Mars of Destruction

Alt title: Hametsu no Mars

OVA (1 ep x 20 min)
2005
1.121 out of 5 from 2,054 votes
Rank #18,103

In the year 2010 the Mars Exploration Vessel, returning to tell its secrets, fell to the Earth in a fiery blaze. Several months later, strange creatures known as Ancients walk the streets of Tokyo, brutally murdering anyone who gets in their way. In response to these incidents, the AAST – the Anti unidentified Ancients Special Team – has been created to subdue the threat. With the help of Hinata Takeru, a high school student who wears the Anti-Ancient Suit Mars, the AAST now sets out on a new mission: deliver the salvaged pieces of the fallen vessel into safe hands, at all costs!

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Reviews

MordredMS
0.7

Ahh, Mars of Destruction. Something you must see to believe. Something you wouldn't ever believe to be possible outside of the realm of LEGEND. Something your mind will initially refuse to register as true, and then shiver with a flow of many different and conflicting emotions. And you totally should watch it.STORY: 1.5/10What little can be understood of the plot is: some starship somehow went "kaboom" while delivering something from Mars, then some big ugly things called "Ancients" appear to be attacking randomly in Japan and there are some (probably underage, and seemingly retarded) girls and a lad in a cool suit fighting them. Everything is told so confusingly and superficially and with so many clichés that at no point will you care for the story. Not a single element has not been already seen a billion times. It's not only stupid and confusing, but at times even contradictory, and you can see that it actually takes itself seriously by trying to be too many things for a low-budget 20-minute OVA and not even once showing any tongue-in-cheek attidude. The cornerstone to understand what masterpiece of clumsiness we're in front of is actually the finale. I'm not going to spoil it, because it's a key element to fully experience how bad this thing is, I'll just say that it will give you one of three reactions: you will burst out laughing, burst out crying, or check what the hell was in that drink you just had because such a cheap, lame and out-of-the-blue plot twist can't possibly be anything but a result of mental alteration. Needless to say, none was the inteded effect. As the revelation approaches, you can basically see popping up on screen a roulette spinning between "I am your father!", "It was Earth all along!", "You are one of us too!", "WE are the Earthlings!" and "It was his sled!".I'm still wondering if they thought they were smart or touching. I read that it's supposed to be a tie-in for an action / dating sim Playstation2 videogame, but still it's not enough of an excuse. CHARACTERS: 0/10Calling these characters "bidimensional" would mean giving them one or two dimensions more than what they have. No, I would go as far as saying that THERE ARE NO CHARACTERS. Basically only two or three of them are named, nobody at all has even a hint of any personality (AT ALL!), and the only scene that could be considered character exploration (through some inhuman stretch of the term) is a 20-second flashback dialogue taken bodily from the first episode of Evangelion. If that was supposed to make us sympathise with him, it failed pretty hard. Actually, giving a crap about any single one of the characters is basically impossible: so flat and non-existent are their personalities, and so stupid are their actions, that you'll either hate them or simply not notice they're there at all. Again, it's a tie-in for a game, so I don't know how those characters are developed there, but this is the impression received from the OVA alone. ANIMATION: 1.5/10This is probably the best aspect of the anime, and this says a lot. The character design is dull, the animations are cheap and terrible, and some shots will make you burst out into laughter. Unintentionally, of course.  Still I have to admit, the design of the protagonist's suit is pretty badass. MUSIC: 0.5/10There is little to no soundtrack, but after hearing what little there is, you wish there was none at all. Because it's pretty painful to hear short extracts of beautiful pieces of classical music (like Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries", Rossini's ouverture from "The barber of Seville" or Beethoven's "Moonlight sonata") used absolutely randomly. Used like they are, in no way do they help conveying any feeling, on the contrary they distract from the scene, expecially since each one of them cuts abruptly followed immediatly by the next one. CAST: 0/10You know when, hearing a performance, you can visualise the face of the voice actor in a proud pose with the caption "And not a single fuck was given that day" above them? That's this anime. The voice actors are not even TRYING to convey any emotion, they just... didn't give a damn. Again, there's one or two times where you'll burst out laughing. OVERALL: 0.7/10Overall? Overall, you MUST see this shit. Everything about this OVA is so awful, so unbelievably stupid, cheap, and hastily put together, that you MUST try it out. It's something along the lines of those movies, like The room or Turkish Rambo or Avatar, that are so bad and full of the stupidest clichès, that watching them with a couple of friends and some alcoholic beverage becomes an enjoyable and ultimately unforgettable experienceof laughter. If the voice actors had been more over-the-top and hammy instead of flat and boring, it could have been a damn masterpiece.

