Reideen Review – 77/100

Reideen is another tough anime to review: it’s done a lot of things right, but it had an equal amount of flaws. It’s a nice watch, but there are so many things that could have been improved on it. The story is like this: Saiga Junki becomes a pilot of a giant robot called Reideen, and he basically has to take care of enemy giant robots that are sent by enemy aliens. While this indeed couldn’t be cheesier, luckily a few details make this not a total waste of time. The enemies are smart too, and don’t let themselves get destroyed that easily, unlike countless other giant robot-shows. The military also quite early becomes involved with Reideen, and soon Junki is going to have to deal with people who try to exploit him. The things that really made Reideen watchable, though, were the atmosphere it creates and the characters. A tense soundtrack and some great budged make up for the cheesiness of the fights, and combined with the storytelling, they become quite interesting to watch. The characters, while they aren’t top-notch, work great with this and through the course of the anime, they’re fleshed out pretty nicely. I liked, for example, how Junki never explicitly tells us why he just doesn’t hand Reideen over to others, but the way he acts throughout the episodes gives enough hints about what the reasons might be. But yeah, the anime could have been so much better if the writers spent a bit more time on the concept. The interesting fights are often ruined by Deus ex Machina-endings, the aliens receive no development at all, we never know where they came from and the final episode is another one of those bad and lazy endings that ruins the entire continuity the anime has been building up to. Blood+, another Production IG anime suffered from the same problem. Like I mentioned above though: it’s a nice watch despite being perfect. If you like mecha-shows with a bit of cheese, you should enjoy Reideen as well, but I can imagine that people who dislike slow plot-development will hate this one.]]>