Visionary Nexus Network

Please keep in mind, this is just episode 1, and I’m trying to be as lenient as possible on this show. But I can only be so nice. Somehow, I highly doubt my opinion on the show is going to change a whole lot any time soon, but you never really know.

I’ve been hearing quite a bit lately about this show, and how it’d be the next Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and whatnot. TTGL is one of my favorite shows, so I figured I’d check it out. I always watch the OP and ED of a show before I begin downloading; that’s just how I roll. So, here’s a run-down of my thoughts as I watched them.

My initial thoughts were, “hey this song is kinda good”, so I went and looked up the artist and found out the main vocalist is Kittan’s (TTGL) voice actor, which gets a thumbs up from me. Explosions, and fighting, and motorcyles, and boob jiggling, and then… uh… little girls with lots of pink? Er, that broke the flow a bit. Evil lolis after that, and a group shot. It was entertaining, I’ll give it that, but it doesn’t really offer much besides, “TYPICAL SHOUNEN SHOW, BUT WITH MORE FANSERVICE”.

It caught my attention, to say the least, and so I went the extra mile and watched the ED and… what I got was… well…

I’m feeling very naughty just watching this, and it feels like if you took K-ON!’s OP and made everyone a lesbian, and there was lots of bright colors and they’re all kissing. I don’t know what to think, but I’m not entirely sure what the creators of this anime were thinking when they thought this was a good idea. That’s like, 10 thumbs down from me. I like little girls and all, but for some reason when I see them being used as nothing more than yuri fanservice for 2 minutes straight, I just get so angry. But, I guess guys like me are to blame for this. =(

I’m not too hopeful now at all for this series. I wasn’t expecting much in the first place, and now I’m expecting nothing. At this point, I was feeling more like watching the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya more than this (which is saying a lot, Haruhi bores the hell out of me), but I downloaded the first episode anyways, and got to watching it.

Let’s just start off with the characters.

First off, we have Soma Cruz. The main character, I’m presuming. Hm. What can I say about him? Well, he’s the timid shota who does nothing. Yeah. He spends the first episode either crying (after his hot, badass sister gets killed. I only say badass because you see her for two minutes, so they didn’t have much time to ruin her), or getting his ass beat by blue girl or super-powered spider freaks. Voiced by the chick who did Miyuki in Lucky Star.

Next, we’ve got Blade. No, not Blade Kiro, just… Blade. Oddly enough, he doesn’t use a sword, and he’s a priest (I have no idea how that works). Combine Kenshiro and Kamina, but suck out all cool out of them and inject him with lots of ‘roids and Dante Syndrome*, and you’ve got Blade. His power is that of super strength and “Zero”, which allows him to copy powers from enemies he fights, kinda like Mega Man. He’s sort of the voice of reason between the main three, but can be kind of a dick. Voiced by Takehito Koyasu, the current Kenshiro.

And then there’s Eve. She’s the blue-haired girl who rides the motorcycle in the OP, and wears skimpy clothes. Eve is a bitch so far. I don’t know if I can call her a bigger bitch than Haruhi (biggest bitch in anime, clearly), but she’s quite the bitch. She spends the first episode abusing chibi expressions, and yelling at Cruz for no reason, other than that she misunderstands things because her brainmass went to her chest and ass. Her power is that of a “doppelgänger”: She can morph her body mass to change into people who have about as much mass as her, or she can change body parts into weapons. Voiced by the chick who was Ami in Toradora!

Oh, and Dr. Wily is in this anime too. But he’s helping the good guys, and he’s not very interesting and he’s just there to explain shit no one cares about.

The ED lolis never appear in the first episode, so whether they’re all actually lesbians has yet to be revealed to me (no, I’m not going to go read the manga to find out).

Let’s move on to the story now. Uh… it’s nothing special. I can see why people thought of Gurren Lagann because of this, but let’s keep in mind that the Needless manga did come out in ’04, so, I’m not gonna fault it on being similar. But, the story can pretty much be summed up like this: WWIII happened, and we bombed the hell out of each other, and created black holes or something in the world and there’s mutant people called Needless that have super powers and a resistance group that fights against them and this all takes place in a post-apocolyptic Japan. That’s about it. It works, I guess, but it doesn’t do much to differentiate itself from other series’ in the genre.

And finally, we have the action. Should be the main draw to this show, but so far, it hasn’t even delievered in the slightest sense of the word. There’s some fighting in the beginning of the episode, but it mainly ammounts to one punch on the robot, and then cut to a scene at a later point. The main fight of episode one plays out like one of the later DBZ episodes, in that one of the two sides uses a move, and then the other makes it seem useless, and shows his real power, and the fight comes to anticlimatic and meaningless end. I know it’s the first episode, but that was the one of the most pathetic fights to grace the first episode of a shounen series. I’ve seen better fights from CLANNAD, and that show doesn’t even focus on that. Not to mention, anytime anyone uses a special move, they must yell the name of the move each time while the name is needlessly (hurr durr…  sorry.) shown in large katakana on the screen. The first episode isn’t boding well for fights, as it wasn’t interesting, and more along the lines of stupidly annoying.

Thus far, I would not recommend Needless. With the direction it seems to be taking, it only appears to be a show filled with shallow characters, in-your-face fanservice, typical boring shounen plot, and disappointing action scenes. But, we’ll see in the coming weeks if that happens to change.

*: Dante Syndrome refers to someone who tries as hard as he/she can to be as cool and badass as Dante from Devil May Cry, but never really doing enough to actually warrant being that cool.

Related posts

• Needless Ep. 2 – Drills, knife fights, and bukkake. (2)
• Needless: Shitting on my day like usual – Episode 3 thoughts (3)
• Needless Ep. 4 – A Lolicon Emerges?!? (2)
• Tokyo Magnitude 8.0: Solidarity Amidst Chaos (0)
• The Art of (Verbal) War – Where Senjogahara/Araragi Fails and Lawrence/Horo Succeeds (7)