No Guns Life

If ‘No Guns Life’ (NGL) were an American cartoon, they could have called it, ‘Second Amendments Life.’ Imagine the liberals attempting to ban guns, and then Juzo filibustering their candy assess because that would infringe upon his right to life. Then, after winning the case, he could slap Ted Cruz in the face, and claim he has really bad aim with his high-fives.

NGL is a dynamic anime where the main character, Juzo Inui, kills various villains on his quest toward determining who turned him into an ‘extended’ (cyborg designed for war). The dark, murky atmosphere is a nice lure to pull in ... the viewer; however, when Juzo begins to act silly (i.e. the embarrassed faces he makes when he sees a half-naked girl), it becomes irksome. Juzo’s characterization, thus far, is rather superficial, and if it weren’t for his gun prosthetic, it would be difficult to distinguish him from other action-centric heroes. He’s the classic ‘badass hero’ who is designed to look cool, and defeat numerous baddies.

NGL also draws a clear line of demarcation between the good-guys and the members of the evil corporation (Berühren Corporation). Making the story a black-and-white affair, that will, most likely follow a predictable build up to the final ‘boss fight.’ The visuals are respectable — given that it’s Madhouse — nevertheless, there is nothing stunning or memorable. The OST, along with the anime itself, is uninspired, and easily forgettable.

All in all: NGL features humdrum action, insipid characters, and weird tonal shifts that are anything but funny. If you were looking for a show that captured the same excitement as ‘Black Lagoon,’ then keep searching, because it ain’t NGL.

No Guns Life? Yes, no guns should ever be brought to life.

Spoiler warning but I'll just give you one small one, it's not good. Don't bother watching this series because it is downright awful. I know for a fact that at face value this show seems 'cool' and 'radical' with the main character having a head of a revolver and the world taking place in the future. I know this because that was my initial thoughts when going into this show, honestly, the show was fine until everything changed when that Tetsurou annoyance entered the scene. Right away that kid alone just place this show ... in the negative zone, he is literally the embodiment of kid Naruto and that's not a nice thing to see. This is literally his format for his character for scenarios, Juno is busy with an issue, the boy's a busybody and has to 'help', in turn of 'helping' Juno he fucks up and gets beaten up, Juno saves him and the boy just apologies, then the cycle continues. This is utter trash writing from the people behind this series, even if is a copy from the books, they do not even try to make scenes or plot interesting.

I am going to be straight, the reasons why I didn't give this series a 1 because I love the concept and I like Mary and Juno, that's all. The music sucks, the art sucks (especially coming from you Madhouse), plot uninteresting and unfocused, just the show is a complete mess. Like if they just focus the whole plot on Mary and Juno alone, I bet it would come for a much enjoyable series, 'Mary and Juno's Bizarre Adventures'. That I would dig. It is so obvious the studio is placing this series out for the sake of filling the anime seasons slots, I know for a fact that Madhouse is not using the full production team due to them also working on Chihayafuru 3. Either this shows the saturation of anime titles the NHK demands to studios or that Madhouse just got lazy and they decided to just shit out series without any dazzle on them. This doesn't come off super disappointing as I can clearly see the show's flaws at the near beginning, so it really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that this series is bad. I do want to call out the ambitious aim the show was trying to go for, like the issue with robots living aside humans and the struggle to maintain peace after a long war. However I just think the studio didn't actually understand the sheer size of what they were aiming, there were tons of technological gaps in the show, not very innovative ideas despite the place being in the future, social system is like messy and politics are just obsolete. I am going to stop here, but if you watch it through yourself you would be able to intake this pile of under-produced crap.

-SCORES-

Characters- 4/10: Fuck the kid and almost everyone else, Juno and Mary are the only acceptable ones.

Art- 3/10: Boobies are big but the physics is so bad that every oppai seems dead to me. In majority of the scenes, especially when the characters turn or look somewhere else, it looks as if the turning animation was made on Windows XP. Face are fucked, environment's boring and the whole show is just trying to mimic shit. Only thing to praise them for is the use of Unreal Engine 4. It's true though, some of the visuals are pretty 'unreal' to believe in.

Writing- 2/10: Ooooweee did this part had a blast, since there is so much bad shit to ramble about I'll just say one good thing. Which is errrrrrrrr... Nevermind I can't think of anything. The show is bad at choosing whether this scene should be serious or that scene should be funny and whatnot.

Sound- 5/10: For the most part is fine, everything does it's job but not super well nor super bad. Everything is alright except the god awful outro, like seriously what is with that outro. It feels as if the singers just muttering a script with the beat off some Eurovision song.

Overall, trash. Plus there is a second season coming up, what a joke. I guess the only way Madhouse and the writers can prove themselves is by delivering their utmost best in the next one. But to comeback from a ditch as deep as this would take a miracle.

