Hametsu no Mars

Mars of Destruction's storytelling has the subtlety of a scorched, bleeding rectum or a tumultuous car alarm. "Plot refinement" is clearly a foreign concept to the creators of Mars of Destruction. Its premise is more derivative than a Syfy TV movie. Its characters are empty and lack many elements of characterization one requires in order to genuinely understand and distinguish them apart from each other. Honestly, they're so bad they made me appreciate the company and personality of torn cardboard (which is quite colorful and substantial compared to these characters). The writing is poorer than the typical Haitian family. It only took roughly four minutes after ... finishing this anime to conjure up about fifteen extremely scathing insults I could call someone involving comparisons of said person and Mars of Destruction; each insult ended with the inevitable scenario of the person telling me I had "went too far, man".

To put it lightly, its visuals are as attractive and appealing as steaming, moist, chunky shit from a Great Dane. Eight minutes in, I was actually flabbergasted to not see flies buzzing around my screen because the appearance was so uncanny. Budget problems were really blatant from the get-go, and the animation is quite below even modest standards (awkward movements and stiff characters galore). Direction and action are abysmal, and the cinematographic technique known as shaky camera is overused and utilized awfully. The main character designs are generic at best, and the villain designs are severely pathetic. The villains' powers are ill-conceived as well (mouth beams are not, nor will they ever be, cool or clever). 

The sound design is, as one might assume, sub par. Voice acting was definitely not a priority (so far it seems nothing during the production of this anime was); weak and humdrum performances fill up the entire OVA. Sound effects were ridiculously cheap and goofy, and its use of music isn't much better. Classical music is hamfistedly stuck in a multitude of scenes, and the transitioning from one song to another is, of course, crude.

Interestingly enough, it seems Mars of Destruction might have been a deliberate Neon Genesis Evangelion parody. Several similarities and possible pokes at the influential series appear throughout the OVA, including: their primary enemies being called Ancients (Angels in NGE), the use of religious symbolism, specifically with the cross, the usage of Classical music, the involuntary use of a powerful mecha by the main character due to his father forcing him to, the main character going through a rampage while being inside the mecha (similar to NGE's berserker mode), et cetera. It's plausible that the creators wanted to seriously lampoon the Neon Genesis Evangelion series, or perhaps they are merely unabashed thieves that felt the need to borrow various elements from a well-known series, without giving due credit, just to make their project "work". I'm not sure which one I believe is true yet.  

In any case, all of of the inept qualities that Mars of Destruction shamelessly flaunts culminate humorously due to The Tommy Wiseau (or Ed Wood) Effect. In other words, its striking amount of inability in just about every area result in a decent amount of chuckles and a protracted smile. Most smelly, putrid garbage in anime generally manage to just be grating and intolerable, but Mars of Destruction managed to use its flaws to its benefit and invoke non-well-earned laughter from it. I doubt the creators desired it to turn out the way it did (something tells me they thought they were creating their serious, dramatic magnum opus), but this anime is fairly funny, albeit not throughly hilarious. It is most definitely not the incredibly emotionally-resonant, thrilling, and profound piece of art the director and producers may have wanted it to be, but it is, in a most likely unintended sense, entertaining and gratifying. And hey, that's enough of a reason for me to use nineteen minutes of my oh-so-precious time on it.

Six Squeaky, Unconvincing "Takeruuuuu!" Cries out of Ten.

A fair warning to new anime watchers. You will be recommended to watch this.
Please do not. First it is a really heavy piece to start with, second you will not appreciate the amount of greatness this anime shows in art and sound. You should have a profund knowledge of the history and making of anime.

This is a psychological anime driving deep into the consequences on going to unfamiliar environments, and how its curses could spread into our society. The characters are struck by different personal issues showing affect during the show. It is not a mecha anime, please don't watch it for that.

