Title: Golgo 13

Original Creator: Saito Takao

U.S Distributor: Sentai Filmworks

U. S. Release Date: Sept 17, 2013

Format and length: Blu-Ray; 50 ep; 1250 min

Genre: Action

Overall Personal Rating: B

Similar titles: Ghost in the Shell; Mobile Suit Gundam

Synopsis

Duke Togo has lived his life as a hitman.  Throughout this career, he has taken the codename of Golgo 13 and with that name, a reputation as the world’s deadliest sniper.  This reputation attracts many employers in search of his services.  However, only a few of his prospective employers hire him as there are two conditions that must be met before Golgo 13 will accept a job.  The first is his payment.  His price is three million dollars.  As such, only extremely wealthy individuals even have the assets to hire his services.  The second is that he must  approve the job.  A number of things seem to affect whether or not he accepts a job.  Part of it seems to be the reason the employer desires his services, part of it is the conditions of the job itself, and part of it seems to be just whether or not he feels like taking the job.  Because of his reputation he has no shortage of possible employers and thus can afford to be picky about the jobs that he accepts.  A regular theme that seems to occur with each job that Golgo 13 accepts is that the conditions make eliminating his target seem utterly impossible.  To the man who hired him, to the police who investigate the murder after he is finished, to anyone who seems to be unfortunate enough to know about his existence, the fact that he was able to pull off such a crime is practically a miracle.

Commentary

I cannot say that Golgo 13 was a bad series, but it gets old very quickly.  There are, essentially, only two episodes.  One episode where he takes on a job where he has to make a seemingly humanly impossible sniper shot. In one situation, he has to hit his target from a distance of two kilometers.  Even the SWAT team snipers on duty said that they would be unable to accurately shoot from a distance any greater than five hundred meters.  In another scenario, He has to wait for just the right opportunity as he has to shoot a man while he’s next to a window which is behind a sliding door which is behind a revolving door.  So both doors had to be open and the man by the window all at the same time in order for him to make the shot. And one episode where, either through bad luck or treachery, he ends up in a situation where his skills as a killer are tested by someone or something that has a huge advantage over him.   For example, in one situation he was drugged and was forced to defend himself with impared motor skills, or in another situation, he ended up being targeted by an experimental military weapon.

There were one real problem that I had with Golgo 13.  One was that there was lots of pointless sex.  For being a cold, emotionless, inhuman killer, Golgo 13 has sex a lot.  There does not seem to be any reason for it other than just because sex.  He leaves almost immediately and she is never seen again.  As far as I can tell, it seems like an attempt to make Golgo 13 seem more like a James Bond 007 kind of character.

Other than that, I had no problems with Golgo 13.  The art was some of the most realistic art I’ve seen in an anime and it really fit with the plot of the series.  The opening and closing themes both had excellent music and the art was more stylized than the episodes were which made the openings and closings nice to look at as well.  I would just not recommend watching the whole series back to back

Overall Grade:  B

Golgo 13 was a good series, it is just not one that should be watched in a marathon as the episodes are extremely similar to each other.

 Review provided by TJ