Can a franchise undergo depression? The groundwork for Casshern Sins suggests… maybe.
The franchise started with a 1973 outing called Neo Human Casshern. I haven’t chewed through it in its entirety by any means, but a little basic groundwork lets you know that it’s pretty typical Saturday Morning Cartoon fare. Its premise, amusingly presaging the MegaMan franchise, involves a scientist’s son becoming a super-cyborg in order to battle a rogue robot that’s trying to take over the world. In 1993, the franchise would reinvent itself with the OVA Casshern: Robot Hunter, which has some darker style notes as were all the rage in the 90’s.
But then in 2008, we got another retelling of the Casshern story. Its title, if you couldn’t guess, was Casshern Sins. Robot Hunter maybe wanted to be a little more adult than Neo Human. Sins, if the title wasn’t a dead giveaway, wants to take a premise that had some dark elements to it and turn that premise into an apocalyptic nightmare where only death and mayhem await.
While I might dig into the older Cassherns at some time in the future, Sins is by far the best known outing (at least in the West) and so it’s where I intend to start.
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