kaizerien
1

Well for those who would like a quick review, I would say 1 word would suffice. Bullshit. The story of the anime is exactly as the synopsis stated. If you are planning on giving this anime a go, decide if you rather spend a few minutes reading words or spend 19 mins or so watching an eye-burning anime that would definately make your head spin. Story: There was totally no explanation given on where in the heavens did the ancients come from. Unless a spaceship can hold an army of humanoid looking things with nobody noticing, are they sending blindmen to mars or something? The abbrevation for the AAST was provided but not for the MARS suit which seems to be especially made to combat against ancients but all that happened to the character first getting owned in the back by a normal ancients to the point of death and then an arm was easily broken and he got his ass handed to him in just a few seconds, in a suit meant to fight against ancients, I repeat, A SPECIAL ANTI-ANCIENTS SUIT. So I concluded MARS must stand for Made for Ancients to Rape Suit. Oh not to mention equiping the suit apparently squashes your rib cage to half the size. Does that guy not have bones? How in the world did his stomach and lungs not get ruptured? Is he a ancient in disguise? In this anime, head being blown off doesn't actually seem common sensical that the person is dead. They have to devote that few seconds to have a docter tell the mains that that person without a head is dead, not to mention the mains didn't even give a damn about it, oh what great camaraderie. Also, towards the end of the anime, a special boss like ancients that had the strength to crush wrist can't simply crush the necks of the girls, not to mention he suffocated them for god knows how long and the girls still freaking breathes after that. It was also stated that plasma guns don't work on him. Note PLASMA GUNS. The girls used smg. Then suddenly the guy has a plasma rifle that apparently worked on him. DIDN'T PLASMA GUNS NOT WORK? AT LEAST MAKE IT A CANNON OR SNIPER OR SOMETHING! SERIOUSLY? A RIFLE? And after having a hole blasted in the middle of his stomach, the boss like existence suddenly wakes up to speak a few sentences...and get blown up by smg shots...plasma smg shots...ISN'T PLASMA GUNS NOT SUPPOSED TO WORK? Charater: I gotta say. The girls are packed with surprises. First scene. 3 girls facing off against 3 ancients. They were said to posses(later in the story) expert level in either hand-to-hand combat, swordfighting, firearms, or information analysis. But, 1 of the girls holding a fireman, bloody missed every single shot she fired out of her smg. I mean if she can't shoot for nuts, why is she holding a gun? Not only their skills, their mentality is out of the world, maybe they are ancients in disguise or something. Their teammate's head got blown sky high and became a blood fountain yet they did not even flinch in the slightest. I mean the poor girl may be a side character, but really? Then one of the main charater fell on her butt, the other girl show a shocked and fearful expression. You mean a head getting blown off right beside you doesn't mean a shit? And on to the main character. His first apparence is in some mofo like suit that make me think he should be the special mutant of the ancients or last boss or something to that effect. He then proceed to pierce his sword of light into a ancient's throat, and as if that is not enough he must show off his strength by having a contest of strength and twisting the poor ancient's wrist, is getting pierced in the throat not enough? After showing off, he got his ass handed to him by another ancient who clung onto his back, breaking his MARS suit with but a simple grip. Let me remins you, a MARS suit is A SPECIAL ANTI-ANCIENTS SUIT. At this point of time i started asking myself, did I imagine wrongly or did my brain decline such that i cannot remember something from a minute or so ago, wasn't there 3 ancients? Rewinding back, there were 3. So where did the last one go? Did he get tired of firing beams from his mouth and went to drink from the blood fountain? Continuing on, the main character is really something, he should have been fighting ancients for awhile now(my own conclusion, nothing was clarified) but after getting pwned from the back, he suddenly suffered severe mental shock, only to recover without any remedy and maning up to fight a special boss like ancient...severe mental shock? The policemen in the story are completely bullshits, they meet alien lifeforms and don't even bother taking out their gun or going for cover, they simply stand there and be human target for the ancients to test their aiming on before moving on to the mains, come on, do you really hates policemen this much? Art: Well computers in 2010 looks like computer back in the 90s or so. Mars apprently glows in red, unless that was the sun(honestly I can't tell) then the sun which was supposed to be gaseous suddenly became a solid planet. Shit quality, shit images. Ancients looks like gays or sex offenders in tightsuits and masks, girls are probably concept arts from when the first anime was drafted, main character's special suit would make gay dancers in club proud. Fast action scenes are simply exact same frames being vibrated a few times and thats about it. Music: Well doesn't the music sound familiar? Of course. Most of the music were ripped off from probably the net. I mean theres Mozart pieces in there, just wow. And the music totally don't fit the context...unless you see it in a different way. Like the first main character fight scene? Instead of fighting, the music makes me think the main character is making out with the ancient while hugging onto his head, and hence, the special boss like existence at the back of the story must have been the continuation of this that they didn't show due to age restriction. Overall: Watch it.(Sorry I like watching people burn)

