Category: Casshern Sins

Short Synopsis: A Dune-episode
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Awesome colours!)
You know, it might actually be the case that Casshern’s random encounters are not going to appear in second half of this series anymore, and instead this series is now going to full-time focus on the most important characters. This episode was entirely about Dune, the next episode seems to deal with Dio and Leda again, and so it seems that the random episodes in the first half were really meant to flesh out the setting of this series. Now that that’s happened, it’s time for the characters to develop, and I can’t wait to see both the lesser and the better characters of this series change.

This episode also yet again provides a piece of the puzzle on what happened to Luna: Casshern did stab her through the heart, and she fell into a pool of some sort, and Dune witnessed this. However, nobody said anything about Luna losing her immortality: her body simply sunk to the bottom of that pool, and somehow Dune assumed that she wouldn’t survive it. The big question is now: why did he care so much about protecting her in the first place when she’s immortal? Why didn’t he dive after her to rescue her body? It’s now obvious that she survived, although I guess that it took quite a bit of time for her to recover. The question also remains where the ruins came from and how Casshern became immortal himself.

I also absolutely loved the art in this episode. The art director really went all out on this one, and the use of bright colours forms a huge contrast with the dark and gritty colours that were used in the rest of the series. This again symbolizes the new direction this series is going to take, I assume: the first half of the show was full of despair, so it was mostly filled with grey colours, and perhaps red. The second half, however, confirmed that Luna is alive, and is filled with hope instead, so that’s going to make for bright and cheerful colours.

But the landscape that this episode took place in was also fantastic and truly original. I’m still not sure exactly what it was… some sort of dried up ocean that was filled with semi-glass transparent blue salt, or something?

Short Synopsis: Ringo and Ouji get separated.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Excellent)
Okay, so either this series got its timeslot shifted to Tuesday somehow, or the Thursday timeslot went into a hiatus and the Tuesday timeslot didn’t. Anyway, about the episode: CasshernXLyuze: you were right. Casshern and Lyuze are indeed the main couple of this series. The final few minutes of this episode were wonderful, as they showed that Lyuze finally accepts that she can’t kill Casshern if he has the potential to get rid of the destruction, and Ringo realizes that she belongs with Ouji. Oh, and the surprise guest at the end of the episode only made things better. 🙂

Regarding the rest of the episode, Dio and Leda are my two least favourite characters of this series, so it didn’t rank among the highlights of the series for me. I’m not sure why, but they just aren’t as likable as the rest of the cast, and I hope that the second half of the series is going to change that. Right now, all signs point to the direction that Dio isn’t going to stupidly chase after Casshern anymore, and I really want the guy to develop and turn into someone completely different, and with a bit of luck Luna is going to make sure of that. The same goes with Leda.

In any case, the arrival of Luna is definitely going to make the second half of this series incredibly different from the first half. I’m not sure whether this was actually THE Luna, but nevertheless the despair of the early episodes will be turning into hope. Whether Luna is real or not doesn’t matter, but she is going to have a very big placebo effect on humans and robots alike.

Oh, and this episode finally showed the real new ED of the series: the previous episodes merely showed an insert song. While the song still isn’t exactly of my taste, the visuals are still awesome as ever.

Short Synopsis: Casshern and Lyuze run into a certain someone.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10 (Excellent)
Ah, so that was the meaning of the insert song of the past two episodes: it’s the new ED, or at least a version of it. Ohoho, very clever, although I do hope that in the future, it’ll get its own animated frames, rather than recycled cells from the series. But then again, I’m still convinced that the first ED had recycled cells from one of the final episodes as well.

In any case, this episode revealed quite a number of juicy plot twists when the creators let the main characters run into Braiking Boss. As it turns out, the guy has completely lost his power after the destruction began. He reveals that Ouji isn’t just a random person who keeps running into Casshern, but instead he was the one who created Casshern. He already had Ringo with him at the time, and she seemed to have a very strong bond with him, although she seemed to have forgotten that as well. In fact, she too is a being that’s somewhere in between a human and a robot: she feels the effects of the destruction, she doesn’t need to eat, and yet she has blood.

It was also Braiking Boss who ordered the destruction of Luna, since he felt that there should be only one person in charge, and Luna was beginning to undermine his authority. Well, that plan backfired like crazy on him, since it also cost him his authority, but it seems that that’s the reason why Casshern killed Luna. I’m not sure whether I understood things correctly, but Ouji seems to really believe that Luna’s dead. And at the very least, Casshern once had the full intention to kill off Luna, and there had to be some way for him to gain his immortality.