For me this ... show was too heavy or I am just too dumb to appreciate the deeper meaning. Every episode was like "Watch it and write a 20 page essay about it"
For people who like to analyze the shit out why the bullets keep missing, this is the masterpiece. For me it was confusing to watch.

I have never been so split between acknowledging the greatness of an anime and the lack of enjoyment it gave me. And yes please watch the sequel to have a real ending.

Well....This is my first review on MAL..and I think i'm gonna be bombarded with insults today because of this review *or not XD*

"Mars of Destruction"

Story: It's like a "101 episode Mecha anime" shortened to 19 minutes.. a "protect-the-world-from-"EVIL"-aliens" type...

Art: Flash animation like..well i enjoyed watching flash animation so i kinda like the animation....and there is some time-space-warps too *bad guy with short arms grabs the girl 5 meters away or something like that*

Sound: Classical music + no transition = DX

... Characters: characters...hmmm...no comment..seriously..

Enjoyment: I enjoyed this one...but for those people who like to watch high-class anime should stay away...

Overall: Mars of destruction is like a flash-animation mislabeled as anime...and i would give it a 10 if THIS was a flash animation but unforunately..it's not

END notes: I've notice that Mars looks like a trailer rather than an anime...

END end notes XD

Intro
‘Mars of Destruction’ is an odd little beast, discussion around it usually falls one of two ways. Either someone is real and says how horrible this anime is or people ironically call it a masterpiece and praise it as the best anime ever made and obviously one way is much more fun to talk about then the other. ...

But ‘Mars or Destruction’ is a bad anime, lets just make that clear, however it’s also the best anime ever made, maybe even the best thing that humanity has ever or ever will create. This is the legacy of Humanity that represents the best we can do and we can only hope it lives on forever.

‘Mars of Destruction’ came out July 6th 2005 and it is horrible for a 2005 OVA, it was based off a VN that I can only assume is better than this but much more boring because of it. The anime, for the most part, is handled by amateurs who I can only assume had no idea what they were doing. The studios that have their name tied to it seem to have made a lot of stuff and I’m sure some of it’s good even if I don’t recognize any of them, but the people who worked on it mostly have small resumes.

Producer and planner ‘Shingo Kuwana’ probably isn’t proud of this, I don’t know the guy nor do I follow him in any way so I can’t know but he hasn’t worked on much of anything so I can only assume that working on this got him promoted to a God and thus he has left this world and now watches over all of anime waiting for someone to be strong enough to challenge him. Director ‘Yoshiaki Sato’ has actually worked on a few good things but his resume is also super limited which makes me think he may of also achieved a god like status and is waiting for an anime to even got close to as good as Mars of destruction was.

The Music… well the music is pure art and that’s not even a joke because the ‘Ludwig van Beethoven’ made some of the music that is used in this show, that’s right everyone Beethoven knew about the greatness of ‘Mars of Destruction’ long before it and was out and made his music knowing it would be used for this masterpiece. That was his intention and anyone who says otherwise is the scum of this earth. But he's not the only great musical figure of the past that wanted to contribute to the greatest creation on earth cause we also got works from ‘Frédéric Chopin’ , ‘Erik Satie’ , and ‘Richard Wagner’. ‘Mars of Destruction’ is able to transcend time itself and if you like any of these people or their music then you have ‘Mars of Destruction’ to thank, cause it’s the only reason they ever made any music, I promise you.

Girls vs. Ancients
So Mars of Destruction is only a little under 20 mins and the entire first and last min are opening and ending credits, so overall there's only about 18 minutes of actual content here and it’s slow as all hell but at the same time way too fast.

The show was clearly trying to stretch It’s run time to be close to the length of a normal anime episode and it does this by making everyone move super slowly, have long pauses between everything they do and just generally be really boring, however it just adds to the humour of it all.

But the thing is that they didn’t even need to make it go this slow, they have moments where they try to give a lot of information in a very short time or they just slap some text on the screen to explain things and they could of just done more exposition and then not have made all the “action” scenes super slow.

