Review of Casshern Sins
Oh Casshern Sins, you were an unexpectedly interesting anime. For better or worse. This may sound harsh but I'd be interested in more anime like it, but better. Not that it was bad, far from it but...well... While the first couple of episodes were questionable, but the series quickly became a great series of one-off stories. It's like a post-apocalyptic robot version of a roadtrip movie for the first half of the series. Casshern (and later his robot dog buddy Friender, among others) travels around the "ruined" world, trying to find answers and finds how these characters, almost all robots, react to their sudden mortality andto the dying world at large. Each episode, well mainly 3-12, is each an interesting story with an enjoyable character and how they react to this post-apocalyptic world. It's a generally interesting look at inevitable mortality iwth the clever twist that it's all about robots, who were basically immortal before "the Ruin" began.
You have your core cast, Casshern the emo whiny character...but to be fair, that part is fairly tolerable and his interaction with other characters help too. Plus, it's understandable considering what happened. You have the optimistic silly child character Ringo, Lyuze, the old man, and villians. The villians are built up well, they are fun villians basically, with decent enough personalities. And it leads into some great plot twists halfway through. Afterwards it's more plot oriented instead of episodic, and at first I was genuinely enjoying that, with one fight in episode 14 that took the usually brief fighting of the series and turned it into an almost DBZ-like level of awesome. Some good continuations of the plot and it looked like it was going to head to a satisfying climax with finding the supposedly alive Luna.
...and I don't know, the series just didn't work that well in the last 1/4. The series had always had a somewhat (I hate to use this word but it's true) pretentious feel to it, but it got really annoying towards the end. The stupidly obvious symbolism, the lame twists, the contradicting message of life and death...ugh. It wasn't bad even than but compared to how much I was enjoying the rest of the series, everything after episode 18 just fell flat by comparison, even if there was still a lot of good in those episodes, it didn't come together well.
The sound design is really good. Only watched dubbed by the voice acting was typical good Funimation stuff. Nothing more nothing less. Some really good music, and the series knew when NOT to play background music, which was necessary for this series.
The art however, is gorgeous. I'd honestly say it's easily one of the best looking tv anime I have ever seen. Even what should have been brown, ugly backgrounds still look great and if anything really help the colorful characters pop. It's so good that for me, it single-handedly makes any defense of every brown and grey next gen video game a complete joke. The characters are so colorful and the animation is really good when necessary and everything is just great in terms of art. I mean for tv anime, I'm not gonna compare it to a Ghibli film or anything, that's just unfair. But still, it's fantastic. The old school designs also make it look pretty unique.
So overall, it was a good anime. It's a shame about how dissappointing the last few episodes was, but it's still a genuinely good anime worth watching. I had a lot of fun for the most part watching it, and it makes me want to see other anime with similar themes or in general a more somber look at the overdone post-apocalyptic setting. I'm sure they exist, I just haven't watched them yet.