Reviews

Mar 26, 2023
Spoiler
Spoilers ahead...

And well, let me start this off by saying i wouldn't recommend this, not even as a standalone.


First lets start with the elephant in the room... No, not the CGI, the lack of the black cat mascot! ...
Just kidding, but not fully, you already know something's off when that thing's not there anymore aside a hard to spot easter egg or a few.
The CGI. Yes its studio orange, and yes, people love to sing them praise, but i personally found beastars pretty choppy and robotic in many scenes, while decent visually. Similarly, while the land of lustrous was pretty good looking, especially the hair, some of its scenes where pretty choppy too, and the shot composition wasn't always great. So where does Trigun land?

Animation wise, its usually better, aside some scenes that do the Japanese 3d 'anime' favorite and start dropping fps to something like 10, or even lower at somewhere around 5 at some points, taking it to a slideshow, which with 3d, that doesn’t morph and stretch to accommodate for that, ‘makes your eyes bleed’ because you can’t follow the motion at all. Thankfully these slideshow moments aren't frequent, and the rest is decently animated at a high or acceptable fps... Animations? Well, very few are robotic, so that's a win. Depending on the scene, some are okay, some are honestly great, some are… TOO fluid, to the point of being literally cartoonish, especially with Vash losing traction with the ground, literally or figuratively (air walking/running)… But these are mostly around the show’s first two episodes that are more lighthearted so its not really that big a problem.

But if that was the 'somewhat good', here comes the 'somewhat bad', or simply bad... First of all, the camera motion. As often is the case with 3d CGI, it takes far too many liberties and moves all over the place in ways that make no sense and don’t contribute anything, or even disorients and gets in the way of your understanding and enjoyment of the scene… Zoom is overused for no good reason as usual too. Second of all, the shot composition itself and the camera placement are pretty bad, which makes for some pretty bland shots most of the time, and ones that don't accentuate or inform you of much as the viewer, which is, well, bad. Lastly, the character design, visuals, backgrounds…

Now that's where the worst part is. Along with the bad shot placement, the backgrounds that vary from poor to good can make the scenes very plain. For example 2 second 2 tone photoshop gradient 'sky' or desert ‘backgrounds’ of similar horrid quality… Or great DRAWN backgrounds that get mere seconds of use and perhaps even with zoom so you don't really see anything! The character designs themselves... Well, i'm personally not a fan of some, others are good, but overall they're decent. What's NOT even close to decent is the detail and models outside the face. The cell shading light renderer effect turns the clothes into really bland, stupid looking 'concrete tubing'. Doesn't help that whichever program was used for making the show doesn't allow for dynamic cloth either so its as stiff as said concrete. Coupled with the lack of detail on clothes, it makes the character two tone featureless ‘clothing tubes’ stand out from the relatively well detailed and shaded backgrounds, and in the worst way too, something that could easily be fixed by giving the cloth elements SOME textures and/or more details like pockets, patches, scratches, and other decals.

Oh, and the action scenes kind of fall flat because while some bits can be pretty good, for example Vashe’s close range hand to hand combat… MOST of the time its just him and others running around pointlessly, with the camera flying, panning and generally flailing around, storm trooper bullets sometimes sprayed in their general direction. So what do you get overall? Well, despite all i said, its definitely watchable, and doesn't look all that bad, but it doesn't look great either. Guess 6.7/10 if i'd have to score the visuals alone. So, if the visuals aren't really the problem (they ARE a part of it tho, since bad shot composition impacts storytelling negatively, and with the bland action scenes, it hurts enjoyment too), WHAT is? Well, its the directing, scene composition, and STORY.

And so let's skip right ahead to said story. This is a weird reboot-prequel kind of deal. People often complain the original anime had a lot of filler (which it kind of did, but not really since a lot of the filler where expanded short post ending bits and other things that WHERE there, just not as long, and the ones that wheren't where still pretty high effort, interesting, and added a lot to the world building and feel the show's going for), but here… Its BASICALLY ALL FILLER! As in, almost entirely made up because pre-July we’re not really told of anything in the manga, and this show went ahead and made a WHOLE season out of that ‘material’ it either made up, or combined with existing stories or parts of them while also moving them in the timetable to make an unholy mix of badly written and badly developed story and progression!

The way almost every episode plays can be described with one word - lazy. You do not get any big mystery and a sense of wonder from observing and learning about the world, you get FACE STUFFED with exposition about where they are and how they got there (human race survival plan, aka ‘arcs’ crash landing on the wrong planet that's just a desert you can barely inhabit due to Knives sabotaging the face flight and with the oblivious help of Vash, which now becomes a major plot point). You get told pretty much everything about Vash and project seeds in the first episode, the only ‘reveal’ being why Knives went haywire (learning the independent plant girl before them was dissected). The conflict and action is also extremely straightforward and boring.