So what's the actual story, well we open on two guys returning from Mars, we get some useless dialog that goes against ‘Chekhov's gun’ and then as they prepare for re-entry into earth's atmosphere they fuck something up and almost instantly the shuttle explodes and the remains fall down onto earth, specifically in Japan.

We skip forward some years and find out that ever since that disaster there have been weird creatures called ancients showing up, how do they show up and where do they show up? We don't get told any of this, we just get told that they show up, but surely people see them appear right, do they just materialise or do they come from space, or the ocean or out of the ground, like give us some information.

It's not like they have a lot of slow fight scenes and a bunch of blank space with no sound, if they did then maybe they could of removed them to make room for explaining some god damn info, now I know it's an OVA and they probably expect that you've played the VN and thus don't need basic information about the world but later they will give us some very basic information on other aspects, so that's not even a valid excuse.

Anyway three girls appear to fight these ancients and then they just kinda stand there for a few seconds… And then the ancients face them and just kinda stand there for a few seconds… And then the girls stand there for a few seconds… The ancients change up and fire two shots at the girls, one hits one of the girl in the head and we get a hilarious over the top fountain of blood just come forth from where her head once was, I don't know if it was meant to be shocking of sad but it's just hilarious, the effect is just so bad. Seriously you can go online and get better royalty free blood effects I'm sure.

Anyway with the girls down to two and a third ancient showing up *gasp* whatever will they do, well they get told that backup is on the way but instead of retreating and trying to stay safe till the backup can show up they just run right at the ancients. They fire a lot of shots and somehow ALL OF THEM MISS! We later find out that they're part of a special unit made specifically for fighting the ancients, like if they just resisted bullets really well then that's fine, not much you can do about that, but no, one girl just miss’ literally every single shot. And these shots go everywhere to the left, right, and above the ancients. So she basically fires at everything except the thing she's been SPECIALLY TRAINED TO KILL! Why does this unit suck so much! Could it be… Forced tension.

The Mars… of Destruction
So the backup talked about earlier final shows up and it's some power ranger looking dude who's all black with blue Neo strips on his suit and he just walks up and stabs the ancients, now later we get told that suit is known as the Mars and is made specifically for killing ancients but it sucks at killing ancients, the dude in the Mars (takeru) stabs an ancient but the ancient doesn't really seem to mind he just stands there and then tries to punch takeru, another ancient gets behind him and just by grabbing the Mars all of his fingers puncher and break the suit like WHAT. This great suit that's meant to be for killing ancients specifically can just easily be pierced by their hands, and the one who got stabbed is still alive.

Eventually takeru is able to get his sword out and stab the other ancient and they both die, I think the other one got shot earlier by one of the girls, I only talked about the chick who missed all her shots.

Side note: I know I'm kinda going through the entire story but it's a short one episode OVA and I think this style where I go through it all and bring up points as they become relevant is interesting so I'm trying it out as a format.

The Mars is like a super suit (mandatory incredibles joke) that only Takeru can use or at least he's the one who can use it best, it's not exactly made clear which it is. But takeru is pretty much just shinji and he has to pilot the Eva in order to save the world form the angles, but he doesn't want to do it but has to cause his father is making him. BUT IT’S NOT EVANGELION GUYS! Don't even dare compare the great work of Mars of destruction to that low tier piece of garbage.

But yer takeru is a shinji clone without any of the emotional drive and realism, takeru says he doesn't wanna pilot the Mars but when he has to he just goes and does it without complaint and while he does scream as the suit it getting put on, once it's on he just goes out and starts fighting, he doesn't seem to have any problems fighting the ancients, it's almost like they made him a shinji clone cause it seemed good on paper and evangelion was successful. However they didn't even consider what made shinji work so well.

So Takeru is a lifeless character who pilots the Mars which sucks against ancients and he fights them really slowly, what about the rest of the cast, well they're not much better.

