While the eighties were the golden decade for the mecha-shows, the nineties were so for the fantasy-genre. While it’s technically no Bee-Train series, you can pretty much label Bakuretsu Hunters as one, because it’s another one of Koichi Masahino’s works, before he founded his now infamous animation studio. In Bakuretsu Hunters, you can see the beginnings of what made him an excellent director, but ironically, he also made a lot of mistakes at areas he’d excel at only years later.

Basically, Bakuretsu Hunters follows the pattern of random episodic stories with a major storyline that pops up once in a while. In these stories, our lead characters need to take out evil sorcerers who abuse their powers upon the less fortunate. A solid premise, if it weren’t for the fact that the main character is a horrible womanizer, and he really takes that to the extreme. For every single episode, you can find him running after cute girls like an idiot, and while it’s fun for the first and second time, it does get old after twenty times.

In fact, a lot more members of the cast have their own problems. Hardly anyone develops beyond their original character. The two lead females and their crush on the lead character can and will get on your nerves. It was a nice idea, to try and create a sympathetic pervert, but after Golden Boy, I’ve seen enough of these guys. The biggest offender, however, is a character called Big Momma (no, really; that’s her name), who drove me to the point of actually hating her. Her character isn’t fleshed out at all, she acts incredibly stupid in the series’ second half and never seems to learn from her mistakes. Her wishy-washy personality gets absolutely nowhere, her character makes no sense and she lacks way too much in background (I kept wondering what she was doing while she wasn’t ordering the Bakuretsu Hunters around…).

The only really satisfying character is the main villain. He’s nothing too deep, but he has a presence. You know he’s the antagonist of this series from the first moment you see him, and his character is fascinating enough to last through the entire series. Apart from that, this series really lives on its individual stories, which often toy around with irony and are admittedly entertaining. I also liked how this series plays around with names, often giving very strange Engrish names to its characters, with the result being a guy called Mr. Wacky, among others.

The production-values are also pretty nice. The character-designs may be a bit too much, but the animation certainly isn’t bad, and knowing Koichi Masahiro, the soundtrack is bound to be excellent.

But here’s my real beef with this series: less than five years after creating Bakuretsu Hunters, Koichi Masahino would create a series that would surpass it in every single way: Wild Arms, which had more interesting characters, setting, story, character-designs, individual episodic stories, was even more fun to watch and had a womanizing main character who actually worked. I just don’t see any reason why you would want to watch Bakuretsu Hunters if you can just watch Wild Arms instead. Bakuretsu Hunters just has way too buggy characters and too many plot-holes to really make an impact, even though its episodic stories are entertaining enough. Not to mention that Deus ex Machina ending…

Short Synopsis: Someone is trying to get rid of Daiku, and uses some very extreme measures to get his way.
Highlights: Awesome set-up for a finale!
Overall Enjoyment Value: 9/10
Ah, okay. This and the next episode may have different titles, but they turn out to be the two halves of one big arc that is going to be the finale of this series. But really, it’s promising to be an awesome finale, and with this, we can really see the power of the decision for this series to go into a different path than the manga: because of that, the creators could plan exactly what they want to place when and where, and thus they have managed to save the perfect story to close off this series. I’m really excited, seeing how this series is about to avoid the number one mistake made with manga- and novel-adaptations: the fact that the length of the manga and anime don’t match. Seriously, more series should do this, instead of creating an artificial ending that was pasted together in the last minute.

In any case, what happened in this episode: Maki turned out to have a heart-attack, but he managed to restore quite quickly, although a next attack would be fatal to him. In the meantime, someone has put some sort of virus in the main computer of Daiku, causing Kainuma’s face to pop up like it did in the previous episode, which points to the fact that a certain someone who knows about Maki and Kainuma is trying to get rid of Daiku. The main chief is also getting followed by someone.

Maki also discovered that a certain piece of Suzuki’s memory has been erased by someone. It is revealed that Michiru looked up to Onogida and that’s why she ended up joining Daiku. Onogida then DIES afterwards, and Maki is also nearly killed by a mystery attacker! Talk about plot twists!

Oh, to think that the creators had no intention to stop the massacre. It does make sense, though: what better time to attack Daiku when the members are already confused by the death of one of their comrades? But what bugs me the most is that missing piece of memory of Suzuki: that means that he saw something inside of Kainuma’s brains that was even MORE SCREWED UP than kissing his dead victims while scraping off their skin while proclaiming his love for Maki. Bloody hell!?

I’m not sure what exactly it is, but I’m very cynical about this season’s endings. I hardly look forward to any of them, and most of them just seem destined for a straightforward and predictable ending, but for Himitsu I’m willing to make an exception. The finale of this series has so far been downright excellent, and there are no signs at all that this series won’t finish with a huge climax. This is exactly what I look for in a good climax!

Short Synopsis: A calm-before-the-storm episode, which shows Haru right before he attempts to retrieve Kushima’s consciousness.
Highlights: Finally some focus on Minamo again!
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
This was an excellent calm-before-the-storm episode. It did exactly what was needed to prelude the finale for this series, and it also found enough time to finis Minamo’s development. It’s still a pity that she got degraded to side-character when the finale of this series started, so I’m really glad that the creators managed to put a satisfying closure to her story arc. With this episode, her growth feels complete.

The question of course remains: will the creators be able to do the same thing with the subplots between Souta and Holon, Haru and Kushima, Souta and the Secretary General and Kushima and Jennie. That final episode needs to be really fastly paced in order to get everything in there, and this is where the director really has to show what he can do to prevent the ending from getting rushed. I think that his best choice would be a simple straightforward ending, much as with Seirei no Moribito, instead of that chaotic ending of Ghost Hound. He should just focus on providing a satisfying conclusion for all of the above-mentioned subplots.

The plant, breaking down also was really nicely animated, by the way. It shows the promise for a nicely animated finale.

Overall, I’m still glad that I decided to follow this series, and while it isn’t THE best series of the past half year, I’d easily include this series in my top-10 favourite series of the past spring and summer-season, which have overall been rather disappointing for Production IG. They once were my favourite of the big animation producers, but that drastically changed in 2008. I think it was just one big mistake to get affiliated with that small company of Trans Arts, because these guys have just wanted to do way too much in way too little time, and they just don’t fit Production IG’s specific style. Especially with that theatrical announcement for Chocolate Underground, I’m wondering who on the company still finds it a good idea to keep affiliating with Trans Arts. Even Wellber, which I loved when it aired, is starting to get less and less memorable, the more I think back about it.