(Spoilers. Comment and score reflect version aired on Toonami.)

Ah, yes, Casshern Sins. A story of a struggling acrobatic troupe A commentary on liberty qua mortality with enough brooding that it starts treading freely right into histrionics. More on that later.

Following some of the discussion on the series early into its airing on Toonami was amusing enough for the jokes cracked at its expense ("What were these robots built for?" "To monologue."), but it became clear this series didn't have the narrative strength to match its own seriousness. What it did have was enjoyable animation and aesthetic sensibilities. The visuals are constantly saturated with the all-important ruin and decay. The world around them genuinely feels like the crumbling remains of a once prosperous area. For what they're going for, the muted color scheme that trends toward soft, dull grays and whites and muddied browns is a perfect match. And when they want to use vibrant colors for a purpose, it causes them to stand out all the more. If you want some robots flipping around and fighting each other, you've come to the right place. Every episode is basically summarized by the tag I gave this show. Fights in Casshern Sins often seem more like something you'd expect to see at a circus. Agile machines glide forth or practically fly through the air, flipping to and fro, slicing and smashing and piercing with nigh pin-point precision. The choreography does not reveal a highly technical fight, but one that is fluid and easy on the eye. What the fights may lack in intellectual complexity they attempt to make up for in flashiness. What you make of that obviously depends on your own personal priorities, but I can appreciate a spectacle in motion. Casshern Sins does not present revolutionary animation, but it's still rather solid. The catch to this is, of course, that the show is often so languid that most of the time the animation isn't even much of a factor.

That's a nice segue into the story. The message in Casshern Sins is trite. Being ephemeral makes us appreciate our lives more? Well gee, thanks for the bold new insight. Still, simple messages can still succeed if well presented. But Casshern Sins just doesn't pull that off. It just beats you over the head with the same point over and over. We get it. The ruin. Things decay now. Anything else? At a certain point you'd expect them to get over it, but it takes them nearly the entire series to stop just despairing and adjust to their new reality. Do we really need episode after episode of "Kill Casshern! Devour Casshern!" from immortality crazed robots to just keep driving the point home? I get that a sudden switch from living forever to constantly rotting away would come as an unwelcome shock, but it makes for a very tedious narrative. Of course, being able to move on in the plot would require them to have something more to say. And they don't. Mind Game can get away with a simple message because it's only film length and is competently delivered in that time frame. Casshern Sins is a simple message over 24 long, plodding episodes that want to make sure nobody could possibly miss the point they're trying to make. The plot on top of that is a paper-thin vessel for their message. So very little actually happens when you think about it. It's always obsessed with trying to be reflective instead. Casshern Sins thinks it's a lot more than it actually is.

But since we're on the plot, how about the characters? While not a violent person, I was tempted to backhand Casshern. Could you care any less about his existential woes? You have a love interest who, like Casshern, has existential woes instead of a personality. You have two antagonists. One wants to be a rose eternally blooming in the vast wasteland and the other has an inferiority complex. That's the entirety of their personality and motivations. Look. These aren't interesting characters. They're not the least bit compelling. They're narrative devices and nothing more. They're nearly as disposable as the faceless robot hordes Casshern regularly dispatches. But hey, they only had 24 episodes to try to develop them, right? Maybe all of that plot took up too much time.

The soundtrack is fitting and pleasant, but tracks tend to get overused. When all of your scenes are basically identical, I guess there's not too much room for variation. You'll hear the same "contentious atmosphere" music and "We're trying to be really brooding and existential right now, okay?" music many times throughout the series.

Halving the length of this series would be a good start, but it'd ultimately still be rather flawed. Solid art and animation combined with the aforementioned soundtrack buoy the show somewhat, but they just can't salvage a show so weighed down by its failures. I can't really recommend this on the strength of its redeeming features, because you could find those all elsewhere in much stronger series. Casshern Sins is kind of like the ruin itself. It slowly crumbles away leaving a useless wreck of not-quite-salvageable parts behind, and those experiencing it just want it to stop as soon as possible, but it just keeps on happening.

The thing with Hyakko is that it can see the brass rings up above, it just can't grasp them. There are moments when it has the potential to break out and be so much more than it is, but it isn't able to capitalize on them. A pity.

That still leaves us with an enjoyable but flawed show. While there are a few characters who are the clear focus of the show, Hyakko has a rather large cast and gives a bit of time to all of them. Having a large cast is fine (see LOGH, for example), but they don't really have enough time to devote to all of them. They wind up as distractions rather than strong side-characters. You get tastes of development from them, but since Hyakko wants to keep introducing more and more characters, there just isn't enough time to explore them further. This leaves characters and plot threads hanging loose. What a waste.

The show isn't spectacular looking, but it still looks alright. Nothing jarring on the eye.