Not much better
There are a fair amount of supporting character, we got some chick who runs the AAST (the special units who fight ancients, can't remember what it stands for). There's also these two American dudes that show up at the end, but all of these have very few lines and don't really do much, but they do say some dumb things which I'll talk about when they become relevant.

The only other characters that matter are these three girls and not the three girls at the start, since one of them dies right away. But the two girls who didn't die and one other girls who gets introduced once they come back and is then present for the rest of the episode. Kurita, Aoi is the most important and she's also the one who gives us narration shortly after the first mission is over and this is where we get our huge exposition dumb. It’s nothing I haven't already said.

Unno, Yamabuki is the least important of the three, she's the one who shows up for the second half and overall she doesn't do too much, she only fire her weapon a few times, has barely any lines and gets taken out pretty fast, an ancient starts choking her at some point and then she's not even saved by takeru, but instead Aoi is able to save her only to then be caught herself, Unno faints at this point so she doesn't do anything and then takeru saves Aoi instead so Unno doesn't even get saved by the protag.

Nakahara, Tomoe is the last girl and she’s a bit interesting, she might be someone who develops weapons or she just happens to have one, but at some point when her friends are in trouble she shows takeru a huge gun that can only work in tandem with the Mars suit and is super powerful, it's also still in its beta form, takes ages to charge, and goes crazy after being fired. This of course is all made to try and make it seem super dramatic, like he might not have enough time or that if the one shot misses it’ll all be over. That's not the case as it charges up in time to stop Aoi from being choked to death and if it ‘goes crazy’ then I can only assume that means that shots will fly everywhere which should be enough to eventually hit and kill the ancients, but we never really get told what ‘goes crazy’ means so I'm left to make up my own explanation.

'Murica
Okay so I just went over how the girls have another ancient encounter, takeru gears up in the Mars, Unno and Aoi get choked and takeru saves the day with a huge ass gun. However it needs to be made clear that this whole encounter happens on a road after a crash. You see the AAST where delivering parts of the Mars shuttle that blew up at the start of the episode, they're obviously linked to the ancients since they only started to appear after the incident. The parts are specifically being taken to America.

That's all we really get told but obviously you can't drive from Japan to America so I have to assume that they're just taking them to the airport and I don't know why they couldn't make that more clear since it would’ve just taken one line of dialog but nope it's ambiguously going to America.

So a super buff ancient shows up and isn't affected by normal bullets and that's why takeru has to use the big gun and once it's all over and ancient comes back to life in a comedic fashion and tells takeru that humans are the invaders and that the ancients are the original earthlings which doesn't make sense. Cause while you may be to able to set up a world where humans are actually invaders it makes no sense that the ancients would just wait a bunch of years and then start attacking after some random ship crashes from Mars.

So the buff ancient falls down and dies for real this time and we skip to when the pieces have arrived in America and we see two Americans talking, mind you that they're speaking Japanese for some reason even though they're in America and both Americans. I know it’s for the viewers but plenty of anime has no trouble putting engrish in its show in situations where it makes sense and lots of anime has had foreign characters who speak English sometimes. It really just goes to show the low production quality of this show that they were too cheap to get someone who can speak English and also too lazy to even do some basic translation and write some English lines for the script, even if a Japanese person doesn't know English they understand the letters and could whip together some horrid engrish, I accept that as a part of anime enough that I wouldn't really point it if they had done that. But no Americans, in America speaking Japanese seems much more logical.

I'm bringing it up cause it absolutely ruins a line one of them has. After one of the guys gets tells the other what the buff ancient said he thinks about it before saying ‘humanity having roots in Japan, impossible’ first of all that's not even what's implied at all, he's just kind of reaching a random conclusion and jumping the gun. But the thing is, he's trying to say that Japan sucks and there's no way humanity would have origins there, but here's the thing, 1. Humanity didn't originate in America either and 2. He's speaking Japanese while in America and being with another American!

