Originally Posted by
Benggaul
Just finished watching the entire series and overall I'd give it between a 6-8 out of 10 depending on the episode, so I guess the series as a whole gets a 7 from me.
I went into it knowing very little aside from the "Lost Session" minisode so I had assumed it would be brand new plots taking place in-between the episodes of the anime, but in actuality they combine several different episodes into retelling the tales from the anime--with mixed results. I enjoyed a lot of the bounty hunting parts and the interplay between Spike and Jet (and later Faye), but I felt these episodes suffered when they started diving into Spike's past with Julia and Vicious. Julia in particular seems to be completely rewritten to try to veer away from the "damsel in distress" she was in the anime and Vicious, well, let's just say they didn't learn the lesson that the Star Wars prequels should have taught filmmakers: nobody wants to know how villains became villains; they just want them to be badass. Too often Vicious comes across as Kylo Ren. Prone to temper tantrums, waving his sword around and shouting at the top of his lungs. For people watching the series for him specifically, the creators failed badly.
Fortunately for me Vicious was never the reason for me to watch. Cho did a better job with Spike than I thought he would (though I still feel there's room for improvement). Pineda's Faye was decent and not as over-the-top as I feared it would be from the minisode. Mustafa Shakir fucking nailed Jet as far as I'm concerned. The rest of the acting was a mixed bag, but I feel some of that is due to them trying to capture the characters from the anime without attempting to make them "real". Anime energy featured heavily in those performances.
The music was, as expected, fantastic. I'll definitely be picking up the OST when I can and reliving the old tunes while enjoying the new. My only real complaint there was that some of it was misused. They'd start the licks of Tank! during the opening scene only to cut to the full song during the credits or play the first few seconds of Doggy Dog before screeching it to a halt before it kicks in. It didn't happen too often, but when it did it was distracting.
As far as being faithful to the original anime...it was and it wasn't. The same skeleton was in place for large parts of it but the way in which it was fleshed out was largely different. Take the Eco-terrorist episode, for instance: similar villains to the anime, but the execution was almost completely different. The end results were the same, mostly, but some of it was obviously changed to adapt to other variations from the original. In the end I found most of the episodes very watchable and enjoyable, though 9 was...meh (see above re: Vicious).
I think the people saying they won't watch based on the 1-minute clip of an obviously over-the-top introduction to Ed are doing both themselves and the show a disservice. I, too, didn't particularly care for that small snippet, but I'm also betting that if Ed is in season 2 (if there's a season 2) then we won't be seeing them for very long, and especially not at that same level of energy, throughout. Ed in the anime was only ever used in small nuggets (with one or two exceptions when the story was centered around them) and I expect the same would happen in the series. A little Ed goes a long way, even in cartoon form.
All in all, I had a good time with the series and I'll probably give it a re-watch to pick up on some things I missed before or want to revisit. There were a few visual and audio cameos from the anime that had me grinning and I expect I missed others. So, again, 7/10 will watch again, but needs more E1n.