Category: Casshern Sins

Short Synopsis: The finale of Casshern Sins.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
Yeah, like expected: the creators tried to stuff too much into this episode and therefore it lacked the impact it could have had, but let me tell you this: if the right time was reserved to make everything in this episode give enough time to naturally unfold, this ending would have rocked beyond belief, and it would have been a great candidate for the best ending of the year. There were so many nice ideas in this episode, so it’s a bloody shame that the creators couldn’t have gotten their hands on one extra episode.

the big problem here that Casshern Sins has always been at its best in slow pacings: letting the dialogue slowly and fluently carry what’s happening. In this episode Lyuze and Ouji die within five minutes. That’s way too little. I could fully imagine that the material in this episode would have been more than enough to make four episodes of awesomeness: one about Lyuze and Ouji’s death, one about Casshern vs. Braiking Boss, one about Casshern vs. Luna and one aftermath in which we see Ringo grow up. The creators would have been easily able to fill that time within the episode.

But still I loved this episode, even though it could have been so much better. The thing I loved most about this episode was the final scene, in which we see Ringo grow up alone along with Friender. We never get confirmed whether she really is Leda’s child, but things are pretty certain here. Normally robots don’t grow, but she did, and she’s a teen-aged girl at the end of the episode. The only reason she could have grown into that was because she’s like Casshern, Dio and Leda. I appreciate it though, that the creators didn’t hang a sign over her with “look at me, I’m Leda’s daughter!!!”.

But yeah, what ever happened to that coloured rock?

In any case, it’s definitely been interesting to blog this series. In the end, it’s never really been my favourite series, but it sure as hell came close. My top 3 of the shows that started airing in the past fall season at the moment is the following:
#3: Clannad
#1/2: Mouryou no Hako, Michiko e Hatchin
I’m still not sure about the exact order between number 1 and 2, but I don’t think that I can include Casshern in it. It just… missed that extra something that would make it truly outstanding, and that I did experience in Clannad, Michiko e Hatchin and Mouryou no Hako. Nevertheless, it’s been an excellent series, with some of the most beautiful visuals out there.

Short Synopsis: Casshern vs. Luna
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
Before I start with the episode, I’m going to have to say some negative things about this series. It’s one of my favourites of the currently airing series, so I’m not happy with it either, but I do want to say a few things about it. If the series had the luck to air half a year earlier, I probably wouldn’t have noticed this, but the past weeks some of the other currently airing shows have reminded me of the difference between an excellent series and a truly outstanding series. Ever since it aired, this series has been on this list of favourites. That creates some expectations, and in the past weeks I realized that in the end the series didn’t live up to it.

In the second half of this series, the show has become much more consistent and predictable when compared to the first half. It merely founds its pace, and consistently went along with it. It never hit any lows, nor did it hit any heights, and that’s the problem I’m getting to. In the end, my favourite episode of this series remains episode seven. In comparison, some of the other shows airing this season have truly surpassed themselves in the past month. For me, Michiko e Hatchin, Shikabane Hime, Clannad After Story, Jigoku Shoujo, Birdy The Mighty Decode, Druaga no Tou and Ride Back have been consistently getting better and better for their own standards, while Casshern’s level of quality has pretty much stayed the same, with the result that quite a few series have already caught up with it. At the end of February, I was fairly certain that my Top 3 of series that started airing in the past Fall Season would contain Casshern Sins, but at this point I’m not so sure anymore. For any regular series, it’s a real achievement to be able to produce an episode that is as good as your average Casshern episode, but this series already showed that it was excellent in its first quarter. For me, it did sort-of fail in meeting the stellar expectations it set in its beginning. I remember Himitsu faced the same problem, but at least that series turned significantly better in its final quarter, and it’s a shame that Casshern couldn’t follow.

