"Hey, let's buy some guy who can animate a few robot battles with some 3D software. We'll make up some dialogues as fillers and spice them up by throwing in a few old jokes and a crapload of terms from some successful fantasy-universe or something like that to make it look like some intelligent and thoroughly thought through show ... what do you think about this Lovecraft guy?"
I guess that's what a planning-session for Demonbane could have been like.
The battles themselves didn't look that bad, but then again: The ridiculous mecha design gets boring and the fights aren't much better in that regard. Most of the time I got the impression they didn't even bother thinking about details, but rather made a new 3D model and threw it at the main characters robot including some flashy sfx. Between the fights the viewer has to face a redicilous amount of Lovecraft-references that (apparently) don't add anything to the show but pure confusion of the viewer. I can't say whether this show may offer something for a person having read all the lovecraft stuff, but my guess would be, that even that is rather unlikely.
EDIT (May 2012):
It has been almost 4 years since I wrote this review. Looking back at the show as I remember it and at my somewhat updated policy for rating shows on my list I chose to update the scores slightly. Also I ultimately did not end up writing reviews here on this site, but I don't just want to 'delete' this one. I wrote it as my oppinion on the show and by and large it still shows how I think about this show. As such the changes will be the following:
(pattern:
category: old score --> new score (reason)
Story: 2 --> 4 (Having watched many other animes I acknowledge, that the quality of this shows story is not as vastly below something that can make an enjoyable experience as my former score depicted, though I still consider it to be significantly below average for the reasons stated in my original review.)
Sound: 3 --> 4 (This change basically is made because I have seen enjoyable animes in the meantime that did almost equally as 'bad' as this one. So maybe it was just because the stuff I watched before this show was somewhat above-average for it's time ... be it in soundtrack or voice acting or sfx.)
Enjoyment: 2 --> 3 (2, which for "overall scores" is outside the range I decided to use for stuff that I at least managed to watch till the end, gets updated to 3. I did not enjoy it, but I at least managed to watch the end because I expected it to get better after the first four or five episodes and then the end was already close enough to pull through.)
Overall: 3 --> 4 (The overall rating gets boosted to a 4, as such acknowledging the possibility that someone who can process the Lovecraft references and likes the style of this show might overall find it enjoyable to a certain extent, though still hard to believe for me.)
