Brain Powered - Reviews

Man, was this one a drag! It gives you the impression that it will be an interesting and weird series but in reality it is totally boring and simple. This is one of the worst titles Tomino (the Gundam dude) ever made and studio Sunrise was out of its mind when it allowed for this thing to be made.

The intro was full of naked chicks and weird imagery. And the song was catchy too. It really managed to make me interested in the series. And then the series begins… And it’s nothing much to look or listen to. Where is the nude? Where are the weird / spiritual backgrounds?

-The general artwork is just your average looking mechas, military bases and rural countrysides.
-The character figures look very generic.
-Animation was kept at minimum.
-Colors and details are done simply, without multiple layers of shading.
-The visual effects are very crude. Just laser beams and energy barriers for a few minutes per episode. Even the funky disks that were creating meckas got old fairly fast.
-On the flip side, voice acting was decent. And the context of the dialogues was full of science, metaphysics, teen angst and more. Too bad even that was ruined by repeating words. Terms like ORPHEN, BRAIN and BIO-ENERGY were mentioned at least 20 times per episode, making the dialogues quite repetitive and tiresome.

The story? Alien powers threaten the balance of the world and a team of teens piloting mechas tries to salvage bio-energy disks and prevent the destruction. At the same time a secret organization plans to release an alien ship that will devastate the world, save for its chosen few believers that follow its cause. It’s not a typical “one-eyed monstrous aliens vs kind-hearted humans” story. It’s selfish people vs selfish people, so it is quite dramatic at times. The alien part is a plot device rather than the main story. The main theme is not really “saving the world”. It’s more like “mommy doesn’t love me” and “my family is obsessed and lost its way” kind of story. The several flavoring elements concerning science, philosophy and mystic powers help to create good foundations for an interesting story… But what was built atop was without the supervision of an architect.

-The characters are cardboards. Stereotypes that you can find in most mecha series. Undeveloped to the point of not caring about them. With generic looks and movements. There is no reason to remember any of them.
-The story is so slow-paced that could easily be summed up in 6 episodes. It didn’t deserve 26 boring episodes.
-The battles are awfully simple and short. I skipped them without missing a thing.
-The conclusion was sudden and rushed. The producers must have intended to create a movie sequel to wrap things up, but eventually didn’t; leaving us with a completely vague and dry ending.

TL;DR: I find no value in this series. Characters aren’t there, story is an illusion, ending sucks! It is boring, slow and anti-climactic. The only thing I really enjoyed was the one and a half minute opening song.

“What do you think you’re doing to my brain?!”

That’s my line, fucker!

Welcome to Brain Damagd: Yoshiyuki Tomino’s mentally handicapped answer to Evangelion. Comparing the latter to the former is comparing Hyperion to a satyr. Perhaps that isn’t strong enough to indicate the sheer gap between the two, or what an utter waste of time it is for those not seeking to witness every single Tomino, mecha, and post-Eva anime out there.

The writing is more detrimental than a lobotomy, and more nonsensical than lobotomizing an infant. Their horrendous Eva-inspired attempts at biomechanical pseudoscience and Gundam-inspired attempts at terminology, are as convoluted as they are nonsensical and inconsistent. The show is also spectacularly blunt to the point of telling you exactly what a character is like constantly despite how obvious it is just from the interactions, yet next to none of these characters have any real consistency. Half of what “characters” say and do, particularly early on, directly contradict what was told and shown to us prior, as early as the end of episode 1. Hell, the “characters” can’t even be called caricatures, let alone what I put in quotation marks, with the exception of a fucking scientist side-character and a boring yet remotely competently-written purple-haired girl. None of the rest have concrete personalities and all of them dramatically at the drop of a hat, often within the same scene. This is especially problematic at the beginning, not only because this is where it is most prevalent, but because this is supposed to be the first impression, where we get to know these “characters”.

Whenever they even try to give these characters backstories and conflicts, they come from the most hackneyed and unforeshadowed of places, and that’s excluding things done offscreen. Then again, this series has a real penchant for introducing things right out of thin air. Not only do the aforementioned characters engage in excessive last-minute flashbacks as a result, but they also reveal themselves to humongous hypocrites...and we’re supposed to root for the protagonists when they suffer from this almost exclusively. The main protagonist (and yes, none of these cunts deserve to be named) is the worst offender of this, going from kissing to harassing the female deuteragonist -whom he barely even knows let alone seems to like- in a split second, constantly, and goes from acting like an insufferable jackass to an idealistic kid who can’t even get his reasoning straight for why he defected from an organization he previously white-knighted like it was his girlfriend -not like he had one to begin with but damn if they’re gonna try to make him seem like an actual human being worth keeping alive-. Then again, this is partially because they constantly try to play coy with why he left and make it such a mystery, much to the obvious detriment of absolutely everything. He is honestly one of the worst protagonists in anime, and out of all the nothing characters who leave next to no impression in your mind, he stands out simply by virtue of being toxically broken and hateful.

Maybe Tomino should have thought twice before trying to do Eva backwards.

The visual presentation is unfortunate as well. The mech designs are bland and generic, without any thought into making them look like anything other than unmarketable drones. The character designs are, if nothing else, pleasant for most part, and they are generally on-model, even if actual animation for both the characters and mechs is somewhat limited, if not incredibly awkward in some cases. Fight scenes are downright horrendous, especially since in these particular sequences, shots almost never flow into each other, and they either have very stilted and limited animation, or try the kind of shorthand that could only ever work in DBZ. Even outside of fight sequences, the editing is generally horrible and nonsensical. Whatever CGI techniques they used such as trying to make ocean water CGI, is almost embarrassingly done as well, but that is the least of the visuals’ problems when the show can rarely do rain in a way that isn’t mortifyingly obvious that they drew lines and moved them back and forth for ten seconds. When your opening sequence begins with a borderline laughable static moving background effect, you know you’re in for a production misfire.

The music is honestly the least atrocious aspect of it, not that it says much, as even Yoko Kanno couldn’t operate at full capacity. The music is largely, and said music often doesn’t fit when it tries to be more than just stand-in fluff, particularly in the first half. The OP theme is barely any better, and while the ED theme is probably the best piece of music here, it is hardly memorable past the first 10 seconds. The voice acting is also subpar at best, with line delivery that ranges from mediocre to terrible for a majority of the characters. Then again, the script they have to work with is honestly abysmal, so much so that some things just could not work, regardless of acting quality.

Brain Damagd is honestly a bothersome experience that stops being bizarrely horrible and just becomes a slog filled with a detestable and borderline nothing cast, and a narrative that works on absolutely no level. Even the audiovisuals are not worthwhile. I wouldn’t even recommend screenwriting enthusiasts to go in for a full autopsy of this disaster, or recommend it to anyone who desperately needs to suffer through every post-eva show out there. I'm not even sure why I’m talking about it or why I watched it; this braindead travesty is an absolute waste of time that should have never been made, barring its ridiculous concepts and some laughable moments. To be perfectly fair, there were moments when the show clearly tried to be meaningful and even human, but they are mere blips in a sea of embarrassment. Unless you plan to watch every Tomino, Post-Eva, or mech anime out there, or watch this with friends, you’re probably better off not acknowledging this show’s existence, unless you want a cheap laugh here and there.

Wait, what do you mean it’s not called Brain Damagd?!