No I haven't been neglecting this world, although it is difficult to write reviews when you're watching five anime at once and had plenty of ideas for stories while trying to work on a computer that's been on borrowed time for the last year or so. Well it's time to stop neglecting and restart with a review on Grenadier.
Grenadier is about a wandering frontier gunman who tries to create peace in every situation they are in despite being faced with opponents that keep getting stronger with each episode, no I'm not describing Trigun but you can forgiven for thinking it is. Grenadier can be best described as a reverse gender Trigun; it helps that main character Rushuna is also blonde, stands pretty tall for a female character compared to the rest of the cast, is goofy in nature yet can shoot better than any character in the series except their own sibling who can match them.
Okay I'm not doing a very good job at separating this show from Trigun so lets see the story. Rushuna has been wandering around for a while being herself until her master puts a bounty on her head and sends a group called the Juttensen after her.
Joined by a samurai named Yajiro & a talented Balloonist named Mikan, the trio set off to the capital in order to find out what the hell is going on.
Now this is where the obvious comparisons end.
For a start it's clear that Rushuna is not so restrictive in using her gun than Vash was at the start of Trigun despite following similar philosophizes, in fact Rushuna wins more points in style than Vash and even Bayonetta in places as she reloads bullets with her breasts and pulls off seemingly impossible gun shots including shooting with just the cylinder frame, this is where Grenadier really shines, the spectacle, in a way this is what some people didn't like Trigun for; it was felt that Vash spent so long not firing his gun that people including myself couldn't sit through the series long enough before we got some proper combat and while it does eventually payoff, it still felt a long time compared to other 90s action anime at the time, in a way Grenadier was created to showcase what Trigun was missing but in the long term especially in the anime, Grenadier loses focus on the story and doesn't deliver itself quite as well as Trigun did.
But what really goes against Grenadier is the fact that Rushuna has gigantic breasts, seriously those things are DDDD, which according to sources is the same size as Soul Calibur's Ivy. The breasts kind of de-credit the story and make it seem like a huge fanservice show, not helped further by Rushuna's interest in taking baths every episode. Any kind of seriousness left in the show is lost in the anime because of Rushuna's cleavage.
Final Verdict: Trigun is a more superior anime by far but Grenadier still creates an impressive spectacle, I will say that the manga does make up for the anime's shortcomings and improves the story.