I also really wonder: what was the cliff-hanger for? It seemed to me that for this small arc, there’s not enough information left to fill yet another episode, and yet the cliff-hanger came at such a point where Casshern was about to kill himself, but got stopped by Ringo. The bond between the two of them really seems to be a central one in this series; it seems even more important than the one between Casshern and Lyuze…

Short Synopsis: Casshern meets a painter who wants to leave his mark on the world.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Excellent)
Well, if it’s indeed true what CasshernXLyuze said, then this was the last of the “filler” episodes of Casshern Sins, and as usual it was a really interesting one. It’s about another aspect of a future of certain death: being remembered by others, and artists are of course the perfect example of this, hoping that even though their bodies will die, their art will live on forever.

Since the story takes place at a city that was once ruled by Braiking Boss, it shows another way of how robots have decided to live with the destruction: simply wait for it and kick the hell out of everyone who disturbs this order (ie: the painter).

I also like how the past two episodes brought an end to “Casshern the chick magnet”. It’s good to see that another episode is dedicated to a male robot. It really makes the series feel like less of a harem series because the creators favour females over males.

Short Synopsis: Casshern gets himself stuck in trouble, and Frender needs to find help to save him.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Excellent)
I remember noting that there weren’t enough males in this series that Casshern would run into. Well, somewhere along the line the creators seem to have listened, because this episode exactly offers the demographic that has been missing so far: male humans and robots, human children and human woman. It’s really one of those episodes that restore the balance in this series. It’s not among the best episodes of the series, but yet I really liked it.

I also love how Casshern only has two or three lines through the entire episode: this really was an episode where he was just someone who watched from the sidelines, and it was about the group of humans and robots who travelled together, in search of Luna. We learn that despite the upcoming destruction, there’s still a large amount of trust among them.

It also becomes clear that robots with strong wills are able to survive longer than most other ones. Well, that explains why Dio is still in one piece: he really is set on defeating Casshern.

Interestingly, this was another one of these episodes that surprised me about how long its airtime really is. I only felt like I’ve watched this episode for just ten minutes, instead of twenty.

Short Synopsis: Dio prepares an army to go against Casshern.
Highlights: Good! Focus on the bad guy!
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Excellent)
Well, I should have known. As awesome as this series is, it still has to obey the Golden Rule of Anime: a character is dead, only when you get to see the dead body appears on screen some way. Luna is alive, although I’m not sure how Casshern found out about that one, but I probably missed a vital piece of dialogue in the previous episode.

In any case, this episode wasn’t the best of this series by far, but it nevertheless was an excellent one, and a very important one as well. Too often I see anime whose bad guys are hardly fleshed out at all. There’s hardly any chance to get to know them, and that’s why they very often fall into the pit of stereotypes. That’s why I’m glad that Dio’s development starts relatively early in the series, when this episode gives him a full episode of attention. I’m already beginning to warm up to the guy.

Also, there really is lots of hugging in this series. I think that this has multiple purposes. For one, it’s very cute, but it also symbolizes warmth; a stark contrast to the cold and dead world that the series is set in, and fully connected to the series’ themes, of trying to do something with your life, even though the world is only getting destroyed.

Short Synopsis: Casshern arrives at a robot graveyard.
Highlights: Nico was awesome.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 9/10 (Fantastic)
Oh my god. This was without a doubt the best episode of Casshern Sins yet, and with such a series, that really has to say something. I can’t believe how easy these writers make it seem to just create such wonderful stories, episode after episode. This episode not only evolved the storyline, but it also created one of the most awesome characters of the series: Nico.

There were lots of different characters with prominent roles in this episode, and it was much, much more than just another episode of Casshern the “chick magnet”. Nico was kind to everyone she ran into, not just Casshern. The most notable of this was of course the male robot (there really needs to be some sort of general term for them): finally one of them gets a bit of depth, and the results are wonderful. As a robot, he doesn’t feel pain like normal humans, so if he loses a bunch of limbs, all he can just do is sit at one place and wait for the destruction to kill him completely. He’s also the first of his kind to see that Dio was wrong, and have a change of heart.