Strong 2 to a light 3

No Guns Life is an anime from last year. The manga started in 2014 and is still ongoing. The anime version came from Madhouse. Let's just hope it came from their division that works on quality projects instead of their one that makes complete tripe.

Story:

Inui Juuzou is an Extended. Which is basically the term this series uses for cyborgs. He has a gun for a head and is able to function in normal society solely through cooperating with the authorities and he makes a living by taking on jobs involving other cyborgs. The anime basically covers a series of these jobs and Juuzou's struggles with ... the large, world ruling corporation Berühren.

There are some pretty significant flaws. First off, we find out that Juuzou can't fire the gun on his own head because the trigger is in the back of his head... in a spot you could reach with a normal range of motion.... with no indication that he's hampered in that regard. And you can't say that someone needs special authorization, because we see it fired once in this series and it's by a kid. The ending is also pretty shit. Usually when you have a series like this, they'll try to make the ending satisfying even though they're going for a sequel by answering some big question, showing a major antagonist brought down or otherwise wrapping up some ongoing plot thread. In this one, they decided to give you a really boring case and leaving everything important to be wrapped up later.

This also suffers from the same problem as a lot of 90s comics where they feel the need to constantly and quickly introduce the next thing so you can get into the action and the few moments where they take a break and could, potentially, work on character development end up being kind of rushed set ups for the next bit of action.

About the best I can say for the series is that there are a few moments that are kind of interesting and none of its faults are so egregious that they absolutely ruin it or get obnoxious.

Characters:

Hard bitten detective, naive kid with a mysterious power, girl in a supporting role who jokes around with the hero. It sounds clichéd because it is. The series also has one of those trans women characters who looks really masculine and acts flirtatious with men in a way that makes them uncomfortable. Because that's such a great trope.

I also have to talk about the evil corporation. In something with strong writing that has an evil corporation, you'll see humanity from the people who work there and the company's evil actions will have some kind of profit-based motive behind them. In this one, there's an effort to do that but they just go too far with the evil deeds. We see them use children for cyborg experiments. We also see them decide to sacrifice a bunch of innocent civilians for very flimsy reasons. Which basically makes them Republic Serial villains without the sense of fun.

Art:

This is another aspect I'm going to compare to bad 90s comics. A lot of the cyborg character designs, including gun head, look to be going for the "extreme" aesthetic rather than looking good. The non-cyborgs tend to have some bizarre characteristic that just makes them look weird like Olivier's lips or Cronen's eyebrows. The action sequences are pretty good. They flow fairly well. The backgrounds are detailed. Maybe a bit too drab but detailed.

Sound: 

The acting is well done. Suwabe Junichi, Numakura Manami & Ymashita Daiki all deliver their lines well. About the worst performances you get are from Ebara Masashi & Ueda Youji. Ebara because the series has that typical, exaggerated, overly masculine trans character and that character always sounds awful. Ueda's performance is meant to sound like a slimy corporate man but he just comes across as hammy. 

Kawai Kenji's music is fine. It's not the best I've heard from him by any means but it's basically functional. 

Ho-yay:

There's really none to be found. 

Areas of Improvement:

If Juuzou has limited range of motion and actually can't reach the back of his own head, illustrate that instead of just having the characters act like it's impossible to reach back there. It's awkward, but it's well within a normal person's range of motion. 
Don't make your corporation so cartoonishly evil. 
Better pacing with more time to develop your characters and their relationship dynamics would do wonders.

Final Thoughts:

This anime is a lot like a mediocre 90s comic, maybe a bit worse. With an extreme aesthetic, under-developed characters & pacing that wants to rush anything character-based because they're worried that any atmosphere or character building will bore the audience. I'm giving it a 4/10. 

This show has no sauce. The first episode tricked me into thinking this might be good. Stylish MC, a looming megacorp that owns people's bodies, and a unique mystery. Unfortunately, all three of these points get dropped in like... episode 2. You are promised a hard boiled detective series, but then fails to have the detective do any sloothing. No villains are uncovered, they are all happy to explicitly state that they are evil. The mysteries, if you could even call them that, basically solve themselves with the answer just falling into the lap of the b-plot character for that episode so they can show ... up to the main plot and actually do something for exactly one scene before taking the background to sauceless action sequences.

The aesthetic is interesting on a surface level with next to nothing lying behind it. Dudes just have fucked up bodies that look evil if they are evil or cool if they are good. There's no consistency or themes.

