I’ve been wanting to review this for a while and I think now is the right time for it, especially seeing as it was brought up recently in a top ten list. So now to review the anarchy series that is Needless.

Needless starts off with a Nuclear war that takes out part of Tokyo, leaving just a barren land simply known as the Black Spot which is ruled by a powerful multinational corporation led by its insane director Adam Arclight. A number of rebels want him dead and that’s where the story begins. We cut to a kid named Cruz who manages to escape thanks to his sister playing the noble sacrifice, who then finds a Kamina-esque priest named Adam Blade & his meta-morphing sidekick Eve, who’s entire running joke is coming up with stupid names for people because she can’t be bothered to remember anyone’s name except Adam Blade’s.
Adam & Eve are Needless, beings who have specific superpowers; Eve can meta-morph into anyone and change parts of her body while Adam Blade we find out can learn any Needless power by analyzing his opponent. Cruz can’t do anything and quickly becomes annoying.
We are joined by a scientist named Gido who also can’t do anything and spends most of the series stating the bloody obvious.
Two other characters who join team Blade are Teruyama who names all his attacks after the Hiroshima bomb while the other character Disc is an android built with every technical upgrade possible and knows the Black Spot inside out.
One thing that you will understand very quickly is how much of a mess this series is, poorly structured story, randomly placed gags, shameless fanservice to uncomfortable levels, stupidly long drawn out battles and random shifts in art where you wonder if the artists were ill that week when they made the episode.
That’s a lot of bad things right off the bat, but it’s excused when you consider that Needless is meant to be like that and anything less than a mess would seem out of place.
If there are major flaws in Needless, there are just as many to name.
For one, Cruz is established as the main character fairly quick and in a series where you essentially have a cast of X-Men, Cruz is the most pathetic character ever made which gets worst when he essentially takes up 90% of the screen time and is made so essential to the plot that the stronger better made characters are made worst because of it. They even felt the need to take out Adam Blade & Eve for a few episodes despite the fact they are the main characters, equally villains such as Saten & Arclight don’t even get that much screen time despite the fact that they drive the plot.
Equally Mr Obvious, Gido gets far too many spoken lines as well, and don’t get me started on how tenacious the girl’s squad is. They were supposed to be a mid-boss battle but fought Adam Blade & co more times than the actual main villains. Finally a few late entry characters get pushed to the back as quickly as they were introduced.
But the worst element of this series is the god awful dub.
I brought this up briefly in my top 10 worst dub voice acting list and the main fact of it is that there was no excuse in getting this wrong on a series with Excel Saga level madness.
At times there were scenes where certain scripts were written poorly, such as when Arclight announced that he was god without even trying to make an effort in his voice and this is the guy who previously played Genjo Sanzo; other times Cruz is over acting to the point of screeching backed up by a few scenes of wasted redundant dialogue, this affects a number of other side characters as well or in the case of Solva, not acting enough.
Only a couple of voices standout; Adam Blade which should be a given, Disc despite sprouting the obvious all the time she’s at least easy on the ears & Kuchinashi who is a mute and only speaks two words. I know for a fact that there are far worst dubs & far worst acting but the thing that made this number one on that list was the fact that all the actors chosen for Needless are veterans within the industry and the ADR Director has equal talent in dubs.
Maybe I should have taken the warnings the DVD gave me. In the UK release of Needless, the disc is defaulted to subtitles and you have to select the dub manually while the episode is running otherwise you get no sound. Comes to something when the DVD is telling me the dub sucks.
Final Verdict: If you want a testosterone heavy show with mindless structure and a lack of care for the rules of the world then watch Gurren Lagann. (Even though Needless predates Gurren Lagann) The only way you can watch this series is to stop thinking and enjoy the madness on screen; the mistake I made was watching this series and questioning why certain things happen.
Madness cannot be appreciated when you question why it’s there.