Needless

Typically shounen style action series are not usually my thing. I find them to be completely silly and juvenile and cater to a demographic that I am just not a part of. The posturing and trash talking, the ridiculous reversals of fortune, and the long drawn out nature of the fighting usually cause me to lose interest. Honestly I am surprised this appeals so much to teenage males, who typically have the attention span of a goldfish. However, initially Needless seemed to be different, and appeared as more of a parody and comedy with an extremely enjoyable female lead. Eventually ... though it loses its way and falls victim to the things that doom many of its brother anime; trying to be and do too much instead of sticking with what was working.

The plot, initially is about as basic and nondescript as they come. Needless is set in a post apocalyptic world in which a new race of super powered humans have emerged, possessing fragments of power that give them mastery over a certain skill such as fire, gravity, and magnetism. These fragments apparently have all come from a common source, a god-like being known as the Second. These altered humans are known as Needless. But there is a hard and fast rule however, while some fragments are more powerful than others each Needless can only possess one. It all sounds like it an interesting take on the superpowers genre, and it a lot of ways it is though the way that the powers are used begins to get annoying after while (more on that later). All is not well in the world of the Needless though as they are threatened by the extremely powerful Adam Arclight and his followers in which they face extinction from his scheming. Only the mysterious Adam Blade and his band of resistance fighters stand in the way.

Needless is chalk full of slapstick comedy, action, blood and death, explosions, fan service, and machoism. Fans of these are likely to find plenty to like. The real problem with the series as a whole is the pacing of its storyline. Things move along quickly in the first 1/3 of the series. Perhaps a bit too quickly, which may have lead to the problems it suffers from for most of the middle and late portions of the anime. The heroes find themselves trapped in a room where they must do battle with Arclight's strongest followers. The battles are action packed but they drag out...forever. The story comes to a crawl and these battles seemingly go on forever as almost half the anime is taken up by this one fight and set in this same room. The shocking plot revelation made during this arc is obvious to anyone with any degree of sophistication. Once our heroes finally manage to get out the rest of the series is almost completely taken up with flashbacks, plot building, and adding a conspiracy arc. While this made Needless' story infinitely better and more complex it again felt to me like a complete reversal once again in the theme. To me it was like the director couldn’t make up his mind. Did he want to create an echii action parody, a straight shounen fighting anime, or a complex story about genetic research and political intrigue?

A small rant is in order on the battles. I know that it is a staple of this kind of series to yell out and name all of your attack moves and special abilities, but really is it that hard to come up with some names that make some sense? After hearing "Little Boy" or "Dean Drive Fox Hound" uttered for the billionth time I just wanted to shove a pair of scissors into my ears. And seriously what the hell does Dean Drive Fox Hound supposed to fucking mean anyway? It’s nonsense!

The real tragedy is that what they were doing at the start was working. The best part of Needless is the characters, in particular Eve Neuschwanstein (try saying that ten times fast). She’s got all the body measurements to make her a fan favorite, but she has a hilarious and quirky personality to go along with it to make her memorable. She stupid, can’t remember anyone’s name which leads her to "shorten" people’s names into nonsensical words. She has a really cool special ability called Doppelganger, which allows her to change herself into basically anything of the same mass as she is. Unfortunately as the series progresses she tends to disappear more than a main character should from the action, thus taking away a lot of the appeal for the show for me since I really enjoyed her. Also her Doppelganger ability is used in ways over the course of the series that seem to be inconsistent with what the ability should really be able to do.

As for the other leads, Adam Blade and Cruz Schild the results are not as good. Blade is a silly and typical shounen male with an over-the-top character design complete with an unoriginal and clichéd personality (basically think TTGL's Kamina). Unless you love 12 pack abs and these kinds of stereotypes or this is the first anime you have ever seen, then you’re unlikely to be impressed by him. That being said he does have his moments of comedy gold and he is not completely without merits. Cruz is also a typical anime boy who reminds me of another TTGL character, Simon (the young version) in both looks and personality. Though he seems to have more sense than most of his shounen brethren, and stays out of trouble for the most part and leaves the fighting to those with powers. His greatest attribute is that he’s probably the only person in the show with a brain.

