Needless

May contain minor spoilers, will leave out story spoilers.

I'd like to sum this up at the beginning, but don't want to give it away just incase you haven't seen it.

The story was actually the best part, in a sense. Needless is about people who have supernatural powers called fragments that allow them to do wild shit. The first 7 episodes of this are amazingly badass, it really sucks you in and the story just takes off quick and runs full steam ahead. I can't really elaborate on the story without giving too much away, but a group of Needless go take on ... some badasses early and it starts off chalk full of potential. the rest will be below.

Art was very good for its age, the sound was a little too 80's - 90's rage metal for me, but it wasn't totally out of place. The voice acting was actually fitting as well.

This show has a bit of a weird feel, on one hand it doesn't take itself too seriously, constantly breaking the fourth wall, but on the other gets a little deep for an action fighting anime. The comedy keeps it afloat early and had me rolling at times.

The characters start off strong, but then becomes are major weakness about half way through.

**minor spoils**


The progression is just too ridiculous. It starts off so strong you start wondering where this is going and then after 9 or so episodes it just stagnates. The characters are caricatures of caricatures. it's got the classic samurai 7 feel to it, gathering the team, all with strong and weak points. But ultimately the supporting cast were completley irrelevant. They may have well just left them out since they really just got their asses kicked at every opportunity.

when i said the story stagnates at around the midpoint, it's not hyperbole. MC and crew get trapped in a room for like 9 episodes getting their asses kicked by weak characters and progressively fight stronger characters and the formula repeats until you're sick of it. The character progression is almost non existent for anyone. It focuses heavily on the antagonists, which is something i don't really like, and no matter how villainous the antagonists, it becomes obvious there will be no serious resolution. At least they could have held that card closer to the end to dampen the dissapointment.

at the end its the antagonists giving the motivational speeches and teaming up, which literally makes no sense. the motivations of the antagonists are so flimsy that you cannot possibly reconcile it meaningfully. You would think throughout the numerous heinous acts committed they may have questioned their role, but ofc they save that shit until the end, which just left a bitter taste.

The ending turned into pure DBZ, with so many twists that i subconsciously reached for imaginary nausea pills.

To sum this up, it starts off really strong, with interesting plot, characters, and potential and ends with a trainwreck.

The actual main character is a weak boy who plays literally no role, in fact i still have no idea what his role was throughout the entire show but he garnered so much screen time I felt his value would be revealed by the end. It wasn't. He served no purpose other than to recap episodes. If you can shut your brain off and watch it for the moments of parody, there is certainly something here. But the tone is so confused that you can't call this a comedy or parody, you just have to call it a clusterfuck.

Final verdict and tl;dr for convenience:
Needless has no redeeming qualities when it comes to being as basic of a concept as a shonen duke-it-out. It's a poor and a mecha-less attempt of capitalizing on the hype for TTGL's "post-apocalyptic rebels with an attitude", and as such, it is rushed and bare-bones. I seriously recommend a critical re-watch if you somehow thought that anything above 6/10 is deserved, but I understand if you judge your anime by your personal watching experience.

---

The visual style and premise seem alluring, until you start watching it. Needless is a very basic shonen duke-it-out with a very basic plotline and, ... harshly put, proof-of-concept charactes.
The art? It looks fine and dandy... until they stop giving a sh*t. I don't mean like "oh neat, this is a simplified black & white raster to intensify the feeling of speed and intensity", I mean it like lazy and forgotten. There are unfinished sections within, and it's very blatant. For that alone, I cannot recommend this rushjob.

Needless' noticeable storytelling and character tropes include, but are not limited to:
-clothing damage
-constant peep-shotting, regardless of the previous
-power lobbing
-plot armor & strength (guy who is losing by all accounts suddenly just wins the fight)
-stretching jokes and story recapping to hit the episode time
-useless characters
-pure lack of context and ideas

The story is actually not basic, just bad. After the nuclear war, sections of the world have become barren wastelands. Yup, it's just SECTIONS of destroyed, plantless/lifeless landscape, not the actual whole world, with people scrounging for scraps and living a generally shitty life. There is nary an explanation for this. Then comes a medicine megacorporation gone bad with the intent of... well, if there was an intent, I'm sure it was hidden in the later episodes to justify one or two evil speeches. The big bad wants one of the characters for his plans and so lures the good guys into their home base after two destroyed goons.

The main character, the shota, has little to no relevance to the actual storyline. The supposedly actual main character (voiced by Takehito Koyasu, DIO for one) is a thunderhead whose main trait beyond plot armor and stronkest ability is his comedic relief trump card, that is, going full Sanji on >12 yr old girls. The other main and side characters are either useless and/or boast tropes as their only defining traits.

OST, apart from op/ed, is some nice-sounding, yet pretty basic metal guitaring. You've heard all of it in your general fighting games before.

Hm, it's an anime.
compilation of Fight Game from playstation, Comedy, and Tragedy.
It's not so good compliation, it seems they could not decide if they make something serious or comedy.
The fight were OK, but why they say the name of the attact? (that's why I wrote about computer game).
Do real people say things like: "super punch!", "boy kick!", when fighting?
Not so much.

I have to say that this is the worst anime that I have seen in a while and I'm surprised I made it through the whole thing. The only redeeming quality of this series is the main character Adam Blade who is just entertaining to watch.