Compare it to the original anime which kept you in the dark on the fact this is the same universe as ours, and isn't just some steampunk - sci fi- western fantasy until like a third of the way in, presenting very little to go off of until the big reveal about how they all ended up on that planet in the first place and the show's antagonist, also showing up also about half way in, and the comparison makes stampede which is completely straightforward and replaces ALL THAT with just stuffing exposition dpwm your throat in the worst way look simply pathetic. And that's in the grand theme of things, each individual episode of the original is also far more well structured, often raising interesting questions, sometimes concepts, showing various sides of Vash and adding to the mystery of this man and what exactly is going on...

There isn’t much story sense to it all is what I’m saying. It starts out, mercilessly dumps exposition, introduces the villain in episode 3, and sends the crew of 3 on a pointless crusade to ‘find’ Knives, aka just travel to July, picking up Wolfwood on the way. WHY is that the villain's plot? Who knows, Vash doesn’t seem to have absolutely any plan about what to do in the confrontation. Why then does he even GET to go on that trip when Knives wants to use him as a gate, and could easily just ABDUCT him there and then in episode 3, with the current version of Vash being far weaker than the manga or 98 anime, and Knives being far stronger? No idea.

Now for the flip side of the story – characters… Also interactions and overall writing. Who is the most well written character in the WHOLE SHOW? Knives. DESPITE STILL being written pathetically and making very little sense, and appears for less than a quarter of the show! Yes, its that bad. What is his motivator? A childhood based hatred for humanity after seeing the dissected girl, learning of the plant ‘final runs’. This is the decently written part, and the one that makes sense. But how about the part where he continuously gaslights Vash about it being his fault for crashing because he helped, supposedly crushing him mentally by saying ‘he did it for him’? Vash was FRIGGING TOUGH AS NAILS in the original, there's no way this lazy bs would work with him! And the fact he both supposedly cares for him, but also doesn’t mind killing him, literally, or by turning him into a plant? That part doesn’t make a lot of sense at all.

What about Vash, the frigging PROTAGONIST of the show? Nope, he simply doesn’t exist. Forget the witty, goofy guy he was before, (also he can also apparently regenerate and shrug off being shot now, because why not… where’d the lasting injuries come from then..? as a tradeoff i guess he can't dodge/manipulate bullets or do the other cool tricks from the original, or simply doesn't try because that takes effort to think up and the people wrting this are horrible), now he’s quiet, sad and not at all well explored either. His pacifism? Its just a fact you have to take at face value because its source – the dialogues with Rem that’s the very core of his being has been cut entirely. So WHY is he a pacifist that would go to insane extents to protect anyone, even the bad guys? Eh, WHO CARES RIGHT~? How do you learn he's a pacifist then? Its just a sliding mention with no real weight lol. No comedy or lighthearted behavior from him aside the very start too. Nor any friendly fun interactions with Wolfwood and Meryl either. Speaking of those, Wolfwood, aside his couple episodes with the steamer, orphanage and flashbacks also pretty much DOES NOT EXIST. Well, guess he shoots a mutated kid when the winds change and Vash is close to talking him down, cool. Not that Vash who supposedly takes it hard seems to really care in literally a moment (the next episode).

Meryl exists to an even lesser extent, being there seemingly just to sometimes react to things happening in the most lazy, boring, and non memorable ways, nowhere near close to what she was like in the manga and 98 show. You might say its expected with her not yet being developed and it being the prequel, but, what’s the point of even having her in a central role then..? Her partner, a new character and useless drunk, is just there to be the narrator, dump exposition and questionable dialogue, then die, which is supposed to help her grow somehow..? And well, lastly, they also barely talk and interact inside this small group, making for a very dry and weird experience, unlike the much more fun, interesting and loud main cast of the manga and show. So overall we get HALF a functioning character (Knives) that’s missing for most of the show, and three-four ‘main’ characters that are less developed than most side characters in other shows... And frankly downright PATHETICALLY written to fill in for the rest of the air time!

I could start unwrapping specific examples of how this plays out horribly, and how these decisions in writing suck, and the ways they make the characters react to things makes no sense, also how they changed the powers and characters further toward being more boring, but, I think you get the picture by now and its already a rather long piece. Final verdict – a rare 3/10 (just for the somewhat decent 3d and new designs) and NOT recommended at all for absolutely anyone.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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