megafat
1

Surprisingly, whoever approved of Tenkuu Danzai Skelter+Heaven thought that it was a great idea, and decided to do it again with Mars of Destruction. And it was only released a mere seven months after Tenkuu Danzai Skelter+Heaven. And after doing some reading into how this was made, it seems both Skelter+Heaven and Mars of Destruction seem to overlap in how they came to be. The plot, what little there is, starts soon after a space shuttle returns from a mission to Mars in the far off year of 2010 ends up being destroyed in the Earth's atmosphere. Soon afterwards, strange monsters called "Ancients" began to appear around Tokyo. A group of specialists taught to fight the Ancients must stop them before they destroy the human race. And just like Skelter+Heaven, the plot in this is confusing if you don't know about or haven't played the visual novel. And unlike Skelter+Heaven, which seemed to be original animation, this OVA is a compilation of all the animated cutscenes from the game it's based on. The company behind the game, Idea Factory, thought that it was a good idea to take the games animated cutscenes and slap them onto a DVD. If this was an unlockable in the game, or was a DVD that came with the Special Edition of the game in a higher resolution so that fans could enjoy them, this wouldn't have had the infamous reception that it got. But having it's own DVD release? Why? As a promotional tool for the game, it isn't very good. The scenes aren't even edited together well, looking like a compilation that some random person would have put together in 2007 for their YouTube channel. And top top the whole thing off, the OVA has poorly rendered classical music put over it. I'm assuming that this was release as a cash grab for fans to eat up, but there could have been a better way, like the previously mention possiblity for a Special Edition of the game. Somehow, the animation is both better and worse than Tenkuu Danzai Skelter+Heaven. Better in that there are more frames of animation and the characters overall look better, but the perspective is complete trash. There was even one instance where a character turns around, but their perspective suddenly changes half way through. I would say that it's so poorly animated that you have to wonder how no one noticed how bad it looks, but I imagine the budget and constraints probably didn't allow for a second pass. Since this thing is a compilation of cutscenes, 95% of the plot is missing, so yet again I had to do some research into what the game was about. And just like Skelter+Heaven, this is an Evangelion rip-off, right down to the main character having a father that forced him into fighting giant monsters in a mech. I don't know how you rip-off Evangelion twice, because not only are you competing with something much better with Evangelion, but you're just competing with yourself, and whoever bought this because they liked the other game, they're going to noticed the similarities right off the bat. Everything else about the PS2 game just makes it seem like your standard visual novel. I don't speak or read Japanese, so I can't exactly attest to it's quality, but I imagine that it at least fleshed out the story more than in the OVA, even if the quality seems off. But from the plot description and the fact that this is an Evangelion rip-off, I think I know what to expect from the plot. Just like Tenkuu Danzai Skelter+Heaven, this one is just painful watch. It isn't even funny bad like a lot of other infamously awful anime. If it weren't for that that this was less than 20 minutes, I probably would have never even bothered. Avoid at all costs.

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