The rest supporting cast is a mix of some very entertaining and memorable characters and more shounen stereotypes. With the exception of Disc, the rest of Blade's team of resistance fighters is uninspired. The ones who really shine are among Arclight's subordinates. This starts and ends with the Pretty Girl Squad of Mio, Setsuna, and Kushinashi. I found their antics to be the most amusing of any of the characters in the series. They are probably the objects of the most fan service, next to Eve, but for the most part it’s all pretty funny and just doesn’t feel as pointless as it usually is in other shows.

Artistically Needless is an uneven experience. The animation of the fights, action, and special effects are all topnotch. The service is well done, at least amongst the females, and they are cute and not too ridiculously proportioned. However the men are awful. I am on record as being a firm hater of bishies and effeminate men. While the men in Needless are certainly manly, they basically look like bishies on steroids. The fact that all of them looked pretty much the same (does anyone in the future wear shirts?) and the silly looking cartoonish muscles and impossible body builds took away from the art overall.

The absolute worst thing about this series is the music. The first OP "Modern Strange Cowboy" is without a doubt the silliest song I have ever heard and the worst example of Engrish lyrics gone wild. The second OP is not near as bad but still not that good and both the ED themes are average at best. Also the commercial break teaser halfway through is laugh out loud silly with the retarded sounding "Needless" being overacted by various male cast members. The acting overall is decent, but again the male voice actors over play their parts so much that they just sound silly.

Overall my final opinion on Needless mixed. I did enjoy many aspects of it, but it had more potential than it delivered. The schizophrenic direction and pacing are too much for me to ignore. Your enjoyment of Needless is likely to depend on your own personal tastes. If you love shounen action then you might want to give this a chance. I found it to be an average series at best.

Ever since Kenshiro informed Zeed and his gang they were already dead, the badass traveling a post-apocalyptic wasteland (shirts optional) looking for ass to kick has been a staple of anime, to the point that nowadays it's almost always a parody.

Needless continues the trend of parodying the genre, by including something almost all anime seem to have nowadays, moe fanservice.

STORY: Overall the story is nothing special, it's the same thing we've seen before. The action tends to be done fairly well, albeit usually fairly one sided. The only thing that holds it back from being a 7 is the tendency to needlessly (pun ... intended) take time to throw in fanservice. I'm not referring to panty shots or jiggle, that's almost expected nowadays, I'm talking about taking a full 24 minute episode to slowly undress the "Pretty Girl Squad" with only the actual plot development in about 90 seconds at the end. Hopefully they won't pull something like that again.

ART: The character designs themselves are good, they just seem out of place. Adam Blade looks like he belongs, but most of the other characters have designs more fitting for Romantic Comedies like Asu No Yoichi.

SOUND: Nothing to complain about here, the OP is very good, the ED while a bit out of place is rather catchy, and as I've said, Needless covers it's action fairly well, including BGM. The voices all work, the only thing they need to work on is attack names, they seem a bit random, but that's more a script issue.

CHARACTER: The characters are for the most part fairly good. Adam Blade's lolicon tendencies are rather entertaining. And as lolworthy as the existence of a "Pretty Girl Squad" is the members are rather likeable and the loli actually makes sense as a "cute bruiser" type rather than just fetish fuel. The only pointless one is Cruz, who is so useless to anything no one even cares to remember his name.

ENJOYMENT: The series grew on me after a couple episodes, it's definitely fun to watch, it just has a few facepalm moments here and there that detract from the series.

OVERALL: Needless is worth watching. If you aren't really a moe fetishist and are more a straight up action fan you should probably give it a few episodes to try to let the intial anachronism feeling wear off. I'll probably end up giving the series a 7 or an 8 when I finish

There are some animes that will end of being forgotten from people’s memory, and be marked as ‘generic’ anime. We call those anime, ‘Needless’.

To describe what needless is; it focuses on multiple theme of being manly, being comical, being serious, being eechi but also being ridiculous itself. It’s anime for ‘GAR’ I can say. Spammed action sequences take majority of this anime, and there are tons of plot holes even on those actions. It follows typical shonen style plot and full of clichés. There is nothing good about anime except the fact that you will actually enjoy it regardless to how horrible it is.