But yeah, that doesn’t mean that this series isn’t getting any worse. This episode was yet again really good for a semi-final episode. What I especially liked was how Luna doesn’t have any combat abilities at all. That really prevents the ending from turning into a boring overblown fight between the main character and villain until one of them goes down. I also liked how many story threads were solved in this episode: Luna and Casshern both quit trying to make the other understand and went their own ways, Dio finally considered Leda, which is something which Leda really appreciated and saved her from her own darkness.

And finally we learn the cause of the ruin: when Casshern impaled her, her blood flowed throughout all the oceans of the earth. This transformed Luna from a goddess of destruction into a goddess of life. And indeed it sort-of makes sense that her new blood can be used to heal the effects of her old blood. Casshern then became the first one to experience the effects of her new blood, but as a side-effect he lost his memory.

The next episode is going to be a very interesting one, as it seems to be more centred around Braiking Boss and Luna than Casshern. The potential for an original ending is very good, so let’s hope that it’s not going to screw up. I remember how someone noted that there could be a second season, but I wouldn’t count on it: this is Madhouse, after all. They only very rarely make sequels (the perfect way to prevent you from milking out your own franchises). However, there is no way that that ending is going to wrap every single open thread in the storyline:
– What the heck was the point of the coloured rock anyway?
– What was the point of making Dio, Leda AND Casshern robots who could potentially reproduce? It feels a bit and unimportant to just include it for a small piece of Leda’s background. Apart from that it’s never really been used.

what I want at least in the next episode is the background of Braiking Boss. It would be a darn shame if he’d just impale Luna to make her blood flow across the rivers of the earth again and disappear. In this episode it became clear that he isn’t a bad guy after all, but he had just been searching for Luna as well, and making the right preparations to save the world. The question is however: what caused this change of heart? Wasn’t he the one who ordered to kill Luna? Of course he may have realized the mistakes of his actions, but I’d really like to see that confirmed.

Short Synopsis: Casshern is still alive but heavily damaged and Leda attempts to receive eternal beauty from Luna.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
Whoa… the voice actors were really having the time of their lives in this episode. Seriously, there was a lot of screaming and moaning in this episode, but those scenes hit me really hard. In any case, it seems that my worries in the previous episode were just completely out of place: although I would love to run into a series some day in which the main protagonist dies before the final episode of the series, Casshern indeed still needs to do some things in this series. The huge beating up he received in the previous episode was meant for his character-development: he’s no longer a senseless killer, and also for some reason, his body’s regenerative abilities have declined a lot, although they’re still there.

And I’m really glad to see how Leda and Dio turned out. I remember noting about eight episodes ago how the two of them were my least favourite characters of this series, but now that they too have received their development, they too have really become part of the amazing cast of this series. This episode really was about the two of them, and worked really well. As Casshern demonstrated: Luna’s blood isn’t perfect. It’s not like you drink it and become immortal with the push of a button. In this episode, Leda only drinks a bit of her blood, though that doesn’t turn out to be enough for 100% regenerative abilities. Remember how Casshern needed to impale her chest in order to drink enough blood and the past two episodes showed that that still wasn’t enough to be purely immortal. I also think that the “immortal”-part of Casshern was just a rumour: Luna’s blood regenerates, but it doesn’t toy with life.

And it also turns out that not every robot is able to take the huge amounts of blood from Luna either. This episode shows that Leda just couldn’t take even a fraction of the blood that Casshern must have drunk from Luna. She doesn’t look dead, but that does explain why Casshern lost his memory: he too received the repercussions of drinking too much of her blood. It’s a bit hard to imagine how this would chain-react into the ruins, though. And I also think that Luna never gave her blood to Dune because he probably already had drunk too much of it, and giving him even more would only ruin him. Luna indeed isn’t a villain, but just someone who is incredibly tormented by her own powers.

But what does that mean for all of the robots who have been saved by Luna before? Did they simply drink a little bit of her blood, that would allow them to heal their wounds, but didn’t do much else? In that case, then it must mean that the robots who were hurting themselves like crazy were just ecstatic: they were too happy that their wounds recovered that they didn’t notice that new ones popped up.

