Star Crossed Anime

I’m what you’d call a “Slayers-noob”. Before the summer season started, I hadn’t seen anything of the franchise so far, so this series seemed like a good opportunity to check out what the hype was all about. As it turns out, Slayers Revolution definitely wasn’t the best place to start, and I’m still wondering where I found the patience to continue watching this series.

My big problem with Slayers Revolution is that there’s absolutely nothing that stands out: the characters are decent, but none of them is memorable or well developed, even the ones who are supposed to be new. The storyline also keeps the series going, but never did it really catch my interest. In terms of episodic stories, the best this series could come up with is rolling a bunch of giant balls up a hill. The comedy made me chuckle occasionally, but nothing more. The only battle that was even remotely interesting was the one at the final episode. Other than that, they’re just a bunch of people throwing spells at each other until one party dies.

Sure, Slayers may have been revolutionary when it first aired, but I’m judging this series, not the original one, and I’m doing it on today’s standards. In that case, there just isn’t anything remarkable about this series. The thing I like about fantasy is the interesting ideas that can be put in it, which only can be limited by the creator’s imagination. Not even once did this series try to be original. And okay, I can understand that the series couldn’t be original with its main characters, but even the storyline for this series, which could have been anything the creators would have liked, just feels uninspired and done before.

So overall, if you’re a slayers fan, you can just ignore this review and enjoy the series for what it is, because it seems to be much of the same and many of the characters that were fun to watch and fleshed out in the first seasons will return for more fun. However, if you aren’t a Slayers fan like me, then Slayers Revolution isn’t going to make you one. It’s a moderately entertaining fantasy-series in a genre that has much better to offer, and I can only hope that the next season is going to be a bit more exciting.

Storytelling:	7/10
Characters:	7/10
Production-Values:	7/10
Setting:	7/10

While the eighties were the golden decade for the mecha-shows, the nineties were so for the fantasy-genre. While it’s technically no Bee-Train series, you can pretty much label Bakuretsu Hunters as one, because it’s another one of Koichi Masahino’s works, before he founded his now infamous animation studio. In Bakuretsu Hunters, you can see the beginnings of what made him an excellent director, but ironically, he also made a lot of mistakes at areas he’d excel at only years later.

Basically, Bakuretsu Hunters follows the pattern of random episodic stories with a major storyline that pops up once in a while. In these stories, our lead characters need to take out evil sorcerers who abuse their powers upon the less fortunate. A solid premise, if it weren’t for the fact that the main character is a horrible womanizer, and he really takes that to the extreme. For every single episode, you can find him running after cute girls like an idiot, and while it’s fun for the first and second time, it does get old after twenty times.

In fact, a lot more members of the cast have their own problems. Hardly anyone develops beyond their original character. The two lead females and their crush on the lead character can and will get on your nerves. It was a nice idea, to try and create a sympathetic pervert, but after Golden Boy, I’ve seen enough of these guys. The biggest offender, however, is a character called Big Momma (no, really; that’s her name), who drove me to the point of actually hating her. Her character isn’t fleshed out at all, she acts incredibly stupid in the series’ second half and never seems to learn from her mistakes. Her wishy-washy personality gets absolutely nowhere, her character makes no sense and she lacks way too much in background (I kept wondering what she was doing while she wasn’t ordering the Bakuretsu Hunters around…).

The only really satisfying character is the main villain. He’s nothing too deep, but he has a presence. You know he’s the antagonist of this series from the first moment you see him, and his character is fascinating enough to last through the entire series. Apart from that, this series really lives on its individual stories, which often toy around with irony and are admittedly entertaining. I also liked how this series plays around with names, often giving very strange Engrish names to its characters, with the result being a guy called Mr. Wacky, among others.

The production-values are also pretty nice. The character-designs may be a bit too much, but the animation certainly isn’t bad, and knowing Koichi Masahiro, the soundtrack is bound to be excellent.

But here’s my real beef with this series: less than five years after creating Bakuretsu Hunters, Koichi Masahino would create a series that would surpass it in every single way: Wild Arms, which had more interesting characters, setting, story, character-designs, individual episodic stories, was even more fun to watch and had a womanizing main character who actually worked. I just don’t see any reason why you would want to watch Bakuretsu Hunters if you can just watch Wild Arms instead. Bakuretsu Hunters just has way too buggy characters and too many plot-holes to really make an impact, even though its episodic stories are entertaining enough. Not to mention that Deus ex Machina ending…

Storytelling:	8/10
Characters:	6/10
Production-Values:	8/10
Setting:	7/10