Like seriously, he's basically saying ‘haha, Japan, that silly little island, no way that's important in any way shape or form despite me feeling the need to speak the language when I'm with a fellow American’ you can't just be lazy and make them speak Japanese for no reason and then have them mock Japan at the same time, did anyone on the team even have a single brain cell or did everyone seriously watch this and go ‘yep that's fine.’ Urgh, it's such bad dialog and that's not even getting into how the show looks.

How the show looks
The presentation of Mars in destruction is garbo, I think it tired to have some inventive shots and sometimes they look a little nice but for the most part it looks terrible considering when it was made. It was made in 2005 and when you look at other shows from that time it's shocking, I was really surprised when I found out the release date cause it's not up to par at all, when I originally watched it I thought it was from the early 90s or late 80s and even then there's a lot of stuff from that time that looks a lot better but at least this would of been passable for the time and not considered horrid.

The voice acting isn’t much better, there's very little lines and I'm sure it's cause it was short on budget, if the script was long and lots of lines had to be recorded then that’s just more money and clearly this show didn’t have much to work with. The voice acting isn't good and the way people hardly speak only makes it worse, I will say that Unno isn't that bad and I think her voice is what it should of been but everyone else sounds really off or distant but it's not the worst part of the presentation.

As stated earlier the music is from classic composers who are famous and after all they made their work specifically for Mars of destruction so at least it's perfect in that aspect. There's some music from the modern era also made just for this but it's by some no name dude with like 4 works to his name and so it's pretty horrid, luckily the other music can make up for it.

Now before I mentioned some inventive shots but I'd like to point out that I think it was done by mistake, the show is very dark, a lot of the time the backgrounds aren't well lit and the front isn't very bright either. I'm sure this was due to budgeting reasons, you can make the backgrounds be lazy and have missing details if you're just gonna hide it with darkness.

Now the Mars suit has these blue neon strips running along it and when the Mars first appears the screen is very dark and since the Mars suit is black minus the strips all you can see are the blue strips glowing in the darkness which does actually look really neat and then when his sword appear (which also glows) it continues to look nice but I think it wasn't done well purposefully.

For that most part the animation itself is also very lazy, people don't move much and when they do it doesn't look right they also cut multiple corners in order to save on time and money. Now there is one part that's really well animated and took me by surprise, when takeru is suiting up there's one really neat shot, it's specifically when the suit is going onto his arm. There's electricity all around him and the way it moves and flows looks nice and fluid. We also see that the suit doesn't seem to be made of hard metal but a more thin and flexible material fabric which also moves through the air and coils around takerus arm before snapping tight onto his skin, it looks really nice but it's the only shot like this and it doesn't last very long, so maybe that's where all the budget went.

Final thoughts
So it's over, that short little 20 min anime gave me a surprisingly large amount of stuff to think and write about. Since it was only one episode I felt it was fine for me to go into a bit more detail than usual. So let me know if you like it cause if so then maybe I'll review some more short shows and movies, where the length allows me to go into more detail then a whole TV series allows.

Mars of destruction isn't good, but I had a blast watching it for how dumb it is, maybe if you're just a reclusive or someone who just wants to watch good shows then avoid it but for someone like me who has spent time laughing and talking about it with friends and people online, making dumb jokes and further spreading the meme that this show is god's gift on this earth just makes each new viewing all the funnier. Before this review I hadn't seen the show in 4 years and as I watched I started to remember all the jokes. If you want to watch it then there's a low quality upload of the whole thing on YouTube which is probably the easiest way to watch it.

If you know anything about how I calculate my review score then you're aware that a show like this is gonna end up with a score much too high, I have enjoyment take up 50% of my consideration when rating and the rest going into things like story 10%, presentation 10% and characters 30%. So if I know a show is bad and hate the sum of its part but enjoys the disaster I end up seeing then it's score is gonna be higher than it deserves, but that's how I do things so I somewhat reluctantly say,

I give Mars of Destruction a 6/10 and since it's so short I do recommend checking it out, it doesn't take much time and you might find it as funny as I did.

