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Back in 2001, Japanese anime director Goro Taniguchi thought it would be a great idea to make an incredibly melodramatic anime about a loose-cannon, hotheaded badass who has a nuclear-powered right arm and a jet engine on his back committing random acts of violence while shouting nonsense. Years later, Bandai saw this show and thought it was stupid, so they decided to release it in North America on DVD with a English cast and script that they felt fit the feel of the show better than the original. The result of these two ventures is perhaps one of the greatest pieces of visual fiction made by the human mind to date. In the first volume of the series, the audience is immediately introduced to the super-powered Kazuma the Shell Bullet, who jumps off a plane and punches a vertical hole through a tall building, starting it off with a bang. Kazuma lives in the slums of a wrecked-up island of Japan known as The Lost Ground with little girl named Kanami, who's the narrator of the series. The audience is then later introduced to Ryuho, a similarly super-powered law enforcement official from the highly-developed city on the other side of The Lost Ground and Kazuma's polar opposite in terms of just about everything. It's after an initial battle that the entire series is founded on their continuing rivalry and opposing ideals all the way up until the final episode. There's also the whole background plot involving prejudice towards the super-powered humans known as "Alter Users" among other things and a large cast of interesting and sometimes incredibly outlandish supporting characters. The show sports a fitting soundtrack, made up mostly of jazz and dramatic Spanish trumpets/choruses and the animation is distinctly 90's, but is pretty smooth and gets much better as the show goes on. The series is most similar in feel to Mobile Fighter G Gundam, Gurren Lagann and other over-the-top shows like that. It also shares similarities to Code Geass and Gundam Seed in terms of rivalry and ridiculous melodrama(this show also shares Gundam Seed's character designer). This series is highly recommended if you want something fun and entertaining to watch without expecting anything incredibly deep or if you want something with an epic rivalry theme to it. This is most definitely not sophisticated, high-brow material. The volume 1 DVD itself comes with a small map of The Lost Ground, which is pretty cool as it marks the locations where episodes take place. Extra features include character, power and location artwork/bios and creditless versions of all the opening and ending themes(The opening animation of this show changes every episode) which are just dandy. The picture and audio quality are great, except for the Japanese voice track, which is significantly quieter and less clear than the English track. The subtitles are also large and obtrusive while being pretty poorly translated. Neither of these factors really matter though, since the English voices as a whole outdo their counterparts at nearly every turn and the English script offers many gems like these: "I-Impossible! My balls aren't there!" "Ha! Looking for your little balls?! I've got 'em right here!" and "Weeell, Kazuma!! How do you plan to get out of this PINCH?" "What kind of question is that?! With my fist of course!" Which are lines that fit perfectly with the nature of the show. Seriously. AAA+++ TV show, and with the $10 running cost of all the DVDs you can't go wrong.Read full review
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