At first I thought that this series was going to be a western/action type of series. You know, like those western movies that take place in a small town that’s right in the middle of the desert that looks more like the Sahara Desert instead of a U.S. southwestern desert. And so the manga proved to be exactly like that. It was just an action flick that followed the main character and his fights against people wanting the bounty on his head.
It seems very similar to the manga Rurouni Kenshin. The main character is a powerful samurai and everyone he comes across wants to defeat him because he’s labeled as Batosai the Man Slayer. The difference between the two series is the ending. And I’m talking about Trigun Deep Space Planet without the Trigun Maximum series. So if I missed a couple of plot points then I apologize.
The story is about a man with a huge bounty on his head named Vash the Stampede. He is known as the cause of destruction for the city of July and so he’s labeled as a dangerous criminal. For three volumes, a lot of criminals or bounty hunters try to hunt him down to collect his bounty.
Most of the manga was kind of boring due to the repetition. It's the same thing over and over again. Vash enters a city and there just happens to be trouble and he has to deal with the villain with a goal of a typical hero and not kill his enemies. The first couple chapters are okay but after volume 1, it gets old really fast. It also doesn’t help that the series is too comedic. Now I have nothing against comedy, in fact I love manga comedies. One of my favorite mangas, One Piece, is a comedy and it's fantastic. The problem with the comedy in this manga is that it's in all the wrong places. It seems like there’s going to be a badass action scene but then it places in some comic relief in the middle of it. The difference with the comedy in One Piece is that the comedy is inserted in places that make the comedic moments quick and clever. Here, the comedy just ruins the action because it’s really stupid. But that's most likely due to the time when it came out.
The ending was really confusing and the scenes with Vash and his past are all done a little too quickly. There’s no flowing story to them because the scenes are just bits and pieces of his memories. One example is this character called Knives, who we don't know about, because the third volume was never clear on his identity. My first impression of the guy was that he was a computer program that took the image of Vash and held a hatred for humanity that we haven't been made aware of yet.
There’s also scenes of this backstory of humans trying to alter the planet so that humans can live on it. Apparently humans used all their resources and now the planet is unable to support the human race. So there are hundreds of large spaceships orbiting the planet with the whole human race in hibernating tanks except for a few people. If memory serves me correctly, I only remember Rem, Vash and Knives. Now whether the rest of the human race was like Vash and Knives, is made unclear but the way Rem communicates with them makes it seem like the two of them are one of a kind. This is confirmed towards the ending of the first Trigun when Knives woke up and during their fight something about angels is mentioned and how the two of them were powerful beings that were above humans. (This could be a translation error but I saw them mentioning beings like angels.)
Now this little plot twist could be going one of two ways. I'm only making assumptions because I can't remember the rest of the manga and I also have no desire to read the rest.
One, is that these 'angels' they talked about could be a fantasy element about divine beings that live in a higher existence than mankind.
Two, is that angels could be a name that is resulted from some scientific experimentation that resulted in Vash and Knives developing their abilities and being different from humans because of these experiments.
But those are the two most common possibilities. I'm sure there are probably more.
Since there wasn’t a huge cast of characters I’m only going to talk about three. The three characters are Vash, Millie, and Meryl.
Vash is the main character and he’s likable enough. He’s your typical hero that is nice and decent. He’s a bit of a pervert, kind of stupid but he’s so nice that you can’t help but like him. He’s kinda funny but he also has the overused attitude of ‘I’m too dangerous so I keep my distance from people’. This is not the first character that has this trait and he surely won't be the last.
Millie and Meryl are okay but the problem with them is that they aren’t shown very much in the manga for them to have any character development. Millie is an airhead so she’s used for a lot of comic relief. Meryl is uptight and always yelling at Vash and . . . that's about it. These ladies don’t have much personalities at all. They are boring but to the manga’s credit they are not in the series a whole lot. If anything, they're kind of in the background doing whatever needs to be done to keep the plot moving.
The other characters are not that interesting and completely forgettable. Nicholas D. Wolfwood is about as interesting as a box of plain Cheerios without the honey flavor. Wolfwood is intended to be this nice guy who’s a bit of a flirt but also has some sort of dark history. But we barely see him and when we do, he doesn't leave a big enough impact to be memorable.
The villains are also boring. While they do, admittedly, have neat fighting techniques to make interesting fight scenes, the downside is that the personalities are dull. They don't have interesting motivations for their evil schemes, they don't have any specific character traits that would make them stand out from any villain, and they don't have an interesting dialogue about their scheme. They talk smack to Vash and that’s about it, which doesn't make it interesting.
I know some people loved this series but I’m sorry. I didn’t like it and I probably won’t read Trigun Maximum. I’ll just watch the anime and see what happens.