You ever watch something so familiar that you spend the whole time wondering where you’ve seen it before? ^_^ I’m not saying Metallic Rouge streaming now on Crunchyroll, is derivative, but it definitely feels like a lot of other things I have seen.

To begin with, the opening moments of the anime are so evidently by the team that brought us Carole and Tuesday that I wondered if the story was going to tie in, somehow. No…but it sure could have been and worked just fine. A single newspaper cover in common would have been fine. Instead we’re in the glitter/grungy world of planet Mars that the story treats like a single city. Have you ever noticed how often whole planets are treated as if they are one town? One culture, no other languages, food, or politics. Heck, even small cities have more than one of those. But no, “Mars” is one place.

There’s a Noir-ish quality to our primary pair – fighter Rouge and her handler Naomi, mostly in the sense that the two of them do missions for whomever they work for. The background story of who everyone works for is messy, with a shifting cast of organizations vying for who know what.

There is a human racism plotline that feels so familiar but I cannot place it. It’s racism lite, as it so often is, in anime. Upperclass vs underclass. Bad people are bad, and mean people hurt the demi-human Neans and there’s no complexity to any of it. Like a child’s garden of racism. Neans are the underclass that humans created in order to treat them like crap. Yup.

There is mecha, in the form of hardsuits, which feels very Bubblegum Crisis, as Rouge takes on other hard-suited baddies for reasons that shift every episode. With, I should add, some very sticky music that is more of a single riff that echoes in your brain, than a song, per se. I get Devilman Lady vibes off the music.

And there is a very 90s OVA quality to the whole thing. Each episode or two is it’s own arc, and will come to an end…even if it’s not resolved in a meaningful way. Rouge’s memories are already the big mystery, but to be honest, I don’t really think this anime will bother filling in the details in a meaningful way, any more than Carole and Tuesday wrapped up any of it’s storylines before the big pay-per-view concert that resolved nothing – don’t think we’re going to forget that, Bones, because we are not.

Is this a Yuri series? Nah. Nor is it trying to be one. It’s a buddy story and that’s just fine. With mecha, fighting, and repetitive, epic music, and a cast that appears to be the same 5 people back for every other episode. I appreciate that kind of cost-cutting. It works better than just underfunding the animation. Points off for the evil clown, though. Mars has enough problems, it doesn’t need evil clowns.

Ratings:

Art – Very pretty
Story – Many things stick to this wall
Characters – Sure, why not
Service – Why are all “clubs” in the future the same one tawdry sex club? Get an imagination people!
Yuri – 0 and not likely to go past “I got your back, as long as you’re not stabbing mine”

Overall  – 8

Not everything has to be high art. We can just like some pretty crap with fighty robots, then forget it existed after its over. It’s okay. ^_^