Before I get into the spoiler-heavy critique of the plot, I'll start with an overview of the other aspects.
The art:
The art style is a bit of a hit or miss. There are some panels that are truly gorgeous. But most of the action sequences, and even some non-action, fall under the somewhat common 90's manga trope of messy to the point of being hard to follow.
The characters:
Vash is interesting, or at least has the potential to be. He's a seemingly easy going character, flaunting a message of 'Peace and Love' and refusing to take anyone's life even despite being classified a 'localised disaster' level threat and being hunted by people who want to do just that. He has the air of someone with an interesting past, and the story scatters little elements about what happened to him before the big reveal in volume 2-3. The companions he gains are good enough to provide some fun conversations and switch up the mood of the action, while having potential for interesting developments themselves.
Now onto the story.
Because as I mentioned, we do actually get Vash's backstory revealed. Or at least, the big event that has caused a lot of his issues and motives in the present. Unfortunately, this is only one of my many issues with the manga's story.
The writing rushes through the reveal so fast that I hardly found time to care about what was happening, let alone fully understand it. The reveal of what happened to Rem was mentioned so abruptly and concisely that I had to re-read it to even realise that they had just disclosed what had been the big mystery of the plot up till that point. The introduction of Knives in the past was glossed over so little that all we knew about him was 'that one evil thing he did' and the fact that he and Vash used to be some kind of friends. This meant that when he showed up again, what was meant to be a rivals-with-history dynamic fell flat for me. This dramatic reunion between them, when their revealed backstory seemed so rushed, only made the confrontation feel dull. It would have been better to leave it all unknown so that the mystery of their shared past pushes the story forward instead, rather than reveal it in such a lackluster way and rush through their reunion after. Or at least lengthened the story to give it reasonable time to build all its pieces better to make for more impactful storytelling.
Outside of the reveal and reunion, a rushed pacing is a recurring issue in the writing, though that's when it was the most evident.
Perhaps this is only meant to serve as a prologue to Trigun maximum so I'm being too harsh on it. However, I'd still rather review this as independent from maximum since it stands as a story on its own. And, on its own, it didn't give me a whole lot of drive to read maximum next, even with the new pieces of information it introduced at the end to re-ignite its mystery.
