This show is really something else. It’s very much a guilty pleasure, and I’m actually enjoying it more than most other shows this season. But damn. the things it tries to pull are just completely ridiculous.
So get this: Cobra and the girl arrive at the core of the planet, and are about to shut off its propulsion system that threatens to destroy it. A gravity field then gets triggered that traps them both. Cobra then trips, falls down a trap hole, ends up in a weird city, hits his head, loses his memory and suddenly an the show suddenly turns into a mafia street-fighting story. I mean… wtf?
The worst thing is that while Cobra (erm… or Joe) is spending days in that underground city, fighting, Secret is still there in the same place, being crushed by the gravity trap. I can understand Cobra himself: after all with amnesia he wouldn’t know what was going on there. What I can’t understand is the mindset of the writers when they came up with this? I mean, amnesia already is a cheap and overused plot device (just look at Dance int he Vampire Bund), but this just takes the cake in complete over-the-top and ridiculousness.
But yeah, I guess that that’s the charm of this series: it’s completely ridiculous, but at the same time it never claims to be something deep or realistic. And unlike most other shows this season, it’s actually got quite a bit of creativity and originality, and it’s one of the few series that doesn’t follow any of the modern bandwagons, other than being another remake. And this is why I love remakes: every single one of them tries to pay homage to its original series in its own way.
This episode thankfully looked a lot nicer than the previous ones. The direction still was lazy (one shot we see Cobra carry a naked Secret… the next shot she has her clothes back on. But the CG was really well done in some of the scenes. The art looked actually pretty good, and at least I’m glad that this isn’t a series that blew all of its budget in the first episode.
But yeah, the only tension in the fight is there thanks to Yoshihiro Ike’s soundtrack. It’s really getting ridiculous how insanely powerful Cobra has become, up to the point where the enemy has to poison him in order to win. It’s so obvious that in the next episode, Cobra is going to pull yet another ridiculous stunt in order to get back at them like that.
Rating: * (Good)
Your description of a totally ridiculous plot reminds me of ‘Armored Trooper Votoms’… 🙂
Just to point out: This story and pretty much the rest of Cobra the Animation are all based off past manga… The “writers” didn’t come up with any of it. That’s probably why it’s so incredibly unafraid.