Kiss Dum: Engage Planet

This anime is just plain bad. It had potential, but in the end it's just disappointing. The only reason why I even managed to finish the whole thing was because things didn't become clear until near the very end. If the plot was written differently, it would've been more successful ending at around maybe 12 episode. [spoiler] Because the whole time it was about Aiba taking revenge for Yuno and killing most of his revived friends. The conflict would've end a lot faster if Kyoka,the commander of the NIDF, tries to improvise when the book of dead was used on Aiba by working with himfinding a better solution, but instead she tries to eliminate him and killing millions of people because things didn't turn out the way she wanted to.[end spoiler] I wouldn't recommend watching it, but after reading this and you still feel like watching it, you can go to doutei fansub website for subtitles of all 26 episode + the ova.

Kiss Dum is an easy anime to get sucked into. It's got airplanes and transforming vehicles designed by Shoji Kawamori! It's based on the Lovecraft mythos! The anime director stormed out after finishing the first episode, so the team had to make things up as they went! Though Kiss Dum has infamy for its troubled production, it's easy to expect that it will, at the very least, be an entertaining, unpredictable trainwreck and that it will keep things interesting by peppering lots of Lovecraft references and vehicle action throughout -- but it does none of that past the first three episodes. Kiss Dum's first threeepisodes leave a great impression. It's a hopeless battle of humanity's forces against an incomprehensible alien threat -- and in the midst of it, a young man freed from death and granted amazing powers via the misleadingly-named "Book of the Dead" to be humanity's messenger and saviour against the conspicuously-named "Hadean" aliens. It's nonstop mecha action anchored by melodrama and betrayal. It even implies a cosmic scale for the story since it shows Hadeans in space. However, that all goes away after these first three episodes. It's obvious this is when the show's production began to suffer; the fourth episode is a recap. While one may expect this to mainly affect animation quality (which it does), it also affects the story quality in a really big way as it devolves from a promising Lovecraftian mecha show to post-apocalyptic Pokemon with the pacing of One Piece. The emphasis on vehicles and mecha disappears -- to drive home that this show is now a battle shonen and not mecha, one of the few episodes past the initial three that's what one would expect from a mecha show is a dream sequence, and in real life the only mecha pilot of importance is killed! The Lovecraft stuff is irrelevant as well aside from a few monster names and unimportant artifacts; the backstory isn't explained until much later, and the monsters are only there for pointless fight scenes that do nothing but distract viewers from the anime's sluggish pace and failure to follow its initial premise. The story the anime decides to stick with is very bad as well. It's mostly the main character searching for revenge, angsting, and fighting monsters, but the monster-fighting parts are totally undercut by the fact that the main character is told what to do by a pseudo-harem of three ghost anime girls that follow his every move. On top of that, the main villain that gets introduced a while later is ALSO an underage anime girl! The main backstory and plot twist isn't worth sticking around for either; it's nothing Kamen Rider hasn't done before. Kiss Dum is a testament to how anime's worst tendencies -- moe girls, endless filler, pointless fights, brooding, nonexistent worldbuilding -- arise from rushed production. This show had the potential to be one of the most memorable mecha shows of the 2000s, but it wasted that potential thanks to the producers leaving the story on anime autopilot while scrambling to present something, anything, for broadcast. The true cosmic horror Kiss Dum presents is that so much anime since its production has done the same thing, yet it gets applauded if it has enough loud comedy, fanservice, and self-insert bait. If you want to watch Kiss Dum even after all this, just watch the first three episodes and pretend it's an OVA that got cancelled afterward -- because the story presented by those first three episodes sure did get cancelled.

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