So in honor of Casshern ending, I decided to look up some of the other stuff and ended up watching the English Dub of Casshan: Robot Hunter.
Frankly, I was a bit mixed on it. Since it's an OVA, it's pretty short with only four 30 minute episodes, so it's over pretty quickly. Because of that, a lot of details get glossed over, and it's not quite made certain how much time actually passes during the whole thing. (I think it might've worked better if it were a bit longer.)
To give an overview, basically this guy, Dr. Azuma creates an android dubbed BK-1. (Braiking Boss). However, he takes his orders of protecting the Earth's environment a bit too literally and ends up creating a robot army and essentially taking over the world as a result, enslaving most of humanity to his will. What's left of humanity tries to put up a resistance against the robot army, though their efforts are middling at best.
Luna pops up as a resistance fighter with a special RF gun that's basically an insta-kill against any robot. She's wandering around looking for her boyfriend while trying to mount efforts against the robots. Needless to say, she encounters Casshan, who bears a striking resemblance to her guy, and she kinda ends following him, as he comes to grips with what he is and trying to stop Braiking Boss. (I keep thinking she was put in the OVA just as pure eyecandy, since she's one of the few women to show up at all.)
Not surprisingly, Casshan is still the asskicker he was in Sins. Karate chopping robots, ripping 'em in half (which oddly has no real sound effect when he does it...), and other cool crap. Friender is pretty boss here, spitting fire and just straight up running though robots like nobody's business. Casshan's invincible for the most part, and doesn't have the regeneration like in Sins. However, he does rely on Solar power to keep him going as we find out in the 2nd episode, where he starts tripping out during a battle. Those little "pistols" he had are retractable here, and act more like jump jets.
The dub itself is odd...to say the least. They somehow got Black King Boss out of Braiking Boss, though in the credits, it's actually listed as the latter. For the most part, they just refer to him as Black King. (Despite you know, not even being black; he's just gray.) The voices are alright except for Casshan, who seems eerily out of place. The VA makes him sound heroic and crap, though as you see in the OVA, he's constantly dealing with inner conflict. It just sounds really off with everything.
The funny thing about all of this is that Casshan is supposedly a like a legend/myth when this all takes place (about 3 years after the fall of man). Yet oddly enough, nobody aside from Braiking Boss even knows what he looks like, much less what he's capable of. They just know he kills robots dead, and he's damn good at it.
The animation is definitely early-mid 90s if you've seen any stuff from there. It looks odd in some spots though.
Overall, it's decent, but that's about it. Really seems like they could've done more with it.
Pretty interesting to watch after Sins though, being able to draw some comparisons and stuff to it.
It's also interesting seeing how the first two episodes originally came out a few months before Mega Man X, with the third a few days after its release.
(And you can definitely draw some comparisons to it still, since Casshern is fully-armored X, Braiking Boss as Sigma, and Friender as the dog sub-boss Velgauder before the 1st Sigma battle.)
I might hunt down some of the 1978 series, though I've read that the OVA follows the general plot, if condensed.
