For once guys I have no idea how to start an intro to this review it's something I did plan on doing last week but Aquaman and a bunch of other movies all came online and the exact same day so that meant I had to postpone this review by a week. Now tho i've seen all twelve episodes of the show and here to give you my thoughts on the show so here is my review of the anime version of X-Men.
The plot to this show is not long after the death of Jean Grey (who was being controlled by the Dark Phoenix at the time) the X-Men here consisting of Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm and Beast are tasked with finding out why there's serge in mutant activity in Northern Japan That's honestly the best way i can describe the plot since the plot of the show changes after episode which is a shame because if they didn't change the story they would have had a rather solid plot but since they changed it we have a plot that's that good.
Incase your wondering yes i'm reviewing the dubbed version of the show and incase your seeing this in Marvel only pages Marvel themselves had a hand in creating this show. Starring in the show was Scott Porter as Cyclops/Scott Summers , Steven Blum as Logan / Wolverine , the original voice for Leonardo of the TMNT as Professor X/Charles Xavier , The Flash star Danielle Nicolet as Storm/Ororo Munroe , Jennifer Hale as Jean Grey , Ali Hillis as Emma Frost and Stephanie Sheh as Armor/Hisako Ichiki.
Please note that those with Japanese names are listed as such because that's what there called in the show. As for the actual acting in the show itself it's actually pretty decent if I sound surprised that's because I am and because when I first took on the challenge of reviewing a Marvel Anime I had heard that they were pretty bad shows so i really wasn't expecting the quality of the acting to be as good as it was.
What was shocking is that given the X-Men characters that I mentioned there's a lot more who make cameo's in the final episode. I won't spoil them all but some of the characters who appear are Colossus , Rogue , Nightcrawler and most shockingly of all Deadpool. I'm not going to spoil the possibly big cameo tho since it really does depend on how you feel about that character but I can't get over the fact that Deadpool makes a cameo in this series it's just a shame it's a non speaking cameo.
The animation for this show was done by Madhouse who have worked on a tone of great anime films and TV shows so you know that the animation is going to be at a high standard and it is in this show. There's a lot of great fluid movements and backgrounds but what really bugged me and it's such a minor thing but a lot of the male characters have what looks like really shiny hair it's really distracting at times as well.
Most of us who saw X-Men: The Last Stand hated it because of the fact that it ruined a great storyline well clearly someone at madhouse loved it because of the fact that they made there version of Storm look alot like the Halle Berry. Of all the designs they could have gone with for the character they go with the one that's based of the actress that alot of people hated in those movies. I'll grant them this the design it self is pretty cool but why Halle Berry that to me makes no sense at all why not base her design of the 90's animated series version since that's still the most well known look for the character.
Incase your wondering why I chose to review this series the short answer is I didn't I held a poll for a few hours on Comics Amino asking them which of the four Marvel Anime (which consists of X-Men , Wolverine , Iron man and Blade) they wanted me to review since I was in the mood to watch one of them and they chose this one. So yeah a poll is why your seeing this review right now and after seeing the series in it's entirety I have to say I might hold more polls like that in the near future since this was an interesting series.
Marvel produced four anime under the Marvel Anime title yes they would go on to produce more shows but they exist in a different "world" to these ones. All of those shows debuted between October 2010 and September 2011 in Japan and in American between July 2011 and April 2012 with each series lasting exactly twelve episodes. What I don't get tho is why each of the shows has to take place in Japan it's not a bad idea for them to do that if it makes sense in terms of the story which it does here but still after a while that would get old fast.
What adds to the pedigree for us comic fans is that each of the series was helped by writer Warren Ellis who is also the writer for the excellent Netflix series Castlevania. Honestly there are a lot of interesting things thrown into the story like the fact we see Scott for alot of the series trying to cope with the death of Jean that to me is interesting and it's something that I don't think has been seen before and the fact that because of that he doesn't trust Emma that much despite her not even being there when Jean died.
I'm going to do something that if you've seen my anime reviews you know I never do and that's talk about the opening sequence because my god is that sequence boring. That opening doesn't do what any good opening should do and that's get you excited for the show it honestly felt like it was thrown together at the last minuet. There were times when watching this series that I considered just skipping the intro altogether and given that X-Men intros not just in Japan but in general have been really good it's disappointing that this one wasn't.
In terms of the action seen in the series I honestly really liked in heck I might even say that it was my favorite part of the whole show. They don't do your typical action scenes either since this is a group of super powered beings fighting that means that you get to see each of the main characters powers in action and that makes the action scenes look really awesome on screen.
Overall while this show is indeed good it has a lot of issues that keep it from being great and it was a great choice from the folks over at Comics Amino but if it's all the same to them i'll stick with the classic X-Men: The Animated Series this show gets a 6.5 out of 10 from me.
