Gungrave

Story about fight over power in mafia organization and betrayal among best friends. Let me tell you my personal feelings about this anime. First of all it's highly overrated. The concept of the story is good but first episode spoil everything and you just wait 20 episodes for the obvious act of betrayal. Art is poor if not average ! dying creatures just disappear and the rest of effects just won't let you go wow! Characters were fine excluding their names as well names of the organizations: Beyond the Grave, Big Daddy, McDowell, Brandon, Vulcan, Lighting, O
oh come on, 5 years old kid could ... come up with better names. Shortly this anime is crap and looks like amateur work. Only thing I liked about it, was final episode wich was pretty touching.

(PS: Originally posted on August 23, 2011)

Warning: this review contains copious amounts of sarcasm.

2nd Warning: the many sarcastic remarks done by the writer of this review does not detract from the fact that this anime is actually freaking horrible.

3rd Warning: I'm sorry but this review contains "SPOILERS". So if you want to watch it without being spoiled, then do not continue reading. However, let me just give you some advice and stay away from this god awful anime...PLEASE STAY AWAY!

I wanted to like this anime, I really did. But things started really going bad once I knew what this anime was trying to do. This ... anime was about friendship…AGAIN! But in Gungrave it simply does not work. Crime syndicates, friendship prevailing, and honor do not go well together. There is nothing honorable and friendly about killing people to make money. Also, when your best friend betrays you, kills everybody you love, and then kills you as well, you are way past the best friend stage at that point. But the main problem with Gungrave is that every character, down to the last one (except probably Mika), is a hypocrite.

Within the first few episodes you kind of know a bit where this might be going. Brandon loves Maria but when she is adopted by the big boss of a crime syndicate known as Millennion, Brandon decides to join with his best friend in order to protect her. His best friend Harry on the other hand wants to climb to the top to satisfy his own ambitions. What I was expecting was Brandon to try and free Maria from the clutches of this crime organization so she can live a peaceful life without murder and violence. Thing is, that is not what happens. Brandon ends up becoming friends with the big boss dude (known as Big Daddy) and hopes that Maria has a happy and peaceful life LIVING WITH A CRIME LORD. To make things worse, she ends up having a child with Big Daddy because Brandon doesn’t want to be with her because he has become a murderer who serves the organization. He doesn't want her to lead a tragic life along side a man who is a killer. BRANDON YOU FUCKING DUMBASS, what the hell makes you think she will lead a more happy life and non tragic life with the boss of Millennion? Oh and guess what, Maria dies. Wow, I'm so shocked.

This anime also loses a lot of focus going from Brandon wanting to protect Maria from a life of crime, and then wanting to protect the Millennion "code of honor", to then wanting to help his best friend Harry climb up the latter of the organization. Dude, decide which one you want because this is getting annoying. This show also doesn’t know what it wants to be. Is it a love story, a friendship story, or an honor/betrayal story? I don’t have a problem with it being all of the themes I just mentioned, but it’s all just mashed in there together like one big mess and in the end it really makes no sense. All this talk about Big Daddy being a loving person who honors everyone and wants to help everyone around him is just a bunch of bullshit. Harry, who betrays Brandon and becomes boss of Millennion, even says at the end that Big Daddy was a hypocrite who killed many people as well. Brandon however rebutted that statement saying it wasn’t true since Big Daddy knew some of the stuff he was doing was bad but the reason he created Millennion was to protect the people he loved and also the citizens around him. So let me get this straight, Big Daddy wanted to protect the people around him and so in order to do that he founded a crime organization which makes money by killing and stealing from people…incredible Big Daddy, you truly are an inspiration to us all. That is the equivalence of me wanting to bring peace to the world by creating a weapons manufacturing company. I can just imagine my slogan, “Firearms, the road to peace!”

That is pretty much the stupidity of this show in a nutshell. I could even bring more examples of why every character is so damn stupid and unlikable. Maria in the beginning doesn’t want Brandon to fight and be a criminal. She even tries to talk him out of doing such things. But what does she do after? She ends up fucking Big Daddy and farting out a child with the head leader of Millennion even though she knows what type of occupation the man is involved in. What happened to you being all righteous and good? Another example of hypocrisy and stupidity would have to be the Henchman who always has glasses on (I forgot his name so I’m just going to call him “glasses man”). Glasses man allows Harry to marry and go out with his daughter even though he knows how much of an asshole he is. The reason why he lets his daughter be with Harry is because he wants her to be happy with the man she loves…even though that man is a murdering psycho! Glasses man, if you want your daughter to be happy, do not let her stay in a relationship that you know will not end well. Oh and guess what, she dies too…WOW, I AM SO FUCKING SHOCKED!

