Anime: Rockman.EXE

Rockman EXE was developed as anime for the popular game series, Rockman (Megaman if in the USA), focusing soley on the Gameboy Advanced game series "Rockman Battle Networks".

I'll be talking mostly about the first half and second half of this anime. The first half refers to everything up to episode 26. This is the main story line. The second half has the post tournament episodes including the prize and the Gospel saga. I'll try to avoid the major spoilers, but a few names are sure to come out.

To start the review The animation in this series changes over time. The animation shows different varieties. Most of it is in classic animation style, no obvious CG. During the second half of the anime they start to show a character named Aki who has heavy CG, as well as the first time they show "Internet City" they give it a vivid CG rendering that almost never comes back.

They do reuse a lot of scenes of plugging in and changing costumes more often then not, and by the time your half way through the first part you'll start looking away when you hear the familar words but overall the animation isn't poorly done.

The sound however I equate with music, and there's only 4 songs in this entire anime that I can remember. The Opening song of the series is rather good and remains for all 56 episodes. The two ending songs (one for every episode til 26 and one from 26 til 56) is poor, to the point of fast fowarding through it. I never once listened to it in the entirity. It has some nice melody but nothing that made me want to listen. The big problem though is there's only one other song and one snippit of music that's used through out the entire anime. The song "Install my heart' is decent the first few times you hear it but you'll hear it almost 10 times by the end of the anime, you'll know exactly how to sing it, and you'll wish you never heard it. The snippits of songs are the classic Megaman sounds of victory and changes. They arn't bad but they don't feel fresh after a short while.

The story of the anime is sort of predictable with some decent twists. Nothing is too shocking but nothing is too bad. I will say the first 26 episodes easily had me captivated which easily got 5 points for the anime story. The other 2 comes from the fact that some of the later stories are decent and interesting though there's enough filler to annoy most people. The episodes where there is no battles is particularly subpar and you wonder why they are there (There's only 2 or 3 and the fact there's only 2 or 3 makes it stand out.) The ending feels like they felt a need to tack on 4 episodes after the true end of the story and often you wonder why they didn't stop at 26 or even just add 13 more for the gospel story line and end it there. They also don't expand enough on how he got a special ability after episode 26 called Style Change. It just appears and stays. I'll address the story a bit more later.

The characters of the anime are decent. Rockman is a great character. Most of the main characters are decent, though the main bad guys feel like they don't try hard enough. Again this anime is made for Kids, but it doesn't mean the villians have to suffer from "Team Rocket Syndrome". In addition the bad guys are adults and yet there's little physical contact when your twice the size of the main character. It just feels like the villians don't try hard enough. Again the second half has more flaws then the first half. Many of the second half villians are similar to the first half characters (iceman/freezeman, elecman/thunderman/magnetman, heatman/flameman (the only one that is explained) as well as a couple others) There's 6 NES games of Megaman who have decently unique characters but they felt the need to reuse the originals and give them similar skills. Overall not the most unique showing.

For this anime alone I calculate the value by "amount enjoyed" diveded by "time watched", basically the value of spending time watching this anime. This is a not a good value though. This anime's second section drags on so much that the only advice I can truely give is at episode 26 stop watching. There's little reason to progress beyond that. If you go the entire distance by the 56 episode you'll feel more like you ran a marathon then watched a series. Definatly not suggestable to do in a short period of time either. This is where story re-enters this review. The story is just the problem here because too many episodes feel so out of the story line, or like they needed something to do you wonder why they felt a need for 56 episodes.

The enjoyment of this anime though is overall quite high. If you skip a couple episodes or just watch the first half you'll love this anime. The gospel story in the second half is great, the tournament and short post tournament episodes are all quite enjoyable. A number of the side or filler episodes are also enjoyable. There's only around 10 episodes of the anime that truely drag it down but it's brought down very hard and very fast and never regains it's former glory (even with it's late story heavy arc).

The overall feeling I get from this anime is that if my friend was watching it I'd suggest he only watch 26 episodes. I couldn't suggest this anime to anyone for them to watch the whole thing as I feel it's a great waste of the time, I'm sure this anime is quite popular on children's tv for the same people who watch pokemon, but not for someone looking for a quality anime. Enjoyable, yes, but not worth the time.