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.
Our protagonist, Casshern, seems to have just come to. He has amnesia, and has no knowledge of the situation the world faces or what most things are. However, he doesn’t have a lot of time to think at first.
The mob of angry robots (robots being said to be the only living beings left in the world, for what they’re worth) don’t only want to kill Casshern, they also want to devour him. You see, the apocalypse is ongoing for robots, with a phenomenon known as The Ruin dragging them towards inescapable decay and death, and not only is Casshern said to be responsible for unleashing The Ruin, there’s a rumor that a robot who eats Casshern will become immortal, impervious to The Ruin’s ravages.
Casshern fights off his attackers with some robot destructions that border on gore. Yeah, it’s cables and tubes, but it still looks a hell of a lot like punching into the target’s torso and ripping out their guts or heart.
Sometime after, by the no less desolate but kind of beautiful shores of a sea, Casshern encounters a little girl bot called Ringo, and her keeper Ouji. The latter seems to know Casshern, or at least something about him. We leave them behind for now, and are also introduced to two other figures.
One is a female android in good upkeep. Her name is Lyuze, and she wants to kill Casshern for the things he’s done, such as the killing of an entity called Luna in the past. However, she’s a lot more rational than the mob and is both willing to talk a little and displeased by Casshern’s amnesia, being unwilling to kill him while he’s ignorant of why he ought to die.
The other is a mysterious robot man in a black cloak. He’ll later be identified as Braiking Boss, but for now the Bot in Black is some kind of dark wanderer who, even more than Ouji, appears to be aware of the true history of the world. He also dislikes Casshern.
Casshern eventually finds a village of humanoid robots preparing to accept their deaths. When he outs himself to protect them for a rogue looking for a Casshern to eat, they go mad with the promise, however faint, of extended life and mob him. Only the robot dog, Friender, remains by the end of the sequence. Friender will more or less “join the party”. He keeps his distance a good deal, but does end up following Casshern on his journey.
After that we learn that humans aren’t extinct (though the first one we see kind of just accepts his death), have another confrontation between Casshern and Lyuze where Casshern is willing to stand there and let her kill him but she’s incapable of finishing the deed before being damaged causes him to berserk (Friender saves her). After this, Lyuze still talks harsh, but is more of a friend, putting her in a similar place to Ouji.
The next beat has Casshern have a remarkably similar encounter to his one with Lyuze (he lets himself be killed but is too tough to die and eventually berserks), this time with his player 2 recolor, Dio. Unlike Lyuze, Dio doesn’t seem like he’s entirely on the up and up.
And at this point, I must report that Casshern Sins has a bit of a “monster of the week” structure to its storytelling. There are quite a few lines that progress steadily, but in amounts each episode that are so small they’re not worth noting chronologically. Before catching up with the facts, I’ll give you the outline of a normal episode.
In a typical episode, we have Casshern run into someone more interesting than the normal violent thugbots. Usually this is a female character, whether a woman or little girl, but there are exceptions. If there’s any threat to the one-episode partner, Casshern will destroy that threat with prejudice. Sometimes the partner tries to threaten or off him for their own reasons, but they’ll be forgiven. Sometimes we’ll cut to Ouji and Ringo, or Lyuze witnessing the events of the episode. The former might even be involved a little. Once in a while we’ll cut to other characters for more lore. All the while, we get lots of shots of the gorgeous desolation of this world. I’m not kidding – the backgrounds and settings in Casshern Sins are wonderful, making a world where pretty much nothing grows that’s usually all in gray look astounding and even magical. Point in the show’s favor.
For instance, the first of this style of episode (Episode 4, before we meet Dio) introduces us to a female robot who wants to fight Casshern, mostly because she wants to fight everyone. Casshern refuses to fight, resulting in them talking about their philosophies. They part ways, only for Casshern to show back up when she’s threatened and beat up the thugs. Girl of the episode decides she loves Casshern and has a funny way of showing it.
Since he’s immortal he hears her out about the whole wanting to free him from his suffering and grant his death wish thing that didn’t work out, and they part on what seem to be good terms. The region for this episode includes harsh canyons and goblet-like rock formations with crimson water (looks like blood, clearly isn’t. We’re not in literal hell here.) that make great backdrops or ground for fighting.
Most of these episodes are absolutely worth watching. They help set the mood, and let you soak in the atmosphere of this decaying world, while also serving to help pace the ontological mystery of who Casshern was, what he did, why he did it, and so on.
So, here’s the recap to the next big turning point: Dio is building an army in an effort to be the true successor to former world ruler Braiking Boss, declaring that he’ll kill Casshern and through that cure the Ruin. He’s joined by the female of his and Casshern’s model line, Leda, who acts as the power behind the throne. Meanwhile, rumors abound that Luna is back alive and granting health and life to anyone, human or robot, who goes to her, leading to a lot of pilgrims crossing the wastes.
Casshern ends up joining the pilgrims, wanting to see Luna with his own eyes so he can understand. Along the way, he, Ouji, Ringo, and Lyuze shelter together, only to be joined by Braiking Boss himself, whose black cloak evidently prevents anyone else from recognizing the legendary tyrant. In this encounter, we get it spelled out what the show had been building, with several extra bits on top.
