usually run into combat situations against rival pirate Kubernes and Earth Forces, as well as having episodes focused around a different member of the crew. It's a decent ... storytelling approach, but the series doesn't really bother going into great detail on the backgrounds of each character and how they became part of the pirate crew, especially when you have a talking cat and dolphin among the crew who never get any fleshing out. Pretty much, the majority of characters in the series are archetypes you would see in one form or another in different adventure titles similar in premise to Mars Daybreak and they never really grow out of them, with only one major character in the series getting any significant character development.

The lack of depth also rings true for many elements of the show's storyline and the title's world-building. The series seemed to be dropping hints that Gram might have a past connection to the earliest humans who colonized Mars in the first half of the show, yet this builds up to nothing. There are hostilities between Mars and Earth for the latter's occupancy and influence being felt on Mars and contributing to large amounts of poverty and crime to occur, yet this is mostly a backdrop to the adventures of Gram and the Ship of Aurora. No explanation is given as to why all of Mars is covered in water. Ester makes mention of being part of a race of beings called the Nautical Witches, yet the show never bothers telling us what they are. Nothing is revealed over how an RB is able to come under Gram's control. I could go on and on pointing out the lack of depth and explanation that Mars Daybreak has for many elements to its plot and world.

I suppose the best way you could enjoy this series is if you don't ask questions and just enjoy the comedy and adventure. But many comedic moments in Mars Daybreak fell flat for me and the adventure element has its setbacks thanks to the character-focused episodes feeling like padding that add nothing to the show since we don't learn much about the characters anyway and even then, most of the developments of the adventure are cliched and quite predictable if you've seen enough titles like this. You know that the Ship of Aurora crew will prevail in many of their missions unless the plot demands for a twist in developments, which occur in the final episodes of the show. Even then, said twist is very predictable considering you could see it coming from a mile away since the Ship of Aurora crew knew how fishy things were with this development. It's not that I find this series to be bad at all. It's just there's nothing unique in it that sticks out for me compared to similar offerings I've seen in the past.

Overall, this series may be worth a look if you're showing it to a younger audience (since the show was made for young boys in Japan) or if this is one of your first anime titles you are checking out. But otherwise, Mars Daybreak doesn't really offer anything for more seasoned anime fans unless you can look past the depth issues and lack of unique elements.

The Mars Daybreak is the picture of average. It has a beginning, middle, and end. There's really not much more to say about it. The protagonist is a Gary Stu, everyone else is a static stereotype, and only a couple characters demonstrate any growth, albeit along predictable trajectories. You might like a couple of the side characters (there are a ton of em so it would be rare that not one strikes a chord with you) but they all get so little time or effort in fleshing them out that there's nothing to any of them but a handful of traits. ... If you like any character, it better be Gram, because he's the one who you're gonna be seeing most of. The setting, the characters, the plot, everything here lays the minimum groundwork for a story and nothing more. It wasn't so awful that I couldn't bear to watch but there's genuinely not any reason to watch this. Perhaps a worse fate than being steaming garbage :/