Of course, I could write pages about how incredibly awesome this episode was, but you really need to see it for yourself. At this point, the creators have really established themselves as masterful storywriters, who really try to make the best out of each of their episodes and take nothing for granted. I’m really glad to have given this series a second chance after its lacklustre first episode and decided to blog this.

Short Synopsis: Casshern meets a female singer.
Highlights: Beautiful climax.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
Oh, this was such an sweet episode. It again classifies as “filler”, but I don’t care! Hah! Casshern this time meets a singer, whose songs have an interesting effect on robots: they annoy the hell out of the berserked ones (by lack of a better term for it), but they the ones who aren’t interested in fighting forget about their despair about the destruction. I believe that the berserked ones actually felt the same power of her songs, although they refuse to accept it, which is why they want to destroy her. The irony in this episode was of course that the symbol of hope and destruction end up travelling together for a short while.

And I must say that those songs were really well done: not just in terms of audio, but the visuals also matched the songs perfectly. The engrish was surprisingly well done, and especially the song at the climax of the episode was just wonderful. This episode also showed that Casshern is most definitely made out of metal, so there has to be something inside him that makes him able to shed tears and heal his “wounds”.

My guess is that this show is going to go for the “Bee-Train”-pattern, meaning a first half of mostly unrelated stories and a few hints at an overall story, with a second half where the story takes over the main focus. I must say that I’m a big fan of this approach, because it really allows the viewer to get accustomed to the different characters and the setting before the big stuff starts to happen. And of course, the fact that the creators have made every random episode an excellent showcase in terms of writing, visuals and audio only contributes to that.

Short Synopsis: Casshern meets a woman who wants to create a bell for her church.
Highlights: Interesting twist on religious themes.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Excellent)
The thing I like best about this series is not the main storyline, of how Casshern has supposedly killed the unkillable Luna, but rather the random stories that shape the world around it. At this point, I really don’t care how Casshern killed that Luna, all I want to see is those excellent stories, where Casshern walks around and meets random people, who each have found their own way of living after the apocalypse he caused. The fact that it happened is at this point just necessary backstory.

This episode is about a robot-woman, who wants to be create a bell in order to proof that she can bring something new to the world. I personally loved the architecture of the factory that she planned to put it on, and the one who came up with it deserves a lot of credit. She actually tries to turn Casshern into that bell, but that one obviously fails.

In any case, I really love what the creators tried to tell with this episode, how the girl tried to create faith by sounding the bell to lonesome travellers in the area, and how the robots alongside her just want to play games and not care about anything.

And well, I guess that Ringo and Ouji are this series’ Ricardo and Lilio (from El Cazador). There’s no reason for them to go the same path as the lead characters, but they just do. Just like El Cazador: it was annoying at first, but after a while it just became part of the series’ premise, and I got bothered by it less and less, and the same thing applies to Casshern Sins. In fact, I found it a nice touch to see them meet up with the woman after Casshern left her, so that we could exactly see how she developed.

Short Synopsis: Dio is also out to kill Casshern, but it turns out that he knows quite a bit about him.
Highlights: The strange sort of sympathy from Casshern.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10 (Good)
This episode gives a proper introduction to what are probably going to be the main antagonists of this series. Dio claims that Cashern was actually made by someone, in order to destroy all life within the world. There seems to be a guy named Briking Boss, who once saved the world as well, and Dio hopes to follow that guy’s footsteps.

The interesting part of this episode was how everyone around Casshern seems to view him in a different way: Lyuze bears a grudge against him, and yet this episode showed how she doesn’t want other to kill him, Dio wants to be the one to save the world, so he wants to kill him, the weaker robots want to be saved, so they beg for his death, the big robots simply accepted that they’re going to die anyway, so why not die with a small percentage of living, Ringo, even though Casshern scared the heck out of her in episode one, starts feeling a variation of the Stockholm-syndrome for him, and Ringo’s caretaker seems to not care, or he knows that it’s impossible to defeat Casshern no matter how he tries. So many different ways to look at Casshern, and that’s what makes this series so interesting.

What’s also interesting is that even though Dio claims to know all about Casshern, he doesn’t seem to know that he’s impossible to kill. Ringo’s caretaker (god, I need to know the name of that guy) claims that Luna was the same as he was once: she too didn’t die, and yet Casshern killed her, so he probably inherited whatever powers she had.