Unfortunately, it really does turn out that this show has only 24 episodes, that means two episodes left. I’m really curious to see whether this series can pull off a great finale. It really has the potential for that, but series as Ghost Hound have shown that lots of build-up doesn’t necessarily mean a perfectly planned ending. At the very least, I want to see a satisfying explanation of where the ruin came from, and why it appeared when Casshern killed Luna. That coloured rock has probably something to do with it. Speaking of which, where the heck has Ouji hidden it?

Short Synopsis: Ouji returns.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
I’m not getting my hopes up. I’m NOT going to get my hopes up this time. There is no way that this cliff-hanger is going to be real. This series is going to be one of the best things since sliced bread if Casshern DOES end up dead, but I’ve seen too many cliffhangers like this one in which the main character supposedly gets killed off before the final episode. The next episode is probably going to feature some kind of plot twist that is going to keep Casshern alive. It’s going to be an awesome one, that’s for sure, but as much as I’d like to hope for a series to kill off its main character before its final episode, it ain’t gonna happen.

But that’s enough ranting, because this still remains such an excellent series. In this episode, it becomes clear that Luna indeed is very different from your guardian angel. In the time before her supposed death, it was so bad that anyone who met her met with death. When Braiking Boss ordered to kill her, he basically ended up killing his own subordinates, it seems. Still, since Luna was seen as the sun, nobody seemed to either bother or notice. Still, Casshern for some reason wasn’t affected by her death-rays, he stabbed her, and got in touch with her blood, and that’s why he became immortal. Nothing to do with love, like I originally suspected. This however, still leaves a truckload of questions yet to be answered:
– Why didn’t Casshern get himself killed?
– Why did Luna’s powers change all of a sudden?
– Where did the ruin come from?
– How come Casshern got pulverized at the end of this episode, without regenerating?
– Did Dune get his nickname really from his own actions, or were all the rumours of the people the original Luna killed delegated to him?

And here’s one thing I’ve been wondering:: every single recurring character has his or her own purpose in the series, except for Friender. Seriously, what was the last thing that it ever did? Try to dig out Casshern from a bunch of rocks. Apart from that, it’s just… there. Is Friender going to be more than just a simple cameo fro the original Casshan series, or will it have an important role in the end?

Short Synopsis: Casshern finally meets Luna
Episode Rating: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
Casshern Sins has just been a string of awesomeness for the past few episodes. Especially this episode was one of those where everything comes together. Casshern finally gets the chance to meet Luna, and because the entire series has been building up to this moment, the results were nothing short of awesome.

So as it turns out, Luna doesn’t turn out to be such a sweetheart after all. In this episode, she shows that she hates things that are about to die, so because of that she simply kills them off. Dune’s reasoning seems to be that if they’d die, they’d make Luna sad, so it’s just better to kill them off so that this doesn’t happen. In the end, Luna’s just someone who’s been obsessed with her own status: she never dies, and if she were to, everyone would go with her. She continuously needs to heal others, and eventually she changed from a nice healer to some sort of obsessive guru-type person.

This episode also seems to explain why there are so many of those angry robots fighting. Before the ruin, they basically lived in a world where they couldn’t die: if they got hurt, they’d simply visit Luna in order to get healed. Because of that, they grew up in a society in which there was no fear of death, and the morals must have been pretty low on each other’s mind: nobody had to struggle for survival, because Luna was there anyway! Now that the ruin started, and everyone’s going to die anyway, they still can’t remember what it means to have your life lost, or to take the lives of others, since it’s so new to them.

She really is symbolic of the sun, in a much less overglorified fashion as usual: she’s there. Without her, everyone will die, but she never grants wishes, cares for anyone or helps those in need.

