RahXephon

Ah... RahXephon...

Where do I even begin?

First off, if you're walking into this with expectations, you'll be disappointed. If you have almost no expectations at all (Like I did), you'll still be disappointed.


Story:
I find it funny how people can praise this as being, “Well written,” or say it has a, “Complex story,” seriously...
If you thought either of those things after watching this the whole way through, then you need to see a doctor. Yes, I know there's different ways of telling a story, but then there's just throwing a bunch of random bull!@#$ at the viewers with no context or meaning. Yet, people seem ... to have a big enough of an imagination that they force themselves (And others) to believe that, if it doesn't make sense you just have to, “Think harder,” because every little thing is symbolic somehow right? People LOVE using symbolism to convince people that the piece of crap they're trying to sell you is actually a diamond. “Well, if you look at it this way.” they say...
Don't listen to them, or that little voice in your head saying that you might have, “Missed something,” or that maybe, “It's just to complicated for you.” Because it's not. Some other shows? Maybe... but this one? No, just no.
You'd have to be delusional to say this is a, “Great anime.” After watching RahXephon, just reading through the reviews here will make you lose your faith in humanity (If you have any left). I can't help but think that everyone's being raised as idiots, or maybe it's genetic.


“Characters:”
Other people say that the story was fair, but the characters were, “Second to sound,” don't make me laugh. So, as for the characters...
Can they really even be called that?
When they come and go with almost non-existent back story and personalities?
(I mean, COME ON... just because they say to themselves, “I like person X, but they don't like me back. Life is hard :'( “ doesn't mean they actually have personalities, ok?)
Or when they die and then reappear again with absolutely no explanation like nothing ever happened?
Or how about when the main one is having an identity crisis every other episode, even after he's already come to the conclusion that he knows who he is TWICE already! And that's on top of the fact that he keeps forgetting who he likes every time there's a girl who throws herself at him.


This isn't even supposed to be a romance drama is it? Because if it is, it failed horribly at that too. It seems to me that the writer (If they should even be called one) were just making this up as they went along. Their thought process going something like:
“We need don't have enough story for 26 episodes, lets come up with something so we can keep airing... I GOT IT! Lets throw a girl at the MC in this episode, add a random mecha to fight here, make this girl disappear so we can throw another one, another random mecha to fight there... Oh wait! We don't have that many episodes left after all that, “Story,” time to make the MC remember who he really likes before it ends!”
...

You get the idea. (I hope)
I could go on and on explaining how bad it turned out to be by the end of it, but if you didn't get my point by now, then there's really nothing else I can do to persuade you out of wasting your time, so that's all I have to say about it. (It's 1 am crazy rant over)

Well, now that I'm finished writing this review, I'm going to try and erase this show from my memory. Maybe Ayato can hook me up with something, he's gotta be on some sort of drug to be forgetting everything as much as he is. (Plus, if hallucinations are a side effect, that would certainly explain a lot.)

Keep it real, peace.

My friend convinced me to watch this since I watched evangelion. Oh boy, was I not expecting something so utterly shit

Story: 2
Tbh, I have basically no fucking clue what is going on in the story. I have read that this is because the audience is basically seeing through the mc's eyes and getting information as he does, and naturally he himself was thrown into some weird shit and also knows nothing. However, this style of storytelling and worldbuilding can be done correctly and does not excuse the utter confusion and boredom I felt when watching this. It wasn't the type of confusion where I wanted ... to seek out the answer and watch the next episode, it was the type of confusion that made me drop this at 6 eps.

From what little information I managed to get out of those episodes, there seems to be some sort of alien/non-human invasion or something (they bleed blue or some shit) and they took over a city and time runs slower in that city. The aliens use weird giant mechs or something to attack and there is an organisation on the outside that defends against these attacks (I can see parallels to evangelion here with the angel attacks). The MC is some kid who is half alien and can pilot some mega op mech called rahxephon. And he also sees some chick that he likes or something who always leads him to the mech. Oh and there was a girl who liked him and since the aliens took over and time flows slower where he lives, shes actually a fair bit older than him now, and there seems to be some romance between them but the whole age thing doesn't make it any less weird.
Idk how accurate I got that but the show seems pretty fucking weird from what I remember.

Art: 5
There was nothing particularly memorable about the art or animation. It didn't stand out as amazing, nor did it stand out as bad. The only thing I really have to say about it is that the mech designs look weird as fuck and aren't very appealing at all.

Sound: 3
Probably just comes down to my preferences. I really can't remember anything about the sound except for how shit the op is. My friend praised it as really good and it was extremely disappointing. Based on that, it's a 3.

Character: 3
All of the characters so far seemed pretty 2 dimensional. Nothing more to say cause I was too busy being confused

Enjoyment: 1
Between the lack of anything enjoyable, ugly robot designs and confusing storytelling + confusing story itself, I lacked any enjoyment as I watched the 6 episodes of this that I watched.

Overall: 3

What a slog this was to finish now that I did. It's a less good version of NGE and it could have been a shorter series with the same plot and overall arc's. After episode 18 I just started skipping through the episodes, a rinse and repeat every 3-4 Episodes. It did not age well.

Story is mediocre, extremely old tropes and laid out stereotypes/roles. Down to the female captain with the boy pilot and family issues, how can we have a worse protag than Shinji? I like the RahXephons design, I really enjoyed seeing POC/Black character portrayed well, the VA's are not bad.

My overall ... opinion is not recommended. I agree with the rest of these reviewers it's hard to first get into, but keep expectations low and it's easily watchable while gaming or doing crafts with wanting something up on the side fi you REALLY want to see this. At least there's nice scenes you can use for AMV's, which is how I found this and wanted to originally watch it.