Actually, it’s ... even more generic than you can think. There is useless boy who is reluctant to become a main character. There is a hothead, but also useless support character, screaming ‘LIIIITTLEEEE BOOOOOOOOOI’. There is ‘wanna-be-Kamina’ Blade man who smells like GAR barbecue. There is evil one, who is evil. They killed them of one by one. They have 4 mighty ones, and one ultimate boss, Adam Arclight. It is so generic, that makes it way too much predictable.

Honestly, there is no real plot there. It’s just fighting sequences that make this anime worth with screaming of characters all over the place. Over-the-top actions and series of panty shots. That’s all about it. Regardless, let’s talk about how story of Needless goes. First, there was Cruz. He met some hot-headed manly dudes and girls. They made a crew. There is an enemy to fight by default. They just fight. They went to boss lair. They fight again. Soon they meet boss. Fight. Done, it’s the end of the story.

One of the worst aspects of this series is pacing. Seriously, at first, it went fast; although it was ridiculous overall, pacing was not that bad. After that, they got trapped in that gigantic room with pretty girl squads for about… I don’t know, about 6 ,7 episodes? That’s ridiculous. They could’ve at least provide some other background other than that. It screwed up some of enjoyment I had when they were just laughing and kicking around before they went there. Actions are dragged out so much, due to extremely detailed explanations and ANALyses on each move and some babbling, waiting, shoutings that character does. Plot holes are so big; you will have plenty of time wondering; ‘Why are they even waiting for 15 minutes in the middle of fight just to allow enemies to have a think time?’.

However, the worst thing is probably that they failed to manage to keep the consistent and interesting plot itself. First 1/3 of the series was probably better in terms of fighting, or w/e. Later, it suddenly gets serious. Every aspect is basically ‘spammed’. It spams this serious and unserious mood about 10 times during one episode. Spammed slap stick comedies are timed so badly, most of time it ruins the mood horribly. There are so much spam of out-of-circumstance-bloods and nudities. Some plot twists are not actually a twist, since they were mostly predictable. It’s just spammed with absurdity. Funny thing is, ‘Side stories’ of needless were much better than its ‘Main story’. I enjoyed the entire support episode that those not contains the main stories. For example, flashback episode of Blade was better than Blade fighting with Arclight.

Art, was terrible. No, it surely was. Starting with character design first; characters are overly muscular and females are overly… um ‘something’. Their body shape all looks exactly same, so does their faces. Design of Cruz is probably the worst here, look at his neck first of all. They all looks like some kind of mass produced clones with different hair style and costumes. Speaking of clothes, they are even worse. Oh hell, they are just ‘LAUGHABLY ABSURD’. Extremely wide collars, un-matching colours… Those costumes are also, almost same for every single characters. The worst, is costume of Disk-san. She wears pyjama from the start to the end and it is clothes that someone like your grandmothers would wear. Action part animations sometimes become choppy, such as the part where they are screaming their ridiculous attack names. Other than that, animation was overall just fine.

Sound aspect was as poor as its art. Some audio effects are completely out of circumstances and break apart the atmosphere. OP was fine but it showed how spamming English language in J-pop can be resulted being ridiculous for actual English users. Ending… I better not describ; it’s lolicon fetishes. Well, that makes sense, since two things I can remember in Needless is spam of ‘LIIIITTLEEEE BOOOOOOOOOI’ and kawaii shots. Seiyuus send their most time… screaming. They sound all monotonous; you can’t say the difference between the voice Blade and Arclight when they are speaking, since they speak with exactly same emotion every single time. Moreover, the problem in their speech existed from the start; the title of, ‘Needless’ itself. Those who do not know English people might think its fancy name for calling super heroes, but I personally think it’s ridiculous. Also, there are some extremely uncomfortable attack names that seized me in pain, such as ‘LIIIITTLEEEE BOOOOOOOOOI’, ‘Dean Drive Fox Hound’, ‘Magnetic Worldo’ and even ‘Doppelganger’. They are spammed throughout the whole series and may decay your ear at the end of the series. Seriously, ‘LIIIITTLEEEE BOOOOOOOOOI’ is just the worst thing I’ve ever heard. I cried for overuse of misused English…

There is not much to say about characters, since they are, generic. They have nothing except of being brave or following some same clichés that shonen suffers most of the time.