The characters are fun together, but due to the large cast, don't get enough time together to form strong, interesting relationships. Yet through them, the show still manages to be funny at times. (Minor, vague spoiler) There's a bit of drama at the end that feels rather sudden and forced. I appreciate that they wanted to add a bit more depth to the character and throw in some more plot, but it's pretty sloppy. (End spoiler)

Hyakko isn't a must-see, but if you're not dealing with a massive backlog, it's worth watching.

(spoilers)

So Kannagi starts out as something that could've actually been an interesting plot. Then suddenly it becomes a love triangle. Or maybe a harem? Or a comedy? Or a slice of life show? It doesn't really seem to know, because it just kind of teeters between halfhearted attempts at all of these while simply abandoning the plot. Sometimes it's club antics. Sometimes it's Zange and Tsugumi (and kind of Nagi) competing for the MC's affections. Sometimes its meta jokes and references. This show has no idea what it wants to be.

The director who was fired off of his role directing Lucky Star is demonstrating exactly why that happened with his handling here of Kannagi. Unfocused, lackluster, awkward, lost, stilted, forced. I mean, do you chuckle when Jin accidentally walks into a karaoke room to find the cast from Lucky Star? Sure, kind of. But then it's back to a status quo, tedious karaoke segment with the actual Kannagi cast. And the switch from plot to several episodes of mindless meandering is instant and out of nowhere. Well, it's a good thing we made room for a 1.5 episode long gay joke (because homophobia is apparently just that funny). And then, in what will surely give you whiplash, we jump right back into the plot for an ending that just doesn't work because these characters have not been given nearly enough time to properly develop for this context.

And all of that love triangle nonsense? Nothing is resolved. You just get a "Ha ha, so awkward!" moment of Jin indicating that he kind of sort of has feelings for Nagi. Just like he kind of sort of has feelings for Tsugumi. (And maybe Zange? Who knows?) Well, good thing nothing was resolved there! So all we have is a hamfisted, overwrought, underdeveloped ending cheapened by a little sexual tension joke afterwards. Thanks.

And what about Zange? Remember how she was introduced as Nagi's rival and then just sort of becomes fanservice? She's genuinely reduced to just a cute girl to fawn over the MC and occasionally delve into some exposition to move the plot forward. It is really tedious to see honest motivations revealed, then just cast aside and never revisited in favor of pandering.

And there's also when characters are off model. And how lazy the meta humor can be. And the cheap, shallow otaku/fujoshi nods. Look, there's plenty of things wrong with this show. What you should take away is that the show can sometimes deliver a chuckle, but is otherwise a complete mess. Don't bother with this. And the worst part is, this had potential. It could've been good. But incompetent handling sunk its chances.

Oh, and if you're wondering about the 14th episode, it's just a throwaway bonus that has all the problems the rest of this show's filler (and I'm going to call it that even if it's potentially canon, because it really does do nothing than delay the plot to stretch out the episode length) has.

"Genres: [...] Shounen" Of course, Japan, of course.

Anyway, the comic relief squad is a necessary feature that kind of doesn't work. Without them, if the show just took itself 100% self-seriously, it would become unintentionally laughable. It needs a lighter element so you can actually take the serious elements more seriously. But the funny parts aren't all that funny. They're manic and trying really hard to be zany in the sense that they seem to think bombast is cruise control for hilarity, but it doesn't work in two ways. Firstly it doesn't mesh with the tone of the series very well. This is not a lighter side of Black Butler, but comic relief characters forcibly interjected into another show drawing their inspiration from Scrappy Doo. Secondly, there's barely jokes to what they do. It's aimless, tepid slapstick and yelling. You can almost hear the laugh track being played over it. Addressing the former would likely result in also addressing the latter. They're there because they at least realized they needed something like that, but they're not truly part of the show. They just fill a quota. And that's why they don't work. They're the idea, not the execution, so they don't actually achieve what they're there to do. And that just makes their scenes awkward and kind of boring while the serious parts stay kind of unintentionally laughable, such that if the comic relief isn't going to have some actual effort put into it, it'd be better if they just didn't bother at all.

Not to say that the rest of the show is great, but that's another matter.
***

"Most of the humor is brought in through a great lineup of supporting characters, namely the serving staff in the Phantomhive household. The various servants and cooks are a mostly incompetent bunch, but the slapstick is never overdone and the goofiness plays well with the characters."

Well, if ANN says so...

I'm kind of impressed that after seven weeks on Toonami, with her name right in the title of the show and frequently displayed on screen during Toonami's bumpers, so many people online discussing the show while it's airing still seem to have no idea how to spell Michiko's name.

Also this dub is pretty alright. Real night and day difference compared to the preceding Sentai dub of Akame ga Kill!. Which shouldn't really be a surprise. It's not like Sentai does much of anything else well, either.

Also it'd been like 3.5 years since I'd last watched an episode of this and I'd kind of forgotten most of everything that happened! So Toonami airing it has been a great excuse to just start the show over again. I'll even wind up actually finishing this show! What a world.