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.

Story

The Lost Ground was created 22 years ago in the Kanazawa Prefecture when an unexplained geological / metaphysical phenomenon occurred which caused the ground to rise up into peaks accompanied by the release of a lot of energy. There were 2 effects of this. Firstly the Lost Ground split off from the Mainland. Secondly about 1% of the inhabitants of the Lost Ground gained special abilities to manipulate matter in various ways, they are called Alter Capabilists, with accompanying "Alter" abilities. If an Alter Capabilist's ability manifests in the form of a separate entity that separate entity is called an "Alter".

Politics makes this anime very ... interesting. There is the Mainland who treats the Lost Grounds as a sort of beggar nation. The city part of the Lost Ground has trade concessions and AID from the Mainland, and is separated from the rest of the Lost Ground by a high wall. Those outside "The Wall" are called Natives, and alter users there are Native Alters.

In order to combat the Lost Ground Native Alters, Lost Ground Admin sets up an institution called HOLD and a special division within that called HOLY which is basically Native Alters who have come to the Admin side in order to suppress other Native Alters from the other side of the wall. It's sort of like using mutants to fight other mutants. Also note that even within the Admin section of Lost Grounds, Alters are NOT accepted as equal citizens, but they are tolerated if they are members of HOLY.

What a WONDERFUL premise. Special people with powers. Politics. Socio-economic ramifications where the rich live in the city and the rest eke out a beggarly but INDEPENDENT existence outside the wall. Organized government vs. anarchy. Dictatorship vs. Freedom. By the time it hit episode 10, I was thinking "this is GREAT".

If all these wonderful possibilities had been taken to their conclusion I would have given story a 10, but it goes only part of the way there. I will say that the very last FRAME of the series brought the plot from a 8 to a solid 9. You'll understand when you see it.

Character

The main protagonist is Kazuma, the stereotypical rebel bad boy with a heart of gold. His alter is the ability to "harden" his right arm with metallic alloy which gives him the ability to smash through anything. At the beginning of the series he is a native alter living with his sweetheart, Kanami, who has masses of long red hair while keeping his identity as an alter "mercenary for hire" secret.

Before long he encounters Ryuhou, rich spoiled scion of an important industrial conglomerate who has emotional baggage from watching his mother die to a mysterous alter capabilist when he was a child. He is the co-protagonist and is the strong, silent, lawful type. He is the most gifted member of HOLY and is charged with suppressing Native Alters, because as everyone quickly figures out, only alters can fight other alters, normal humans don't stand a chance. Ryohou is ridiculously good looking. In typical aloof hero fashion, he is oblivious to the TWO girls who are in love with him.

Kazuma and Ryuhou start out as enemies but they don't stay that way as things progress. It all happens very naturally too. Sometimes I was not happy with the "one dimensional" nature of Kazuma as the competitive, I want to be the best/winner guy. It's too Dragonball Z. Ryuhou matured as the series progressed but even then there are some manly man man things that manly men can't change.

The cast of supporting characters is very well fleshed out, every single one of them. Straight Cougar is the comic relief but he has a "deep" side and ended up being my favorite characters. Shiree had the most amazing alter. The mainland princess is idealistic and unrealistic. Melon man has his own principles and the rest of the smaller guys you either liked or hated but they weren't easily forgotten. All in all the characters were very well done except for Kazuma's character development which could have been done better.

Art/Animation

By 2008 standards, this is fairly dated with TONS of frame reuse. Like every episode there's frame reuse. However to give credit to the artists the transformation scenes are very well drawn with excellent artistic licence, flow, color and creativity. You don't get bored of seeing the "alters" of various people. If not for this I would have rated Art a lot lower.

Sound

The first strains of the opening sounds reminded me of Ricky Martin's "She Bangs"!! Serious!!! The alter sound effects were well done and voice acting was good. Not much else to say, nothing else jumped out at me as horrible or wonderful enough to give this more than a 7 rating.

Enjoyment

I didn't expect to enjoy this series as much as I did. Some parts of it were very predictable, characters fit into anime stereotypes but still with all the variety and interaction and plot driven devices this ended up being a very enjoyable watch. There's lots of fighting, cool alters, philosophical parts, drama, angst, love, what's not to like? Slightly better Art, a little more character development with Kazuma and pushing some other plot points to their conclusion would have made this a 10.

s-CRY-ed is one of my personal favorite animes. The wide set of characters is amazing, and the interaction between them is even better. In some way, all of them are connected through one another.

The story in a nutshell is set a few years after "The Great Uprising" and this in return sets up the character plots. Alters vs. HOLY. Alters are people who gained certain abilities from the incident a few years back, and they live outside the inner city just trying to survive, but HOLY wishes to either eliminate them all, or bring them to their side.

This show is very enjoyable. A lot of ... choice words thrown out here and there, nothing anyone hasn't heard before. If your a fan of DBZ, you'll most likely enjoy this one too. The story is great, the Animation is fantastic with awesome sound to go with it. As I said, the characters make the show even better, and it's just all around enjoyable.

Emotion also runs high in this one. A lot of anger from Kazuma, Scheris and Mimori make love a real issue for Ryuhou, and Ryuhou is just one of those lost boys trying to figure out what's really going on in the world and what really happened in his past. Kanami makes this story enjoyable too. And those are just a few of the most important characters. Cougar is a pretty funny guy too ;] The two main guys are Kazuma and Ryuhou, which in every other episode they're pretty much punching each other's faces into the ground, or arguing about something or other.

Overall, s-CRY-ed is one anime your not going to want to miss out on. The art is beautiful, the plot gets thicker and thicker as you get into further episodes, and you really have to pay attention in the beginning to understand everything to the fullest. This one isn't an anime you have to read the manga for either, so there's a plus. The manga goes into more details about the story, but oh well.

s-CRY-ed gets a 10/10 overall from me. Make sure to watch it sometime.