Story:
Cliche and predictable are how I would describe it. It tries to throw a few twists at you but I saw them coming far in advance. It tries very hard to be epic and over the top but lacks a well thought out story

Art:
Animation was pretty clean, but the fact that characters cloths would regenerate and wounds would be healed ... between episodes, or sometimes scenes just so it could be done again was just too much.

Characters:
I hated every single one of the except Blade! Every single one of them was retarded except the kid who had normal intelligence but was treated like genius.

Enjoyment:
will never watch this series again and would only recommend it to people that i don't like.

I actually made it more than halfway through this, but I left it and came back the next day. When I tried watching again, I found I had had all the stupid I could handle. It's basically comedy by making all the usual shounen comic stuff even more extreme.

Needless is, as the name implies, needless. Needlessly violent, needlessly stupid, and needlessly likeable for some reason. It’s replete with action, comedy, and enough fan service to make Kokonoe Rin blush, but it comes across as almost a parody half of the time instead of something really trying. At least, toward the beginning. The end tries to take a more serious route and while it does succeed, it succeeds in giving us a cliche story that could have been left out and still maintain the integrity of the show. If there were no back story it could have been a parody or a comedy but ... with that background it seems like it’s actually trying to be something real.

It’s hard to classify Needless as anything because of this. It’s shounen, but is it a comedy or an action story? While it can be both, it changes tone so fast you don’t know what hit you.

Story
There is a story to this series, which I found strange at first because the series starts with what appears to be a very basic plot of an evil corporation full of super-powerful people fighting a resistance of super powerful people. But later on we get a background plot of science experiments and creating god and all kinds of really biblical stuff that is trying to make the show sound smarter than it really is. And the problem with the story in the series is it follows the same basic plot as Trigun and Trinity Blood. Spoiler The good guy and bad guy are experiments, pretty much brothers. And they are both called Adam to go with Eve. Which is a lot like Cain and Abel from Trinity Blood.

While I can accept the biblical parts, it just seems needless (Ba-ba-ching). There’s also a thin plot about the main character, Cruz’s sister but none of it is really that great. The story is weak and there seems to be a bit too much of it toward the end when we’ve been exposed to fight scene after fight scene mixed with comedy, breaking the flow of things.

In other words, don’t come to Needless expecting quality story-telling.If it were to boil down to anything, Needless is the story of a bunch of people with powers in a post-apocalyptic world where they fight each other formulaicly for twenty-four episodes.

Animation
I had no problem with the animation. Characters looked a lot like those from Gurren Lagann which was a bit of a problem at first (Cruz=Simon)(Eve=Yoko)(Blade=Kamina). But it doesn’t matter, the animation is perfectly fine, though it isn’t amazing. It’s average.

Sound
I decided to watch the dubbed version and wasn’t surprised that there were quite a few voice actors who were god awful, including Cruz’s sister who had to have been played by a robot. I guess the main characters did competently but…you know. I don’t expect much from my dubs.

The first opening and ending song for the show is good, but the second opening and ending isn’t. Within the show, the heavy metal soundtrack is pretty good.

Characters
Believe it or not, the characters in this show are average! There are a lot of characters but very few actually stand out. Blade is a lolicon priest who is probably the funniest character in the show, Cruz is an emo kid, Eve is a ditzy girl with big boobs. There’s a scientist who states the obvious or reiterates what somebody has just said.There are the girls of the Beautiful Girl Squadron, all of whom have no substance, though I like the seemingly mute lesbian one, Kuchinashi. The bad guy, Adam Arclight, is generic.

So, not much to talk about in this department.

Overall
An anime that prides itself on violence, panty shots, and comedy? It has to be good right? Fight scenes are too damn long, and when you have a twenty-four episode anime, you don’t want to stretch out ten episodes as one fight scene in the same room. Seriously, from episode nine to nineteen or so the show takes place in a single room. It gets rather boring and so does the anime. It starts fast-paced and promising but ends rather dully. I heard that the fight scenes in this show were some of the best in anime and I would like to tell the person who said that to suck it because the fight scenes in this show were lame and basic. I was not impressed by this show at all, but it was a decent distraction. It had some good moments, a lot in fact, but it was just so trite and basic and as it continued it tried to inject story but failed.

this looks like tenga toppa gurren langanfrom art but mixed special attacks every half minute, 2sec of emotions,there is an old guy that looks like from nintendo as a scientist, a stupid baka yelling hoe that screams arround, is annoying and a wanna be half naked god loving priest senpai guy that never dies.
A kid that lost his sister and acts like he is sad for 10secs, but then completly forgets that 399 of his friends died in a sec.
Basicly the story quality is on a hentai level but without the hentai part

If you want a shonen that has a somewhat deeper story, ... stick to the very old ones

tldr: just don't watch it as your first anime experience

Not bad for first half of the anime. Art is good, animation is not bad, comedy is decent. But when the second half of the anime comes, things went down hill. MC is totally useless, loud, annoying and just a waste of screen time. There is no character progression at all. Adam or Eve should have been the MC.

Subtle spoilers...

The enemy's base looks huge but yet, we have over 9 episodes stucked inside a room fighting with extremely little story progression. There were so many other girl squads shown in the earlier episodes, but none actually appeared in the fight even though it is situated ... at their headquaters! The fight lasted sooo much longer than it should have. I just gave up and start skipping through the remaining 9 to 10 episodes. Overall, it could have been great, but it became a great dissapointment for me...