Introduction

You play enough Super Robot Wars, you're gonna get curious about some of the anime featured in the game. It seems like Gundam, Mazinger, and Getter Robo are the tentpoles of the franchise. So I watched some Mazinger. I thought I was getting a modernized retelling of the original series, and I was. If that was the end of it, it would be fine. A solid B.

But here's the thing: this series ends on a legendarily bad cliffhanger. The series itself might have ups and downs, but it ends on such a sour note that it just spoils the whole thing for me. It's a sour taste. I even went to check in with the Mazinger fandom to make sure I wasn't missing something. (they don't like it in general either was my takeaway)

Story/"The Problem"

Okay, look. The series starts with an episode called "Grand Finale", and it's just a clip show of the last 2-3 episodes iirc. It's super robot. I'm not taking precautions about spoiling anybody with spoilers. So if you care, skip this section.

Simply put, it's unfinished. It's unfinished and it ends poorly. The original series ends with a new threat emerging and a new robot (Great Mazinger) taking Mazinger Z's place. This series just ends with a new threat emerging and the heroes being already too exhausted to stand against them and... fade to black.

Story is everything for me, and while it's not unrecoverable to be unfinished (I freaking loved Bubblegum Crisis long before I knew Crash existed; I didn't even really mind Tylor not having an ending b/c it seemed a forgone conclusion), here it just spoils the whole experience for me when I know there's nothing else. It really feels like playing a video game and getting a "Bad End" out of nowhere.

Aesthetics

Pretty cartoonish. Almost a bit like Osamu Tezuka (Astro Boy). You get an overly dramatic narrator giving his all to hype up the stakes of the story for what's essentially Power Rangers Sentai Kamen Rider but with mecha. Serious things happen and people die, but they die in a nice pg-13 way, where the worst thing you'll see is an occasional cop laying in a pool of blood.

The major players of the evil army feel like they are pulled straight from Tokusatsu too. The main villain is "Doctor Hell", with his lieutenants "Baron Ashura" (half man, half woman, split straight down the middle), and "Count Brokken" (a fascist in a military uniform with a detached head). It feels like it came out of Sentai and I kinda love it.

But this is a remake of the original series, so for as serious as it tries to go, they have to cram in references and easter eggs too, and they just don't mix very well. Just look at Koji's piloting outfit and try to take it seriously...

Pacing

Something I've noticed about recent anime... you don't get a lot of one-off stories anymore. First I noticed it in Attack on Titan: like the show was made to be binged 5-12 episodes at a time to give conflicts greater stakes and a more epic feel. I don't begrudge shows this kind of pacing (for some genres, I prefer it), but when a show like Mazinger (and also Gundam, particularly Victory) does it, it just makes what should be a grand conflict seem small.

"Remember our war against Doctor Hell and his evil machine beasts? We clashed like 6 times in extended storylines that dragged on for multiple episodes each. That sure was an epic robot war!"

...sometimes I just want to see a monster of the week. I want to see Mazinger challenged, over and over again, and I want to see Mazinger overcome those challenges. And I believe there's a sweet spot where you can also do serialized storytelling. I think Gundam often did a good job of finding it, where episodes and trials were self-contained, but the events of one episode still mattered going forward.

But yeah. Mazinger is made up of just a couple drawn out story arcs rather than a monster of the week thing. Know what you're in for.

In Conclusion

I already said. I didn't care for it, thanks to the ending. It had its ups and downs, but that was the just the cherry on top (except the cherry was a turd) that ruined it for me. I feel like I wasted my time.

Hopefully, if you read this, and you still decide to go watch it, you won't feel like you've wasted yours now.

But I wont' deny, the first opening definitely goes hard. By far the best thing I'm taking away from this experience.