Over on the forums we have a group of masochists (DTAB) who enjoy nothing more than watching the shittiest anime we can find, and this review is based off the most recent show we watched as a group. Or rather they watched, I missed out so had to watch it by myself. As horrifying as this particular monstrosity must have been for them watching together, I can guarantee you that it was infinitely more horrible watching it alone. Thank god Geist was so manly, I wouldn’t have gotten through it otherwise, but the testosterone kick got me through it.
Anyway, feel free to drop by the "Damn, That Anime is Bad Club” and join us in watching out next pile of bile. Heh, pile of bile. Unintentional rhyming is fun. Anyway, the review, if you can call it that:
Somewhere in Japan, in 1986 someone thought they had a great idea, and managed to convince other people of its obvious greatness. This great idea was then transformed from brainfart to an anime, a woeful anime at that. That anime was named “MD Geist”.
If anybody out there is looking for a standard by which to rate all over shit anime, one to act as the baseline from which everything else is judged against, then look no further than MD Geist. It looks like shit, it sounds like shit and it’s insulting to even the least refined anime fans intelligence. It somehow manages to make other shitty titles such as Yumeria and Samurai Shodown look like works of Shakespeare, which believe me, is quite the feat.
I think we should start the ripping of this little gem off by taking a look at the plot. Oh the plot, there was so much of it I don’t even know where to begin. Okay, that’s a massive lie, the reason I don’t know where to begin is because there actually isn’t a plot of any note, so technically it doesn’t have a beginning itself. As far as I can see the “plot” is basically something about a planet named Jerra where two armies are fighting in a post-apocalyptic wasteland for some reason I’m still not entirely sure of. Then this one dude, a super soldier called Geist, wants to kill them both, or one of them, or everyone and anyone. And there’s a woman, who wants to have sex with him. So yeah, you can probably see why I’m having trouble writing anything remotely useful here.
This show exists to be violent, and to show that violence off at every turn. The problem is that the violence is aimless, the viewer has no idea what’s going and why everyone fighting. And trying to make sense of the battles only induces dizziness, seriously, one minute some woman is shouting and the next faces are being squashed with bare hands and mech’s are being stabbed with knives. It never comes close to making any sense. It doesn’t look or sound pretty either. But why bother with plot or nice visuals when you have important stuff like face grenades to worry about.
Now, onto characters! I know what you’re thinking; at least the show must have some hilariously awesome characters, right? Wrong. Let’s start with Geist himself. He’s a very manly super soldier, and has an awesome semi-mullet, and I’m fairly sure that his voice has the power to impregnate either gender at will. He’s also strong, so strong that he can punch giant mech’s with his bare hands until they explode, so tough that he can pull a bullet out of his own brain, so tough that he can make whole armies tremble with fear.....hell, he’s so tough that he can turn down no strings sex after being locked up for god knows how many years. While that’s awesome, we get no backstory, no development and no emotional investment from him. He exists to destroy things, that’s his sole purpose. And his motivation for doing so? Well, just because. Then we have the woman. As far as I can see her main purpose was to be so ridiculously annoying compared to Geist that it would somehow trick the viewer into thinking Geist was a good character. She’s loud, she’s a whore, she’s clearly mentally unstable, she isn’t even good eyecandy. And to top it all off she hides during the final battle, then just when you think she’s gone for good she pops out and is all “LOL, I’m like, totes still here y’know?”. I disliked her massively.
The supporting cast was.....wait, was there actually any more characters? Ah, yeah, there was the bad guy. He died. I think. And Sakamoto, and Lester, and John....they died too. And apparently we were meant to care that they had died. The only one I can faintly remember is Sakamoto because of his amazingly terrible voice actor, the other ones have already been forgotten. Oh yeah, nearly forgot, Judas Priest make a guest appearance as a Nazi biker gang. Because why the fuck not?
The soundtrack was actually pretty ace, for the first 10minutes. After then? Well, you realise the once amazing guitar solos and pitched harmonics are repeated every 13seconds until the credits roll. This one time we got some sweet synth stuff going on while Geist was wrecking shit up, or as I like to call it “Geisting shit up”. That’s right, I invented a new verb, to Geist; the act of wrecking shit up for no apparent reason, and without any consideration beyond total annihilation at all costs. Where was I again.....? Oh yeah, sound. The OP was amazing, the lyrics are just mind blowing, you need to Google them right away, and listen to the full version on Youtube. And the voice acting, we watched the English dub, and even if dubs are generally terrible this show takes it up (or down?) a notch to almost unparalleled levels of incompetence. Every line is delivered without any energy, emotion, timing or.....ah i’m done here, you get the message.
The visuals? Appalling. That’s literally all I’ve got for this one. Sorry, I have not the words, nor the motivation to elaborate on this one. But they suck, really hard.
In conclusion, MD Geist is a terrible, insulting mess that exists only to throw copious amounts of poorly scripted violence at the viewer in an effort to mask the lack of plot, awful and forgettable cast, hilariously bad voice acting and cataract inducing animation quality. Sadly, the violence might be worse than everything else combined, so it even fails there. So, should you watch this? I can’t possibly recommend this to anyone without feeling like a moster. If you really want to experience something awful just get a friend to waterboard you, it will be less painful and the memories will be fonder.
My personal rating was 2.5/5, purely because I had a blast at just how terrible it was. My critical score will be a far lower 1/10 though, I can't rate it any higher without having nightmares wondering if I accidentally made someone think this was passable. Although i'm giving it 1/10, i measure shitty anime in Mone's, a scale which goes from 0.5-5. If you don't know what Mone is, watch Yumeria, or just watch a video of Mone, you'll soon understand.
Final rating; 0.5 Mone's.
Screenshots
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