Blade, despite of having some spam of irritating lolicon loving part, succeeded of being one of the coolest, and manliest one I’ve ever seen. Other than that, characters development and description is pretty much ‘dead’. They are empty, including Blade. They are just overridden by their cool abilities and failed to show what they have inside. Only one who actually showed that was Saten, but others; none existence. In terms of comical relief and some interesting plot, pretty girl squad and Eve was the only ones who were ‘interesting’.

Yes yes, I can ignore everything. However, I just couldn’t stand that Cruz guy. He is the worst character in this series. Everything is on his point of view, yet what he do get kicked and punched to death while everyone is fighting. The part where I died was when everyone is saying, ‘YOUR ONLY ABILITY IS THAT YOU CAN FUCKIN THINK’. Guys, everyone can think, even the most foolish person in this earth. They are all just common senses that Cruz has. Oh wait, maybe because that everyone in his crew is too dumb to even find out what ability of making things freeze and burn at the same time. (Temperature) And, in this part, we find one big plot hole. In his crew, there is a android who lived 300 with super computer brain, and there is also a doctor, who was one of the most professional scientist in the past. It makes absolutely no sense that Cruz becoming the only one who can ‘think’.

Eve is the only one character that makes this series at least a level of watchable. She is cool and very manly in terms of her spirit, which makes her only of the most ‘manlike female’ in the anime universe and also the best character of this series.

Needless is a terrible and good at the same time. Although it was spammed with ridiculous comedies, ‘LIIIITTLEEEE BOOOOOOOOOI’, bad art, monotonous voices, bad English, plastic muscularity and ‘Ability to THINK’, it was very very enjoyable, like most of shonen stuffs. Somehow, character success of at least not being dull. Actions are cool and so does their abilities. There are scenes that you can say, ‘hell this is just awesome’. Dragged episodes cut these enjoyments in half, but whatever. It is still enough.

So, in conclusion, Needless failed to become over the average anime in terms of its quality etc. every aspect. However, it was still enjoyable whatsoever. Needless will be forgotten, and I also do not particularly recommend watching this anime, but I can be sure that it was quite an experience having manliest characters and cutest females in one series with awesome superpowers.

First off to compare this anime to gurren lagan is absurd...Ok i can see the similarities in the characters of Kamina and Father but other than that, nothing alike. There is no real storyline, and the little that is there is not amazing..It was interesting enough for me to watch the whole series. I love anime with action and this is action packed, with cool abilities for each character. I do enjoy that but to compare it to Gurren Lagan..give me a break, that was still to this day one of the best anime I have seen, and although I enjoyed needless ... to a certain extent it is still my lowest rated anime on my list. I know I have not seen a whole lot of anime, but enough to get on this site make a profile and continue to be addicted to anime and watch it everyday, and will continue to watch anime for the rest of my life. Now don't let this deter you from watching this anime. It is enjoyable because of all the action and cool different powers. It does have a whole bunch of characters so that is a plus as well, but you don't grow attached to any like you do in Gurren. Shit I cried during that anime. You are not shedding tears for needless that is for sure...and the ending for needless...meh

Needless...How should I put it? It had a great start, felt pretty into it until the episodes later on. It went very downhill after the first half of the anime. had some smart moments of build up then total ass pulls that were not enjoyable. It's a bit of a mess really. It's a good laugh when talking about it with others, it's mediocre when watching it alone. The pacing is terrible, like, they drag stuff too much or go way too quickly with it. They explain the powers (fragments) well, but then when actually using them in fight is like "No no, it ... actually doesn't work that well." or the fights with them are boring. Bad timed jokes, doubtful quality jokes at that which are repeated over and over again. Overall? Mediocre, but I don't completely regret watching it.