The full lore is that Ouji, as “the Professor”, made Casshern, Dio, and Leda in an attempt to truly surpass humanity by making robots that were capable of reproduction. However, they were a failed experiment, resulting in their high-spec forms being used as killers in Braiking Boss’s employ. Somewhere along the line, Luna showed up as this messianic figure and Braiking Boss decided that the world didn’t need two potential rulers, sending Casshern, Dio, and Leda to rub her out, which Casshern managed to do despite the fact Luna was supposed to be immortal. In the wake of this, Casshern became immortal and the Ruin emerged to scour the world and lead formerly immortal robots to certain doom.
Braiking Boss’s retelling of this story makes Casshern lose it a little. As such, when Dio’s army begins to attack the city where Luna supposedly is, Casshern needs pep talks from Lyuze and Braiking Boss to actually go in, mostly to rescue Ringo.
On the inside, he ends up having a little grudge match with Dio.
When Casshern starts to get the upper hand, Leda threatens Lyuze in order to break the fight up, escaping with Dio as Casshern opts to protect the girl. After this, Lyuze joins the party properly. They travel on in search of Luna’s manifestation, learning that Ringo is an odd existence (found in an infant state inside a ruined robot, suggesting she may have been what Casshern’s little club aspired to make) before reaching the place Luna came from. She’s not there, but three weird kids are. After Casshern fights off Leda (who starts going with extreme vanity as her motivation, because female. This show is not particularly good to its ladies. Or anyone, but there are degrees) the kids fulfill their purpose by giving Ringo a magic rainbow rock, which Ouji thinks could be researched for a cure to the Ruin.
All the same, while Ouji does his research, the party moves onward, still looking for where Luna is now. Much of this arc is dedicated to integrating Lyuze. To be fair, some of the bits (like an encounter with the nearly broken but deathlessly determined former retainer of Luna prime, Dune) do a lot of heavy work, but… You know how in a lot of the early 2000s dark anime there’s an episode or two that are way stranger than normal? Like the Game Show or Disneyland episodes of Ergo Proxy. We get that episode here with an entire one that’s a dream-within-dreams sequence for Lyuze as she comes to terms with the fact that rather than avenging her sister, she’s fallen in love with Casshern. Some of this is great material that does feel like it delves into Lyuze’s deep-seated issues, but it does portend her pigeonholing into the Girlfriend role.
I don’t mind girlfriend characters. I don’t even mind the idea that Lyuze would fall for Casshern; the show sells that very well, including her various conflicts on the matter feeling legitimate. What I mind that this character who was formerly a hardened fighter and consummate badass is, once she comes to terms with her feelings, immediately depicted as being unable to win her own battles, and spends most of her time moping about the fact that she’s still subject to Ruin when her beloved isn’t. It’s a fair thing to angst about, but it’s pretty sudden and pretty consuming.
And, to be fair, I don’t recall what her fight card was like before, since it has usually been Casshern taking on anybody big ticket, but the writing really rubs it in. It’s like that thing in JRPGs where you see a character as an NPC or enemy a zillion times and they’re way overpowered, but then they join your party and suddenly they’re level 1. When it’s combined with things like noticing how the weirdos of the week skewed female or how Leda dropped from cunning manipulator and schemer to howling about how she ought to be beautiful forever because she’s a woman, it is kind of striking that Casshern Sins seems to not really know how to write its ladies to be interesting in their own right… or rather that it does know, since characters like Lyuze and Leda started strong, but largely doesn’t want to do it.
In my mind, this is a smallish blemish, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it, and this felt like the place to do so.
They make it to Luna’s true lair, and we spend a few episodes around there indulging in the traditional sour grapes where immortality is bad because eternal life is meaningless. Casshern rejects Luna’s come ons repeatedly, as she tries to recruit him as as a guardian or a king to reign alongside her. Lyuze and Ringo don’t care much for Luna or her brand of immortality either. Eventually, as though to prove a point, Casshern takes a fight against Dio’s army that he doesn’t win. He can’t die, but he’s so totally torn apart that his regeneration doesn’t outpace the damage either, leading to his agonizing capture.
Thereafter, Dio and Leda arrive. Briefly, they take over Luna’s empire, but Dio doesn’t care about dominion or eternal life any more, only about fighting Casshern, thus causing him to take Casshern and book it, so Casshern can regenerate and fight him good and proper. Leda is also disappointed to learn that eternal life from Luna’s blood does not come with regeneration or eternal beauty, causing her to overindulge and put herself in a position to get the tables turned on her by Luna. Also, it’s strongly implied that Ringo is somehow the child Leda thought she didn’t have.
Casshern and Dio have their big grudge match, with Dio declaring victory after he breaks his arm punching Casshern (to be fair, he did score a clean hit there), and spending his last words to ask Casshern to save Leda. Thus, Casshern arrives just as Luna is trying to finish Leda off. He steps between them, letting Leda escape to eventually lay herself down beside Dio and presumably die, and has his final little war of words with Luna. This ends as he and his party just walk away, with Casshern vowing to never fight nor kill again.
