Half a year ago, when I blogged Sengoku Basara 02, another action series, I remember noting how its biggest flaw was that it spent too much time building up and too little on actual action. That is one flaw that Wolverine really managed to avoid. Heck, it’s been a long while since I have seen an anime that had this much actual action. And the great thing is that it’s not like the usual shounen ish action of “2 minutes of fighting and 10 minutes of staring at each other”, this show continues to push itself forward with its action, preventing itself from dragging on by using its surroundings, new characters or different sets.
In other words: I’m really warming up to this series, and this episode was the best episode of Wolverine so far.It obviously lacks any animation budget here, but still: the action does not devolve into still frames, or the usual cheap shortcuts you see with action scenes. There really is a ton of movement in this show and I really like how the creators make use of this and make this not another action show with just a bunch of close-ups.
Meanwhile: the story. Still simple, but it’s a very neat twist that this episode was hinting that Yukio was the one who killed Tesshin. Simple, but neat twist for in the future. Omega Red’s double comeback also was a neat little twist, in the way that the creators promised another huge fight, and instead solved in a matter of minutes. Oh, and the ending! I didn’t expect that another one of the X-Men would make an appearance here.
Finally: is it just me, or was the music in this episode even better than usual? There were tons of interesting tracks here. Compare that to Iron Man: it just had one awesome theme song (really the height of any episode when that was played), but beyond that the rest of the songs were just forgettable. Even the composer (yes, the two series share composers) has tried much harder for Wolverine.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
OMG! Cyclops?