But damn, this series has now accumulated quite an army of villains: we already had Dio, Leda and Braiking Boss, and now Luna also joined their ranks. All four of them have their own agendas, and with only four episodes left in this series it’s going to be very interesting to see how all of their story-lines are going to be concluded.

Short Synopsis: Casshern and Lyuze get attacked by a mysterious robot-duo.
Episode Rating: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
ZOMG, two full episodes, dedicated on nothing but Lyuze! Oh, how well this series makes use of it. This episode was simply awesome. There was surprisingly little dialogue between Casshen and Lyuze, but that’s also what made this episode so beautiful: the two of them didn’t need a lot of dialogue in order to develop the bond between them.

Speaking of beautiful, I think that the screenshots already gave some indication, but I absolutely LOVED the visuals in this episode. It felt like every single shot oozed with style, and there wasn’t even a single frame that didn’t impress me. Madhouse truly did a terrific job on animating this episode.

Anyway, about Lyuze: it turns out that my theory of love bringing immortality is wrong: Lyuze still rusts in this episode, though what’s interesting is that even though Casshen bleeds again in this episode, we never see him regenerate himself like he did a number of episodes ago, so the source of his immortality is still pretty much unknown. However, Casshern and Lyuze officially became a couple in this episode. It turns out that the entire previous episode was building up to that moment.

Then there are the two guest-characters who appeared in this episode: the female robot and her friend. It’s strange: I loved the two of them, even though we learn hardly anything about them. Their development really is minimal: they come from out of nowhere, attack, and disappear again. They only appear for what… three minutes? And yet they’re fully fleshed out for them to work. We know that they’re strong, care about each other and are obsessed with not dying.

Short Synopsis: Lyuze finds a bit of time to reflect on herself.
Episode Rating: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
It’s episodes like this that really set Casshern Sins apart from all other anime out there. It just takes one single character, and easily manages to fill the 20 minutes of an episode with it while other series even have trouble to fill up five minutes. While CxL may have found this episode disappointing (which I don’t get, by the way; the entire episode was about Lyuze, what more could you want?!), I really loved this episode. This really is one of the reasons I originally fell in love with this series.

Throughout the episode, you really have trouble to figure out what’s real and what’s not. In fact, I even dare to assume that this entire episode simply happened within Lyuze’s head: otherwise we would have seen Ringo somewhere. The enemy robots, her crumbling sister who appeared over and over again, the strange guy who came from out of nowhere to hit on her, I think that all of them symbolized the doubts that are inside of her. We hardly saw anything of her personal troubles for the past few episodes, but I think that throughout the series, she more and more hid her own personal worries inside of her, instead of unleashing them on Casshern, like she did when she first met Casshern.

And I do have to say that Lyuze was nearly as cute as Ringo when she was young. In this episode, this younger version of her really helped her complete her character-development and accept Casshern, which has been built up for the past ten episodes or so. Before, she believed that she only lived for her revenge on Casshern (hey, the ruin was going to kill her anyway, so she might as well use her last life to take revenge), but she finally sees that the death of her sister did have one positive side-effect: it made her meet Casshern.

Now then, to relate this back to the previous episode: if it indeed is true that love is the recipe for immortality, then I think that Lyuze just attained it. It’s interesting how love in this series is some sort of contagious disease: Luna started it, then Casshen got “infected”, and now it’s his turn to introduce love to Lyuze.

Short Synopsis: Our cast arrives at the place where Luna supposedly was born.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
Nothing short of an awesome episode. Not only does Leda finally get her development, turning her from a dull character into a great one, it also pushes the plot also gets pushed into an entirely new direction.

So, let me get this straight: Leda once was pregnant!? So Ouji’s research did succeed, apparently. If I understood things correctly, she entrusted her child to Luna, who would grow it in some sort of artificial womb (probably to guarantee the survival of the infant), but along the way something went wrong and her child died. It turns out that she was after some sort of secret that Luna left behind. I’m not yet sure for what kind of motive, but in this episode when she’s this close to attaining it, she simply loses control of herself. I’m beginning to think that Casshern and Leda’s emotional stability are inversely proportionate to each other: Casshern has calmed down a lot since the first few episodes (as noted by Luna and Ouji in this episode), while the only emotional support Leda received was from a power-hungry Dio.

