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R2 DVD Reviews
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Written by maehara
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Tuesday, 29 May 2007 17:00 |
 Gun×Sword, featuring a girl with a gun and a man with a sword. Of sorts. Wendy Garret and Van Insert-Name-Here are both seeking the same person – a man with claws, apparently – so Wendy decides to tag along with the man with a mecha. Sensible idea, but it takes a while for Van to learn to live with her...
1 - Tuxedo Blowing in the Wind
When travelling (and hungry) gunman Van reaches the town of Evergreen, he finds a town in fear - a group of bandits known as the Wild Bunch have set up in the area and set out on a killing spree, and the remaining townsfolk have barricaded themselves inside the town's shopping mall while they try to figure out how to deal with the bandits. When Van saves young girl Wendy Garret from the clutches of the Wild Bunch, the town's mayor asks Van to deal with the bandits - and there's food and money in it for him if he agrees. At first Van refuses, but when he can't get the local bar - as occupied by Lord Luck and the Wild Bunch - to serve him a glass of milk, he decides maybe it's time he did something...
2 - Funny Stream
Van and Wendy arrive at Bridge City, where they meet Carul Mendosa, aka Carmen99, an information broker that Van's had dealings with before. She has information on the man Van's looking for - but with the bridge out of the city closed for repairs, it's going to be a while before he can get back on the Claw's trail. Even when the bridge is reopened, crossing is restricted and only women are permitted - so Wendy, still hoping to track down her brother, opts to make the bridge crossing without Van. Worried that something unusual is going on, Van does a little digging around the Mayor's office and finds the true extent of his deception - and immediately sets off on a rescue mission...
3 - Heroes One More Time
Another day, another town - this one called Gloria - and after passing out from lack of food Van and Wendy end up in a local bar, where Van is quickly recognised as the saviour of Bridge City and given a hero's welcome by the town's own former heroes: Jose, Nero, Barrio and Carlos, who in their younger days were four-fifths of a group of sentai rangers, the El Dora Five, but who now spend their time in the bar swapping stories of their past glories. When the town's own mad inventor sets his new Armor lose on the town, Jose and co see an opportunity to become heroes once more - but as ever, past glories don't mean much in the present day...
4 - And the Rain Kept Falling
Wendy may be travelling with Van, but she's beginning to realise that he's not really paying much attention to her or appreciating her company. He hasn't even called her by name once, although given his memory that's maybe not all that surprising. When Van falls ill, Wendy's left dragging him though the rain to a cave where they take shelter, and as Van's condition gets worse she does her best to care for him - yet still all he can say to her is to tell her to go home. While Wendy makes her way to a nearby town looking for help, Van manages to summon Dann and sets off on his own...
One thing you can't help but notice about Van is that he never gets involved with any battle until it begins to affect him personally, but that then even the smallest thing will have him stepping in and sorting things out. It's a side of his personality that Wendy will find hugely infuriating as the series goes on.
Van's not your average outlaw type – with a sword made of a strange flowing metal and the ability to call a huge mecha (or Armor, as this series calls them) down from an orbiting station when the need arises, he's quite a capable little trouble-shooter. His aim is to take vengeance for the death of his fiancé, who was killed by a mysterious clawed man. Van's Armor is the impressively-powerful Dann – dropped to the surface from orbit whenever Van calls on it, Dann's capable of turning any battle into a one-sided walkover, although Van tends not to call on it until it's absolutely necessary.
The same mysterious clawed man seems to have been responsible for the disappearance of Wendy's older brother, so when Van proves his fighting skills by saving Evergreen from the Wild Bunch, Wendy decides he's her best chance of tracking down her brother and tags along. Van's initially reluctant to let her, but she's a persistent wee thing and over the course of the first four episodes he begins to get used to her presence. Wendy's not much use in a fight – she may carry a gun, but it's only got one bullet and she's never had to use it yet – but she fills the role of the voice of Van's conscience very well, as well as being quite useful for other, more domestic reasons.
This first volume feels a lot like the early episodes of Trigun, to be honest, as Van and Wendy travel from town to city to village across Endless Illusion, their home planet, looking for clues to the location of the clawed man and invariably running into a string of problems along the way. The tone of the story is generally lighter, though (episode 3 pokes a lot of fun at the sentai / Power Rangers genre, for example, while episode 2 features an army of villains with living moustaches), although Van himself has the feel of someone whose past is weighing him down, and who has had to pay a price for the power that being able to call on Dann gives him.
The series is capable of throwing more serious stories into the mix, too, especially when dealing with the clawed man, and the final episode on this disc begins to touch on that side of the story a bit. Van and Wendy aren't the only people searching for the clawed man, and someone else is on the trail and following closely in Van's footsteps. It's still early days yet, but depending on which aspect of the show the series goes on to focus on – the comic or the vengeful – there are some interesting possibilities for how the story could play out. The Trigun comparision comes in again here, in the way the humour drained out of that series as Vash got closer to Knives – I can see Gun×Sword going down a similar route, and that probably would be no bad thing.
I have to say a bit about the way Endless Illusion is portrayed on screen. In many anime series, you take a world away from Earth and it's given a single look – jungle, desert, whatever, there's often very little change from one location to another. In Gun×Sword, every location has its own unique hooks, and a lot of effort seems to have gone into creating the visuals. The character designs have also been very nicely realised, and the end result is a show that is a real visual treat.
Gun×Sword looks the part, and while the story has its roots in other shows it's done in such a way that it's got a feel that's almost its own. Van and Wendy make a good mismatched couple, while Van's ability to call on his Armor means that any battle is a treat for mecha fans. The series relies more on execution than originality to make its mark – there's a lot here that will remind people of Trigun, for a start – but make its mark it does. I had great fun watching this, and it's definitely worth a look.
Video clips for this release: Clip 1 | Clip 2 | Clip 3
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