Okay!! So, I am quite new to the anime world, so my anime senses are probably quite noobish XD but I feel like I can probably talk about it alright C:

There is much controversy, and hate-related views on this particular OVA, and although it was severely lacking in basic structural form, character development, and original ideas, deeming it unique and memorable, it technically fulfilled its role as science-fiction, even if not well done.

Firstly, I will address the story, because this is obviously the most blatant, and flawed part of the OVA. Beginning in space, and playful banter between the two pilots gave off ... a very casual feeling, leaving one with a sense of mediocrity, more or less. However as the story progresses, and you expect the rising action to take place, the plot is interrupted, abruptly jumping from the protagonists past, to fighting scenes, and is really all over the place. This lack of structure is the leading cause of this OVA's failure, because it takes no actual path, but leaves incomplete thought, and the watcher somewhat confused. Sort of like trying to follow a kid diagnosed with ADD who just drank 16 oz of soda pop, tell a story. It's hard.

As for the character's themselves, they had potential to be something promising, but the way the writers went about this, was poor, to say the least. There are always recurring traits for characters in certain genres, but especially for the protagonist, his background, and personality were all too unoriginal, and felt quite forced. A tragic hero is always a nice touch to these types of anime, but it was too obviously irrelevant to the story itself, like the author was trying to say," Blah Blah Blah... OH WAIT– he's also abused! So like my anime!" It doesn't work that way, subtly and modesty is the key. As for the girls in the AAST, they served no real purpose. However, judging by the fact they were decent looking, and stood there stupidly, watching as their comrades were brutally beaten... Uhm, you can tell the writer intended for them to solely have a charming effect, and no real importance to the progression of the story.

The art was alright, nothing spectacular, but nothing terrible. My biggest problem wasn't the semi-outdated art, but the quality of the animation itself. It's most notable in scenes where the Ancient severs the head off of street bystanders. The ancient touches someone with his light, and the head of the victim just up and falls off, like it was never connected to the neck.No intricate detail in the actual process of severing. The movements of the characters as well, could use some polishing.

The sound, was fantastic. Beethoven is a classic, and no matter what, provides an eloquent feel. The reason it only received a 6, is due to the TOTAL contradiction between the mediocrity of the anime, and the beauty of the music. It was literally like trying to put lipstick on a pig, and as a fellow musician, was somewhat painful to watch.

Overall, contrary to many reviewers of this anime, it wasn't so horrifying, and a disgrace to all anime, etc, etc. It certainly had several flaws, but I could understand the viewpoint of the creators. You also must take into consideration the fact that the OVA was only 19 minutes long, and the creators just tried to fit in too much in such a short amount of time, leaving a very rushed, and half-done feeling. Also, at times, it just didn't make any sense. (See ending to understand this reference). I wouldn't suggest this to anyone who is extremely opinionated, (those who believe their taste is superior to all others, and think they actually have the authority to deem someone whose anime taste differs from theirs, a 'pleb'). Nonetheless, if you have an open mind, you can clearly see the good intentions in this anime.

Yaaaay XD so uhm yeah, done!!! Hope it helps! (Even if only a bit) even negative comments are welcome!

this was my first anime I have ever watched. This anime was highly recommend by my friends. i thought that my friends were linking me to some kind of hentai, which I probably would of enjoyed more than this.

10 minutes in, I had no idea what I was watching, and by the end I had no idea who these characters were or what I even watched. I feel like I should give this anime a 1 but I felt like mediocre was a more appropriate word. girls were 10/10 and the sound was 10/10 because of Barber of Seville. the ending was just ... about as sad as toy story 3.

i'd give this masterpiece 3/10, god bless you rossini