s.CRY.ed

Okay kids, time for some real talk. Dub Scryed is the best God damned show ever made, and will ever be made, in the history and future of visual entertainment. It's about this badass dude with a nuclear-powered arm and a jet engine on his back who takes shit from no man. Basically he enjoys his life living in an abandoned dentist's office in the slums with his loli fangirl until some uniformed douchebags from the city across the way show up to wreck his stuff and kidnap him. From that point on he, Kazuma The Shell Bullet (the main character. last names are for ... pussies), devotes his life to kicking their asses, especially this one pompus, justice-obsessed guy named Ryuho. He's pretty much your cliche bishounen hero and serves as the other main character of the show.

The main theme of the series is their rivalry in particular. No matter what else goes on in this show, it all ultimately boils down to our badass hero and our girly nerd hero wanting to beat the shit out of each other.

But seriously now, Scryed is basically what you'd get if you took Naruto, Bleach, DBZ and Code Geass, cut out the filler, terrible writing, homoerotic overtones and everything else that brings those shows down and put the gold left over into 26 episodes. Speaking of Code Geass, that series is literally just Scryed after Goro Taniguchi got paid tons of money to add Clamp art, school crap, robots and double the series length for no reason.

The pacing's good. The first half of the series has Kazuma coming to a classic shounen showdown with some of the wildest and most awesome/gimmicky/hateable enemies I've ever seen. In the background of all this, the plot develops as the big bad city and its police force comes into greater conflict with the slum people. Of course this all involves dudes with weird superpowers fighting too.

Later on in the show, after Kazuma breaks the universe in half with a flick of his wrist, the series jumps into overdrive and all sorts of awesome shit happens. Scryed shows that it can juggle multiple subplots at once with equal weight(something Code Geass wishes it could do btw), which does nothing but add to how awesome the last batch of eps are. The final episode of Scryed should be duly noted as the best final episode of anything ever. Not even exaggerating here.

Characters? Awesome. Many people confuse Kazuma with a cliche shounen hero, when in fact he's everything a good shounen hero has never been. Does he fight for his friends? Nah. Does he fight to become a great figure? No way. Does he fight just because he likes fighting? Well, yeah. Obv. But the key difference is that Kazuma does not give a DAMN. Do you have hostages and are threatening Kazuma? He'll just knock you the hell out with no regards for anyone else. He's impulsive, selfish, destructive, reckless, totally narrow-minded, PROUD and all the other things heroes are too balless or moral to be. These factors play heavily into his character development, as he becomes gradually more mentally unstable and self-destructive.

Then there's Ryuho. He's the polar opposite of Kazuma in every conceivable way in terms of personality, appearance, powers, back story, etc. Such is the point. He's almost as major as Kazuma, though I don't feel like typing a lot about him. Just note that he "HATES EVERYTHING EVIL!"

There's also Straight Cougar as Crispin Freeman. Or perhaps it's the other way around. Hard to tell. Anyway he's the best character in the show besides Kazuma and a fan favorite. The whole premise of his person is to live fast and be awesome. He's actually stronger than both the main characters, but he doesn't even care enough to show it. That's how slick this guy is.

Others include:
Kanami: Loli Narrator
Kimishima: Kazuma's best bro, third best character right here
Scheris: Boobs(in the manga) with Kari's voice from Digimon
Mimori: The cancer of the series, we don't talk about her
Jigmar: Mullet-clad commander of HOLY. sounds like Jelly Jiggler
Tachibana: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSs_T23qqW4#t=02m00s
Biff: HAMMMMMMMERRRRR
Urizane: Has mighty watermelon powers
Emergy: This guy actually summons a damn Gundam to fight Kazuma
A humpback whale: The main enemy of the series
Kyoji Mujo: The most wonderfully slick and antagonistic villain ever. He's actually just a gay elf but whatever.

Other Stuff: Hm... Music. Yes. As with like every Taniguchi show, this series has a plethora of dramatic Mexican trumpets, acoustic guitars, male choruses, etc which liven up action scenes, make dramatic scenes wonderfully Tele-Novela-esque in their cheesiness, etc. A+ OST.

Now let's shut up for a sec to talk about voices. You don't watch Scryed subbed. Let me repeat:

###You DO NOT watch Scryed subbed.###

Not only does every sub group for this series suck horrendously in ways you can't begin to grasp(I hope you're reading this, incompetent "FIST OF MY EGO!" translators), but the original voices produce a very different series. A boring, desolate series only fools dare to tread where a really aggressive constipated boy does shoddy combat with some losers. A stark contrast to Dub Scryed(the correct title for the series) which follows the antiheroic exploits of a proud man with a prouder fist asserting himself upon dastardly cheesy wrongdoers who are running all up in his house. The scriptwriting in the dub is Pulitzer worthy, as shown by that youtube link above and these gems:

"If it exists, I'll find it! Even if it doesn't!"

"Kazuma~! How are you going to get out of this PINCH?"
"You should know the answer... with my fist!!"

Oh yeah, there's art and animation too. Portions of the first few episodes of the series look very 90's, but as the series goes on it gets better and better. They actually spent a good portion of the budget on just the final episode, which is considerably smoother than previous ones and even features fully new transformation sequences and no stock footage at all. Not that there's much of that in the series in the first place.

SUMMARY: It's the son of G Gundam and First of the North star and the father of Needless and Gurren Lagann. Dub only, sub sucks. This is the only shounen fightan' anime you'll ever want or need to watch.

The premise of Scryed seemed reminiscent to X-Men, certain people had special powers which led to discrimination from the general public. There's a team of them working to iron out the differences, while others resort to violence. I found the series to be pretty enjoyable despite it's simple plot and progression, although I started to become disenchanted toward the end. Most, if not all of the fights were up-front with little thinking or strategy, and after seeing them play out the same way over and over it became boring. I didn't really care for the way the ending was handled either, but I won't describe ... it to avoid spoilers. Overall a decent sci-fi action anime, but you could do better imho.

This anime is criminally OVERrated...

Aesthetically it's a good looking anime with great music. Conceptually the themes are interesting on their own-but fall flat.

While watching, I found myself asking "why?" many times; mostly due to the lack of explanations or reasons presented in the show itself.

This anime is way too long, yet ironically 26 episodes isn't enough to present an idea, build on it, and flesh out a relatively small cast of characters.

Interesting ideas and problems that characters face are forgotten by the next episode, and characters that do absolutely nothing to progress the story somehow get boat loads of screen time.

There is no tension ... in the show at all. The special abilities that characters posses are not explained at all and the "Alter ability" generally has no rules or limits. Characters use and gain special powers and abilities out of nowhere just because something has to progress the story. This became more noticeable during the mid-end portion of the show.

The anime also suffers from not having a main antagonist. The show realizes this pretty deep in and tries to bumrush you with cannon-fodder villains to close it out.

If you want to watch a simple anime with constant fighting then try s.CRY.ed, but in the end that's all it is.