Anime Review: The Big O

This show is about Roger Smith; a man who lives in a post-apocalyptic world where a strange toxin has cause the whole world to lose their memories. Simultaneously, the elite, both good and bad pilot giant robots and have battles with each other at varying points (although giant robots are considered illegal and cause police to treat all pilots as criminals). Roger is a negotiator, and frequently, uses his giant robot, the Black MegaDeuce, aka Big O, to handle situations that tend to spin wildly out of control.

This show is a tough thing to review for a few reasons. First of all, the artwork in this show is beautiful. Even though the show is relatively old, the animation is great. The colors and creative shape of the world is something that is great to watch. But this isn’t enough to condone watching this series. I know there are many people (manly fan boys) who love this show and will attempt to hunt me down for bad mouthing Big O, but here are my main problems.

Big O may be great to look at, but the story and action just are not there. Let’s start with the story. The concept of the entire world losing their memories is great! What a unique way to have the world fall apart. Now instead of taking such a simple every action for granted, people are considered royalty for having memories and there are even black markets and robberies to obtain them. The problem with the story though is how dry the episodes tend to be. There is a long drawn out argument between the villain and Roger, eventually things escalate and the scene turns into a quick fifteen second robot battle. Now, you might argue, giant robot battle, who doesn’t love that? Well when watching the Power Rangers robot battles at 20 years old are better than watching these, you start to understand where I’m coming from. Shows from the same time period as Big O did a much better job at portraying the power and magnitude of these robots. Big O just shoots the same beam out of his head and destroys all of his enemies from one attack (similar to the Power Rangers and the Megasword destroying everything in one attack. The only difference being the pure fact that Power Rangers is live action gives it a bit of saving grace).

If the creators of this show were to bring it back and try to revise some of these problems, I would whole-heartily give this a second chance based on what is right about this show. But until they do that, I can’t give anyone but the fan boys the green light to check this out.