This anime is however not all bad. A really amazing episode I loved a lot had to be episode 8 called “Family” which involved the killing of Glasses man closest friend called Sid who ended up betraying Millennion in order to save his own son. It was very emotional stuff and it showed us how tragic life is when you get involved in the mafia. This is what the show should have been about! It should have been about our main protagonists trying to escape the life of organized crime, not embracing it and talking about how honorable one is when being part of one. It really pisses me off because this show started out good and its moral dilemma’s seemed to make sense, but then it just lost focus on what it was about and took a right turn into bullshit land.

Everyone in this show dies and I’m happy about that since everyone is a douchebag. It’s not like I cared anyways because everyone is so stupid. The ending has to do with Brandon and Harry dying together because even though Harry did all those horrible things to Brandon (like killing everyone he loves), their friendship is eternal. See how stupid these characters are! Actually I think I finally found an overall theme for this anime. It has nothing to do with friendship and love. It all has to do with dying when serving in the mafia. Even if you do find love and happiness when you are in league with a crime organization, horrible death is the only thing you will get in the end. Mafia is evil, evil is stupid, stupidity eventually leads to death. It all makes sense now.

A very unknown anime, but with his small fanbase it is the most overrated anime I have ever seen (just see the reviews in MAL itself), its community treats it as a classic cult, which it COULD have been but is FAR from being. (Now if you don’t have the patience to read this book, scroll down to the final considerations where I summarize my opinions)
Gungrave starts with a HORRIBLE first episode, where he wants to give some taste of what will happen in the future but ends up just being bad and giving heavy spoilers of what we will see later. I ... highly recommend skipping this episode, because episode 18 is the same thing as this first one. (They tried to foreshadowing the same way as Berserk 97 but they failed)
Then the anime goes to a big flashback, which is where the anime shines.
In short, the story talles two great friends poor from the periphery who entered the mafia and want to go up there. Brandon is a quiet person (too much) and just wants to be loyal and protect those he loves. Harry, on the other hand, has a great ambition and will do anything for her. (Again identical to Berserk) Basically this is the plot, the central theme of these show revolves around family, loyalty, ambition and betrayal.
The anime has a bit slow pace but creates a really cool story, with some memorable moments (episodes 8,14 and 26 are AMAZING). But now comes the bad part.. And how bad it is .. Oh boy ..
At some point, elements of sci fi are introduced in the anime (and a bad ones), in the worst Resident Evil style and that's where the anime throws everything that was built until then in the GARBAGE (Well, the first episode tried to warn us that it would happen but we didn't listen haha). The second half of the anime is a succession of bad action scenes, with a plot worthy of 80's trash film (with things like the villain's crazy laugh looking at the city through the building's window), with stupid characters (there's a fat zombie that flies with a helicopter propeller on his back), with cringe lines ("I don't deserve a name, call me N, there are no names in hell"). That is, the anime was screwed. The only cool thing about the second half is the last episode that returns to the themes discussed in the past and gives a cool outcome to the characters. The rest is the purest and most complete TRASH.
This may be personal, but I believe that it is common sense that the opening is stupid and its a fact that doesn't match the show (that elevator music with that poses is so ridiculous), the OST communicates well with the anime but it is far from something memorable, the ending is incredible (and it should be the OP). The animation in general is ok, at times it is good but there are scenes very badly done. One thing to quote is in the direction, it has very nice details like the phrases in the preview of the next episode (Very similar to Trigun, and it is not for nothing, since it has the hand of the creator of this series in Gungrave). A specific scene worth mentioning is the whole end of episode 14 that was magnificent, very well done.

Final considerations:
When the anime focuses on the protagonists, the mafia and the core themes that I mentioned before it's a great anime. But when he goes to the "sci fi" side, "Resident Evil", "Michael Bay", "80's trash B movie" he becomes something VERY stupid. In the end my grade for the series as a whole is 5. That's because the mafia part is really good so I can't give it a lower grade. It's funny how this anime has some of the best episodes I've seen in all the anime and also some of the worst, and all of that in just 26 episodes. My relationship with this anime is one of hate, hate because I wanted to love him but he makes me want to burn my eyes and burst my ears to make him stop.