Gunparade March : My Review

My Rating

As it seems to often happen with media, even a partial success in one format prompts the whoring and spawning of a title into other formats. To name but a few batman, pirates of the carribean, and the dreadful aquaman. Any title that seems to garner any merit gets redone in every format all the way from movie to tshirt and video game. Sadly though its all to common for the brood of this spawn to be nothing more than opportunistic advertiser prattle. What makes a video game great often doesn’t make a very good tv series at all. GunParade March fails miserably into this category

The series originally started off as a Playstation 2 game. I can’t speak for how good or bad it was, having never played it. Having watched the series I can say any good points it may have had definately didn’t carry over. The trailer looks really good. Upon watching the series you will find that the video for the trailer comes almost completely from the first five minutes. From there after it turns dull. Its really too bad because there was a vast amount of potential that went unrealized.

To site a few examples, somewhere twards the end of the first disk one of the female characters dies. I’m not going to tell you who. Not because I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but rather because I’m not really sure who she was. The show introduces all of the female characters in one shot and doesn’t really go into any backstory. Several of the female characters look and sound very alike and without any more detail than their name and a one line description I couldn’t tell them apart. They delve into how everyone is affected by the loss of thier comrade, but its hard to feel any emotion for the loss of a character who was never a part of the story in the first place. Another sample of the total lack of backstory is the little girl Nonomi. It is obvious from the beginning scene that nonomi is an important character with special almost magical abilities. Aside from one episode where another character admits she feels responsible for why nonomi is different, there really isn’t anything said about her in the story. I was very drawn to her character and I think they could have explained better why an eight year old girl would be hanging around with a group of twenty something military types.

The overall plot starts with an alien invasion somewhere during world war II. The story finds a good venue to place the alternate reality scenario with giant robots and alien battles. However instead of going into detal it just assumes you accept this alternate reality for what it is and moves on. After fifty years of battle with aliens, how do we manage to survive? What is the PBE we are using to fight with? How much of the earth is left and where are the aliens based? What is a brain alien? Truthfully, the war and the aliens don’t have anything to do with the underlying story. It is really just a masked over love story. I don’t mind a mushy love story, but in reality it would have served the plot better to leave out the alien robot stuff and focus on the story. Anyone who watches the trailer, sees how good it looks, then buys the disk will be dissapointed.

In all fairness I can’t say the show was terrible. Rather it was average at best. I won’t put this on my reccommended to buy list. In fact I wouldn’t even put it on my go rent it list. If you’ve seen as much anime as I have you will proably watch it at some point. I have a strange urge to see every anime ever made. I guess you can’t really tell the good anime if you’ve never seen any of the bad? If you’re at the rental store after mech anime, skip this title. Grab a copy of Gasaraki or Dual instead.