That’s a fine ending to the show, but there’s one more episode, and one more rogue we haven’t really answered in any form. Braiking Boss has been showing up here and there, with his last pit stop being at a graveyard he once made for his fallen comrades. In the stinger of Episode 23, he shows up before Luna, and they decide to form a new eternal robot empire together.
We see that Casshern, Lyuze, Ringo, Ohji, and Friender get to be a happy family for a while.
However, Ohji passes peacefully in his workshop. Some time later, Lyuze goes and dies in Casshern’s arms, much to his despair. Oddly enough, neither of them is shown crumbling into dust like other robots who die from the Ruin.
Luna, meanwhile, is freaking out, twisting from curing death to ordering the destruction of those still mortal. Even Braiking Boss doesn’t seem to be particularly happy with her. As she freaks out about her eternal world, that’s when Casshern comes knocking.
He shatters her guards into a million pieces (so much for that whole “not going to fight or kill again” thing). Braiking Boss comes out to play, donning his best M. Bison cosplay for an epic final confrontation with his former right hand man that… so much has not been building up to.
I get it, Braiking Boss or at least a cognate to him was the main antagonist of the other Casshern shows, but in this one he’s sort of been this enigmatic outsider. He’s spoken of quite variously as a historical figure. Sometimes, he’s called a tyrant, and implicated in the slaughter of humans. At other times, he seems to be seen by the robots as a near-mythical leader of their Golden Age. He did make the actual decision to have Luna 1.0 killed, but it was still Casshern who did it. They never really felt like they were even enemies in this one. Like Dio, he fights Casshern for pretty weak reasons, and like Dio he hasn’t been granted immortality by Luna. He’s certainly a better fight than Dio, and the show really sells how powerful Braiking Boss is, but there’s not really any better emotional payoff or more epic rivalry than the Dio fight that ended the previous episode resolved. In fact, Braiking Boss seems to be on the same page as Casshern if anything.
After taking a finishing blow, Braiking Boss asks Casshern to kill Luna and only Luna, because I guess he wants any of his minions that are left to live, but also wants the world to stop meddling with the nature of life and death.
Casshern doesn’t do that. He gets stabbed by Luna, they talk about how their cycle of violence caused their bloods of life and death to mingle, and then he gives her a stern talking to that while she’s welcome to save those who come to her, they mustn’t forget what death means, and he’ll return if they do.
It feels pretty intense in the moment, thanks to the music and lighting, but this whole climax could have been an email.
Narration tells us that Casshern vanished, but became the boogieman for all those who dared to be immortal, giving them a death to fear. We then see that Ringo lived alongside Friender, even growing up into an adult form and, by her narration, intellect.
Thus, with Ringo as a herald of the age of mortals, hoping to see Casshern again in the distant future, the show plays us out.
Casshern Sins was a trip. In my mind, it owes a great deal to Ergo Proxy, and can’t quite live up to that other dark, philosophical road trip in a dying world. But Ergo Proxy was strong enough that there’s room to fall short of it and still be a good show. I think, on the whole, that’s the space Casshern Sins hits that area. Briefly, amnesiac hero in a ruined world, visits lots of places that promptly die as all things are doing, followed by a lady initially antagonistic to him who later becomes a love interest, along with a small child bot, and ultimately makes some sort of stand on the central philosophy of the show, which is different based on which one. From here on, I’ll try to speak just to Casshern Sins.
Casshern Sins is a downer of a show. It’s never too totally miserable, but it is a show with a lot of hurting and not a lot of redemption.
Casshern Sins is also a show with a lot of blemishes. I may have highlighted a few of them, like the decay of motivation for just about everyone and the unnecessary final episode, but all throughout, it’s never without a pain point. There’s always something that’s off, whether it’s Casshern’s hero show design not fitting too well into the grim environment at the start, before you get used to it, the disconnected nature of the monster of the week runs, or the shaky storytelling towards the end.
It feels like a show that launched without anyone having a clear idea where it was going. They had a world – the world-building is honestly something I can praise – but they just sort of let the pieces on that board do whatever until someone realized that the thing needed to wrap up.
Why did Luna resurrect? Unclear. What was this about her first incarnation causing mass death? A thing, I guess. Why is Casshern super regenerating invincible when even others who take Luna’s blood are just healed of the Ruin? Not explained very well, if it’s explained at all. Heck, why did offing Luna Prime cause robots to start decaying in this weird supernatural way? I don’t know, it just did. There are so many ragged edges on the plot. And I know it sounds like this would hit the worldbuilding side too, but the look and feel of this show are really impeccable, and taking a snap-shot of the present, concerning ourselves with what is rather than what was or how we got here, gives us this grim but fascinating dynamic world. It’s a world of misery, but one that doesn’t feel too bad to visit for a short time.
I will grant that Casshern Sins is by no means a light nor easy watch, but in terms of grade that’s not going to count too much against it.
Thus, my grade for Casshern Sins will stand at B. I think its peaks and valleys sort of balance out, leaving us with just a solid, effective, memorable product.