So, at the moment, not much is going on. It’ll be a little bit before the new Amatsuki comes out, and Code Geass took a break this week. There are 3 other shows I am going to blog for you all, but I am not caught up on any of the three/haven’t seen them in a while so I’ll post on them in the next few days – 2 I won’t spoil for you but the other, Macross F, has been done up through ep 10 by Blissmo and I’ve only seen 4 eps, haha. In the meantime, I am constantly watching older shows, but most of them are ones that I would rather talk about on my home blog and not bother you all with. This time, though, I thought it might be interesting to do a little retroview, especialy since I don’t exactly plan on marathoning this show as I usually do.

The show in question is Gunparade March. All 3 of the people who’s opinions I trust more than anyone else’s have this show on their favorites list and yet somehow in my infinite journey to watch everything on said people’s lists, I never found myself compelled to check this one out. Today, I thought ‘why not’ and gave the first ep a whirl. It was a doozy.

At the start, the show is flaunting quite an ensemble cast (think Bokurano or Baccano, only not as serious or silly as those two respectively are.) The first episode was easily one of the least revealing starting eps I’ve ever seen. 75% of the episode was action and the other 25% was really, really weird character interaction which never really focused on any one person. In fact, none of the characters managed to squeeze out more than a couple sentences between the two fight scenes that made up most of the ep. The apparent leading female (going by the pic above) doensn’t even show up in the ep, and we only see her face on the transfer papers being handed to the school’s principal at the end.

What made things even more confusing was that I couldn’t even remotely tell what the tone of this story was supposed to be. The dialog in the fight scene didn’t seem especially serious, but then we see one women and child who, after a little bit of screentime, get shot to death and blown up, which made me tense up like crazy. Then, though, at school, there were tons of hijinks and oddball characters, only to lead into another fight in which several of the cast are thrown into a near-death experience. The battles were, unfortunately, totally uninteresting for me. They weren’t poorly animated, but it was mostly show-mech-shooting and then show-thing-being-hit with a couple explosions and blood splatters thrown in for good measure, but nothing that captured my attention.

Oddly enough, while this ep did very little if anything for me, I’m drawn to watch the next episode if just to see what the fuck is going on.