Anime review: Gun x Sword (2005)
Another club watch, like the previous Dantalian no Shoka. I have to say this one didn't fare remotely as well, though.
A classic plot of obsession with vengeance in a setting that smells very much like Cowboy Bebop and Trigun… but with some giant robots clumsily shoehorned in.
That last jab is representative of the largest problem here: this anime is way too bloated with half-baked ideas and secondary characters to really have the time to expand on anything! For example, most of the enemies are just mid-bosses to pepper the Road Towards the Claw™ himself, their motivations or backstories barely exposed and sometimes (in the case of the young twins) completely skipped.
And don't think this only applies to the enemy cast, oh no… almost everyone but Van is way too flat, even Wendy herself lacks personality. Carmen's motivations are unclear and Joshua is a painfully annoying "if you kill your enemies, they win" goody two shoes who blatantly overstayed his episodic welcome, much like the El Dorado old guys (who remind me of the bar geezers appearing in only a few Cowboy Bebop scenes, instead of devolving into story fillers).
Hell, they didn't even spend a single scene to let Van reflect on his accomplished vengeance and the resulting satisfaction (or lack thereof)!
What the writers should have done to get the time to elaborate on the remaining characters and inject some substance into the recipe is obvious:
The other main fault lies within the switch from episodic - when it was at least entertaining and didn't suffer much from the lack of depth - to the final story arc. This arc is 7 episodes long of people screaming from inside their robot cockpit while piling keikakus sky high; people you never cared about since there were not developed enough, I remind you.
In contrast, Cowboy Bebop's final arc was 2 episodes long and Outlaw Star managed with 3.
So thanks but no thanks. Its only good points are that the episodic parts were competently done despite being all over the place and that Van's character flaws which often made him a despicable "hero" were also a novelty factor that kept him interesting. I think it could have gotten at least 7/10 from me without the final arc.