If I vaguely state stuff that happens in the story it almost sounds interesting. A megacorp makes all the cybernetics (called extensions in this series) and own the world. There's an anti-extend group killing innocent people who have cybernetics. The main character was made to be a weapon in a war and is now a private eye. Sometimes extends (people with extensions) experience discrimination (despite literally everyone we see in the series being extended.)
The problem comes in on how these aspects are executed. The megacorp is just comically evil, because if they weren't then the show would actually have something to say. Idk how you have a corporation that owns everyone's physical bodies without even the slightest attempt at commentary on capitalism. The anti-extend group is also just evil with no subtlety, they just kinda hate extends and just like to murder people to make extends look violent. Don't think about how stupid that is. They don't really have any philosophy besides just cyberpunk racism. The main character is just op in the most boring way possible, there's never any tension because literally nobody could ever threaten him in any meaningful way. He gets on the megacorps bad side and the only consequences are like one attempt to spite him and a minor inconvenience.
The discrimination against extends bit never actually has consequences for anyone. The main character is never denied entrance somewhere because he looks like a gun. At most a few characters act slightly shocked at the fact he looks the way he does. Best we get is a girl in the final arc who won't talk to him, but it's all hand waved by the end of the episode with the main characters just stumbling into the thing that progresses the plot.

The story is painfully passive. Nobody does anything. Things just kinda happen to the characters and then the resolution just kinda happens in the same way the conflict just kinda happened at the start.

The music is forgettable. I genuinely can't recall how a single track sounds and I literally just finished watching it.

The sound is bad, half of everything in this show sounds like stock audio effects.

The action is lame, it's a slideshow with no weight or consequences.

Visually you get everything from the first episode with no actual variety in the locations, colors, or sets. Nobody interacts with the world, it's a wholly unappealing backdrop (and not in the intentional way that cyberpunk likes to do)

A remarkable lack of sauce on display. Don't waste your time.

Does not contain spoilers

So, as you can see i gave this a rather mediocre score, therefore, let's start with the good, especially since there's not that much of it. Its studio madhouse. That's good i guess. The drawing is their iconic style, which looks great, especially on the main character, although weirdly enough, in this show even that style doesn't seem to be able to fill the picture with anything to stop it from feeling lacking. The design of the cyborgs is pretty neat. Overall picture (but not animation) quality is decent. Sound's good, the opening's great... That's about it really.

What's the rest then? Dreadful. ... Without even joking, at least a third of the show you'll be greeted with the main character staring into space, usually while smoking. Another third you'll be listening to huge, shameless exposition bombs about the world and the relations between factions, other characters staring into space or saying/doing something cryptic that only they understand the significance of in the moment, you might understand it later too if you bother investing into understanding the poor lore, for whatever reason, because its honestly not worth it. Now, i'd be lying if i said the last third that consists of the fights and interactions isn't kind of nice, which it is, but in the end, there's just so little of it, and the plot barely goes anywhere too, but i guess there's another season announced to (not) look forward to!

Honestly one of the most average, even nearly below average and generic shows I've ever watched, would not recommend it to ANYONE, even not to pass the time or huge fans of studio madhouse.

An anime that should be action-packed interesting that ended up being a slog to get through. The concept of the world has promise, but it never delivers on that promise and potential.

Yeah, in an anime landscape dominated by cute anime girls, ecchi, and isekai trash this may seem like a breath of fresh air. However, that’s all it is. A brief flash of interest before you watch a few episodes and are somehow bored of an anime where a man with a gun for a head fights other cyborgs.

Literally everything about this anime is either run-of-the-mill or below average. The art and direction ... were surprisingly subpar quite often and there were many instances of poor CGI.

Remember how I said this anime seemed like a breath of fresh air from the abundence of ecchi in contemporary anime? Well it turns out that thought was misguided because every woman needs to wear some revealing article of clothing and there needs to be dedicated camera angles to highlight it. Why is this even something that must be shown for an anime set in a dark, distopian world? Am I supposed to get hard from this? Is this supposed to keep me interested because the creators know the story is ridiculously boring?

Oh yeah, about that story, this was pretty much just 12 episodes of exposition. This is most evident when the final episode is pretty much separate from everything that happened earlier in the season. The entire season, characters and plotlines are introduced only to disappear until later in the series (most likely). But this means that the season has nothing it is building to, so it just says “fuck it” and uses the final episode to set up more characters and plotlines instead of giving a satisfying conclusion.

The characters are pretty much all characters you have seen before and the bad guys are just portrayed as irredeemable evil with no real psychology behind their actions.

The music was forgettable, but the OP was good if that matters for anything (it really doesn’t).

Also there was some awful editing at points. Like, people didn’t even watch it before approving it bad. Maybe somebody at Madhouse did screen it but were put in a trance by how boring it is so they didn’t even notice it.

Anyways, I know this review is long and makes it look like I hated it, but like I said before, it was just disappointing and subpar the majority of the time. I will not watch the sequal unless it is supposed to be REALLY good. Like above 8.20 good.

It is closer to a 4 than a 2.