Brain Powered 2/10

This show is like watching a car accident involving two Ferraris. Big money going kablooie. The dismal quality of this show should be an embarrassment to the creators.

The 26 (26! Why not stop at 24?!) episodes of Brain Powered shuffled, not unlike the toxic waste guy from Robocop, onto Japanese TV in 1998. Directed, scripted, and created by Yoshiyuki Tomino, the legendary creator of Gundam and Dunbine, I bet this show had a lot of people's hopes up. Those poor bastards.

I liked two things about this show. Firstly the music was great overall. There were some repetitive tracks but I didn't find anything bad (If it's Yoko Kanno it CAN'T be terrible). I even liked the OP and ED, those songs were pretty good. The other thing I liked was the opening sequence. It's basically all the main female characters flying around naked. Since there's almost no nudity in the show itself I'm not sure why they did this but me likey. It makes what follows somewhat less painful.

So what's wrong with this show? First off it doesn't look very good. At times it looks rushed and the characters don't look consistent throughout the series. The backgrounds are also only passable. I can forgive some bad animation in older series but the backgrounds should look great in a sci-fi mech series with the budget these types of shows usually have. I'm also disgusted with the mechs here. First off they all look about the same, this becomes a problem in identifying who is who. You can't even tell the good guys from the bad guys sometimes. Secondly they hardly move. When they fly the animators just move the cell across the screen. They don't even chage the cell between standing and flying, they just draw some glowiness under them. They also have the wimpiest weapons ever, some light glowy dealies and hardly anyone takes any damage since they couldn't re-use the cell they use for everything else.

I ALSO hated the editing in this series. The direction is way too abrupt. The show does things like jump from one closeup in one location to another closeup in a completely different, unrelated place with no break in the dialogue. The director doesn't bother to give the viewer a shot in between to establish the new location. This makes things VERY confusing, especially when all the look-alike mechs are flying in the same blue sky and the characters are just yelling inside their mechs and not at anyone else with them or through a communicator.

The dialogue is ALSO a source of pain and confusion, characters talk so much that sometimes you can't tell if they're adressing someone within earshot, someone outside earshot, their mech, or themselves. This isn't helped by the crappy editing. Oh and I also hated most of the VA's. The main character girl was HORRIBLE! I could read the lines off a card better. IN JAPANESE! WITH A MAN'S VOICE!

So what's this mess about? Scientists have discovered a big thingy under the ocean called Orphan. It spawns these glowy discs that get found all over the place. Sometimes when someone stumbles upon one of these things a big mech is born and the lucky person has a shiny new mech to fly around in. There are 2 types of mechs, the Grand Chars that are piloted by the people that now live in and study Orphan and the Brain Powereds that are piloted by the people who don't like Orphan since it's planning to suck the life from the Earth.

The main male lead once lived in Orphan but escaped and fights on the good guy side on a ship called the Novis Noah where after the captain dies THE SHIP'S DOCTOR IS MADE THE CAPTAIN. The main female lead is a girl that happened to find a Brain Powered and acts annoying. There are oodles of characters in this show, a bunch of good guys and a bunch of bad guys and the whole thing is pretty confusing. People switch sides, motivations change, mechs go figure skating, people go insane, I go insane.

The deal is that Orphan is a spaceship that sucks life for energy. When it takes off it's likely to wipe out all life on Earth. This whole deal gets pushed more and more to the back burner with all the going insane and figure skating. I'm still not quite sure what happened at the end and I frankly stopped caring.

Don't watch this show. It's terrible. I feel dumber for having seen it.