Reviews

Back Arrow is a throwback to the times when anime were mostly mecha adventures and sci-fi without much of a concern when it came to plot or sociopolitical messages. It’s made specifically for people like me who don’t relate with highschools, moe, or isekai, and we just want to see some damn giant robot action goddammit! Me and an another old-school mecha fan were watching it weekly while it was airing and we had so much fun with it as a blast from the past. It had so many things going on besides the robots action; it included adventure, war epics amongst different civilizations, mystery, and even got a bit metaphysical in the last episodes. I kept seeing it as a tribute to Xenogears, one of my favorite videogames from the late 90s.

Nostalgia and personal preferences aside though, it’s not well written at all and it rushes through every conflict and concept for the sake of having a twist in almost every episode. Despite having great variety in civilizations and sci-fi ideas, there is hardly any proper build up and you will barely see something before it’s over and something else comes along. Power ups are instant, the tone changes abruptly from comedy to drama, explanations regarding how something works are given after that something has been used, and the plot twists have close to no logical explanation. The authors were just throwing in as much as they could without bothering to give them the time to get fleshed out, or to make sense, or to last long enough for the people who are supposed to be the target audience.

But as a whole the main issue is the very fast pacing. The show could have easily been three times as long, although that would also mean the animation studio would waste three times as much money on something that very few would bother to watch. Because in case you didn’t notice, mecha have been out of favor ever since the Millennial generation was proven to be more fond of battle harems and school moeshit. Hence why Back Arrow was not given the attention it deserved. It was a tribute to the stuff generation X liked 40 years ago. Since there are very few of us left who still like mecha and not isekai nonsense there was very little incentive to bother much with a project that was doomed to be overlooked by 99.9% of the viewerbase. Also artwork and animation are just above average, thus Back Arrow couldn’t even win the sakuga audience just by being the best possible looking thing of the season.

It’s quite enjoyable if you shut off your brain and you see it as a tongue in cheek type of show that never tries to be more than crazy stuff happening all the time, but I’m not going to call it a good show when its conflicts are resolved in a hurry, most explanations for how something works are made up on the spot, and even then they are something cheap such as ‘he willed it into happening’ or ‘he was brainwashed or he forgot he could do it’. It was a cool one time diversion from the graveyard that is modern anime and that’s it.