Ginga Reppuu Baxingar

No one else has written a review for this anime, so I guess I’ll be the first one. Ginga Reppuu Baxingar is a space action-adventure mecha from the early 80s, involving a bunch of galactic vigilantes on motorcycles going around the solar system kicking ass. I encountered this by random one day and out of general interest checked it out.

The story involves Shirou Mahoroba aka "Billy The Shot" and his friends known as the “Cosmo Rangers” going around bringing justice to the universe. They eventually are hired by the overarching government or Bakufu. They go around riding motorcycles, and when a really big threat comes ... up their motorcycles all join together to form a big mecha called Baxingar. There’s usually some villain introduced at the beginning of each episode whose out for revenge or betraying them or something and by the episode they meet, and the bad guys are defeated. Apparently the plot is based around the warring states period in Japanese history, but you don’t need to know that to follow along.

If there’s one thing I can praise this show is the art and character design. Each character is unique and distinctive, and they also all have at least a change of clothing and style at least once each throughout the show, no small feat in the 80s where everything was hand designed and drawn. Aside from that the background art and fight scenes were decent, the music was pretty over the top and corny, and often didn't fit the scene at all. The characters themselves were mostly one-dimensional and meh. Some of the characters faces were drawn pretty consistently, but some of the other ones, especially the female background characters, were drawn so poorly it bordered on body horror.

The plot and technology of the show is very inconsistent, one moment they fighting with guns, then swords, then magical space motorcycles, and then giant mecha. They keep switching it up every scene and it gets somewhat stupid, and you will pretty soon be asking why they don’t just pull out their mecha to win every fight if it is so invincible. In one of the dumbest twists, one of the characters goes blind midway through the series, but this surprisingly has no effect whatsoever on his fighting abilities or the plot, he just develops some random 6th sense.

Did you think storm-troopers had bad aim? You haven’t seen nothing yet, as even the mooks of Star Wars look like expert marksmen compared to the villains of Ginga Reppuu Baxingar. Despite the fact that all the fights take place in close combat, whether using sword, gun, or mecha the bad guys hit thin air nearly every time while our protagonist always take them out with one shot. It isn’t until episode 19 in fact that one of our main characters is hit, and even then it is just a flesh wound that he easily shakes off. To make matters worse, this overabundance of plot armor is completely reversed in the last three episodes, were the main characters start dropping like rocks in situations they had been escaping without a scratch.

Probably the worst part of Ginga Reppuu Baxingar, and it is really bad, is the writing. The script is hilariously terrible at being subtle, so bad in fact that by just the first five minutes of an episode you can already tell with 99% certainty how it will end. For example, episode 8 has a soldier being told by his girlfriend “I love you so much boyfriend, please don’t die”. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out how the episode ends. Episode 18 has a soldier being told by his sister “I love you so much brother, please don’t die.” Guess what happens again. In Episode 38, man get’s told by finance “I’m glad you’re still alvei.” No one could have predicted what would happen in the very next scene. Episode 10 has one of the main characters think out loud “It’s the anniversary that my whole family was murdered but they’ve never caught the killer.” Do you know who she meets by the end of the episode? This goes on and on and it goes from being pretty fun to really annoying by the end.

So in conclusion would you enjoy Ginga Reppuu Baxingar? Every episode is action packed, even if that action is pretty nonsensical, and there are good aspects. Despite that, a lot of the anime is painfully average or bellow average, and even among other cheesy 80s anime it doesn’t really stand out. There are a lot of similar mecha anime that came out during the same time and are better.