X-men Anime Review

The X-men anime aired it's last episode some time back, and I watched it as soon as it was up, but I was unable (or too lazy) to find the time to give my review of this series. So here I am now, writing a review of this 13-episode series.

I'll start off with the last episode itself. Yui Sasaki's and Professor X's son goes rampage, turning the world to chaos. And before him stands the X-men, who tries to go on the offensive but get their asses kicked quite bad. As I kind of feared and suspected, Hisako, the new member, is the one that saves the day. Rather typical way to go, if you ask me.

One thing I liked about the episode was the cameo appearance of several other X-men, like Colossus and Archangel. Although Nightcrawler's hair is quite exaggerated in my opinion. There was even an Iron Man appearance, despite that boring first episode I saw. The battle was mostly some mind battle between Professor X and his son, which is not exactly action-packed. However, I liked the ending, mostly because Cyclops has opened up to Emma Frost. Notice how he didn't mind her calling him "Scott", even though he coldly told her to call him "Cyclops" nearly 6 episodes ago.

Of course, what better way to end the episode and the series with a cliffhanger? At the ending, we see a destroyed prison cell, that was so obviously keeping Magneto. Sounds like there will be season 2? As much as I'd love it, I highly doubt it.

Overall, the series was rather... average. It would probably score lower for a non-X-men fan. I'll first list down the cons. For one, why create some lady called Yui Sasaki who is a professor helping mutants, falls in love with Professor X, and have some powerful mutant kid with him? Sounds A LOT like Moira MacTaggart from the comics. Why not just use her name? The story gets rather dull, to me, when the X-men visit her facility, and there is a lot of unnecessary running around and fighting the mutated assistants. The bad guys in the show are also new, but nothing colorful or interesting about them, which is rather boring.

Now, if they threw in the Juggernaut, I believe ratings would have soared. Speaking of Juggernaut, it's quite irritating how the credits at the end misleads viewers. They show villains like Juggernaut, Magneto and Stryfe, despite them not appearing in the series. I mean, what gives?

The plot is not exactly rather complex either. Mastermind is not exactly some cool villain to see X-men clash with. Another thing is how Hisako is the main focus at the final battle. Sure, the rest of the X-men have some screen time, but mostly it's about Hisako. To me, that's quite boring.

Now for the good points. When I saw the first episode, I thought that the entire series would have the X-men clad in their comic-version costumes. I was very wrong. But their costumes did not really disappoint. Kind of a mix between the Astonishing and New X-men costumes. I like the line-up too. It's almost the Astonishing X-men line-up, with the lack of Shadowcat and Colossus. But it does not really matter, since I doubt there would be enough time to look into more characters, and they would end up as calefare. I'm glad that for once, a X-men show moves to when Jean Grey dies and Emma Frost comes into Cyclops' life. I was looking forward to more of the relationship of the two, but there was little mention on that. There is, however, hints of the relationship between the two improving, so I guess that will do.

And the characters in this anime look pretty good. I like Cyclops, of course, but the most amazing one has to be Storm. Never in animation have I seen a Storm that looks really good and sexy. I'm not sure what you guys are looking at in the picture, but I'm looking at her face. It's really well drawn! And there isn't those "anime/manga eyes" on her, or any characters in fact. Which is good. Also, the Wolverine is done correctly in this anime. The one done in the previous anime Wolverine looks too tall and skinny to be him. At least this one stays true to the comics. Despite my complaint about the plot, it was rather okay as a whole.

As much as I enjoyed this anime, I doubt I'd look at the next one, Blade. Don't really follow that vampire hunter dude. Didn't even watch the film trilogy. Why didn't they do a Spider-man anime?

Guess who ate the cake with wasabi in it?