Megaton Musashi:Megaton Musashi is a video game adaptation like
Zegapain, with the key difference being that it really feels like a video game adaptation. Or perhaps, since big parts of the anime do appear in the game as cutscenes, it would be more correct to call it multimedia sludge. The anime doesn't start out too bad, since it keeps things simple early on. It's Zegapain's post-apocalypse, 99% of the humanity is dead, and the few remaining survivors lead fake lives, not digitized inside a computer simulation, but as mind-wiped normie drones inside vast underground shelters. Spiky-haired violence enjoyer and shounen protagonist archetype Yamato Ichidaiji gets un-mind-wiped and pressed into becoming a giant robot pilot to defend his home against alien monsters of the week. Subsequently he learns that there is more to these invaders than meets the eye when he befriends an alien princess named Arshem who's been sent to infiltrate the shelter and assassinate potential pilots.
The setup is misleadingly simple, and with its toyetic mechanical designs and complete sincerity, the show seems to be going for the tone of babby's first hype super robot anime. And I'm using that as a simple descriptor, not a slight - all genres need new entry points for fresh fans. But this simplicity starts giving way, slowly at first, when oodles of new named characters get introduced, alongside mechs, weapons, special items, powers and even entire plot points that are introduced with a bang but later sidelined, ignored or even forgotten. It makes sense in a game to have such a large toy box of things so that players can experiment and pick their fave pilots and customize their preferred builds, but in a passive format it makes the proceedings feel haphazard and unfocused. The sheer amount of stuff in the anime starts snowballing, and by the time Yamato's home shelter lifts off the ground, becoming a flying fortress-battleship for the purpose of chasing down fragments of a McGuffin recipe scattered around the planet, he has all but lost his main character status in favor of a genuine and ever-growing ensemble of friends and foes.
The second season is at least somewhat refreshing in how far from its starting setup the show has evolved. The fairly episodic super robot shenanigans have been replaced by a sprawling, diplomacy-heavy space opera, with the peace princess Arshem now arguably being the nominal main character. She's the best part of the anime and gets to be more proactive than many of her genre colleagues. Sadly, the show's writing quality never matches the ambition of its scope, and it's steadfastly inert and dramaless. This really hit me during the second season when the good guys, now on their
Fafner Exodus-esque voyage, come across a human settlement that has managed to survive despite not having a hi-tech shelter with a cloaking device. In fact, the village is out in the open, which immediately declaws the Draktors (who are supposed to have total space superiority) as a villain faction. Worse still, when the village is ultimately exposed thanks to our heroes, its entire population, which now includes a good number of enemy defectors, has to be uprooted and evacuated aboard the Ixia, and mind-wiped on top of that for integration reasons... and the writing manages to squeeze basically no drama out of all this. Instead, more time is spent on bizarrely edgy detours involving age gap romance and ship tease which do come off as the writer's barely-disguised fetish.
And the bloat continues, with new characters being introduced all the way to the final episode, until the show comes to an abrupt end just as it has managed to introduce its presumed final boss. It doesn't even feel like a logical cut-off point before a hypothetical future season as was the case with
Majestic Prince; rather, the anime just stops. These days 28 episodes might feel like a luxuriously long runtime, but it's not when it's spent like this. The show suffocates under its own minutiae like it's some 50-year-old legacy franchise. One example: early on in the first season it is established that the Draktors have monster transformation powers, and Arshem can turn into a werewolf. On the second season she straight-up forgets this convenient power when she's captured and chained to a wall. And this startling biological difference is again not mined for drama either when the human and Draktor societies start intermingling aboard the city-ship.
Apparently it's not an anime-only thing,
as the same storytelling woes are present in the game as well. But since the game also features some crackling good hack'n'slash RPG gameplay, it can get away with such clumsiness. Since a superior, interactive version of the same story exists and is now accessible to westerners as well, I wouldn't recommend the anime version of Megaton Musashi to anyone. It's the same deal as with the various
Danganronpa anime: even just watching Let's Plays on Youtube is a better option.
Dr. Nick wrote:Sengoku Collection:... A lot of people probably dropped this back in the day because it's frontloaded with some of the weakest episodes, but overall, it's a gleeful exercise in IP disrespect, and one of the very few fun things to come out of modern cancerous Konami.
