Mars of Destruction Review

There are a lot of well-known and respected anime titles out there that seemingly everyone knows about, such as Neon Genesis Evangelion and Cowboy Bebop. On the other end of the spectrum are anime that are so bad that they should not have seen the light of day. One of these anime is Mars of Destruction. It is known among anime fans as one of (if not the) worst anime ever produced and so I decided to give it a watch.

Released back in 2005, Mars of Destruction is a short 1 episode OVA produced by Idea Factory (Generation of Chaos, Run=Dim). The story is set in 2010 after a spaceship carrying samples from Mars breaks up in the atmosphere. Shortly after that, monsters called Ancients begin attacking people in and around Tokyo and it’s up to an organization known as AAST to stop them. Unfortunately, conventional weapons are useless against the Ancients and they must rely on a man named Takeru to fight them using a “Mars Suit”.

The setting doesn’t sound too bad considering how strange anime can get, but the execution of the story was horrible. Mars of Destruction starts off with the spaceship breaking up in the atmosphere and then fast forwards to the future when AAST is fighting the Ancients. After a brief hospital scene, they are fighting the Ancients again, followed by a brief explanation of the story and one final fight. As you can imagine, with all of this fighting, there is no real story to develop. A flashback in the hospital tried to copy Shinji’s relationship with his father from Evangelion, but copying others’ work for the sake of copying is just poor taste.

Character development is nonexistent. Takeru states that he doesn’t want to fight, but does nothing to back up his words and is no different at the end of the anime than he was at the beginning. The three AAST girls, whose names I can’t even remember, spent most of the time shooting their guns.

The animation quality is some of the most depressing I have ever seen. Considering Idea Factory is an animation studio, I would’ve expected animation quality to be at least better than that of indie anime. A large portion of the anime uses still frames and many scenes cycle back and forth between 2 or 3 different frames. Considering that action scenes make up the bulk of the series, it’s depressing to see the characters make single movements one at a time while those around them are frozen in place.

While little effort was put into the animation, even less was put into the music. Rather than have a real soundtrack, Mars of Destruction simply uses classical music by Chopin and Beethoven during very unfitting scenes. Half of the anime didn’t even have any background music playing, simply being silent with a few grunts and cheesy sound effects.

I am at a loss when trying to find something good to say about Mars of Destruction and have to agree with the rest of the anime community: Mars of Destruction is one of the worst anime ever.