In the end, this “secret” was hidden inside three child robots, that Luna left behind at her birthplace. At this point, we’re not sure what its purpose is, but Ouji is going to find out. For that, however, he was forced to break up with Ringo, which made for a really emotional break-up scene between the two. I also wonder: those children referred to Luna as their mother, but also talked about a father, who has long since died. I can’t imagine anyone who fits that bill, other than that the children somehow misheard about either Dune’s or Braiking Boss’ death or something. Also, that one comparison they made with Leda and Luna is also very interesting, hinting that there’s much more to Leda still.

Also, this part is what I’m a bit unsure about, but if I’m not mistaken those children also revealed something about the concept of immortality in this series: if you want to be immortal, you’ve got to know the meaning of “love”. If this is true, then it does explain a few things: Leda herself can’t understand that concept, so despite her wishes to be immortal that became apparent in this episode, she’s never going to attain her goal. Dio himself is stuck with such a woman, so the concept of love also shouldn’t occur with him. And now that I think about it, all of the robots feelings we’ve seen so far in the random stories were despair, admiration, obsession and fascination, but no romantic feelings. Luna herself somehow did understand the concept, and when Casshern “killed” Luna, he somehow understood this as well, fell in love with her and lost his memories because of it, or something similar.

Also, bad things are going to happen to Ringo, with this episode I’m sure, due to one particularly nasty case of foreshadowing where Ringo’s legs stopped working (does that mean that she really is a robot?). When this is going to happen again, Ouji won’t be there to cover up and fix it. At first sight, it’s a bit irresponsible of him to just leave her like that, but I think that the reason why he’s decided to say goodbye to her is to be able to find the solution to the destruction as soon as possible, because he knows that she’s about to suffer from it.

Short Synopsis: Dio and Leda run into some old acquaintances and Ouji reveals a few things about his past.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Excellent)
It’s good to see that Dio and Leda get their fair share of attention. While they are my least favourite characters of this series, their extra development is quickly getting rid of these problems, and makes the two of them more enjoyable with every episode that focuses on them. In this episode, they meet Braiking Boss’ top soldiers before Dio and Leda arrived: Barkan and Mars. The two are still angry for the two of them taking their place.

The interesting thing here is that they too beat the crap out of Dio, though still all he can think about is how he can’t win of Casshern. Leda manages to save him and leads the two of them away, but something bugs me about her reaction when Dio returned (pumped up by Braiking Boss’ words of motivation): her joy at seeing Dio back was definitely acted. I’m still not exactly sure about what she’s planning, but she definitely has a hidden agenda. This series has shown by now that she simply isn’t as strong as Casshern or Dio, so instead she has to resort to trickery and deceit more.

Speaking of which, Braiking Boss also hasn’t been simply wandering around for no possible reason. Something’s telling me that he’s trying to set up Casshern and Dio against each other, but what especially bugs me is how in the ED, he’s lying right next to Luna. You’d think that that would be a place for Dune, so what’s he doing there?

But my favourite part of this episode was obviously Ouji’s background. He seems to be some sort of cyborg: mostly human, but with artificial limbs. It turns out that the reason he’s taking care of Ringo is because she saved him when he was at the bottom of despair, when she was only just an infant. That really begs the question to what she is, though. I can understand how Ouji is a cyborg: the guy was a scientist for Braiking Boss, so I guess that he also had enough time to experiment on his own body. But Ringo on one side is just a regular child who grows up, gets hurt, and apparently doesn’t need any food (at least, we’ve never seen the two of them eat so far), and at the same time she feels the effects of the destruction just like any other robot…