I watched Trigun Stampede (season 1)

[Finished September 4th, 2023. Rating: 5/10]

Watching this anime has made me realize I might be pretty bad at evaluating new adaptations of existing works. I’m probably biased because the Trigun manga is already one of my favorite stories of all time, but it’s really hard to approach a story that is essentially just taking its ideas and condensing them into a much shorter frame of twelve 23-minute episodes. It might’ve been easier if Trigun Stampede ended up being the inventive new take on the story I was expecting, but a lot of it really was just spent on repeating the same ideas that the manga had with new presentation around them.

Thankfully, the ideas are still really good because it’s Trigun. I covered them already in my review of the manga, but it remains a very powerful story about struggling against the pain of a world defined more than ever by humanity’s selfishness and difficulty working together. Vash is still a hopeless optimist putting the burden of the entire world on his shoulders and refusing to grow attached to others, and Knives is still a hopeful pessimist trying to lead his kind to salvation in a crusade against humans. Their physical and ideological clashes are once again the most compelling thing about this series. In fact, Stampede brings the best of its original ideas to the table when it’s expanding on the lore of the ‘plants’ — the superhumanoid species these two are a part of — in ways that bolster their conflict. Knives in particular gets the most character expansion out of any of the returning cast, with a lot more facets of his infantilization of his brother on display, as well as an entirely unique and self-contradictory approach to creating new life to flourish in his ideal world. There’s a lot more religious symbolism attached to him this time around, which feels like a really fitting choice for the direction they take his writing in.

Unfortunately, the rest of the prominent characters from the original don’t feel like they’re given as much care. Wolfwood was one of the best parts of the manga, and Stampede fails to adapt pretty much any of his interesting traits from there; it even makes him no longer a priest, a baffling decision considering that was practically the core of his character writing. Legato meanwhile retains his general attitude but gets almost no focus, the anime framing him as a generic henchman of Knives’s when he was previously the most important figure in the group. Much of the context surrounding Knives’s cabal and why they were formed is generally gone here. Perhaps most strangely, a transgender woman who plays a prominent role in both the manga and Stampede is retconned in the latter to be a cisgender girl, for seemingly no meaningful reason.

But back on the positive side, one major thing this anime gets right is presentation. Trigun Stampede easily ranks among the most gorgeous animation I’ve ever seen — a good quality comparison would be that it’s slightly above the level of the first Spider-Verse movie. Its world is phenomenally built and a joy to see explored with every episode, with beautiful cityscapes and believable communities formed around them, while its action is masterfully choreographed and packed with both bombastic visual effects and minute attention to detail. Practically every single scene is the stuff of dreams. Honestly, I think this is one of the things that justifies the show’s existence the most; seeing Trigun’s world executed with this level of polish and flair is eons beyond what I’ve seen from any other adaptation of the story. And sometimes, just seeing the broad strokes of a story I love done really beautifully is entertaining enough that it’s worth it.

So do I recommend watching Trigun Stampede? Eh, maybe. If you’re really into the series and hunger for new content like me, it’s probably worth a try. If you want to dip your toes into Trigun and get a sense for the general vibes/ideas of the story without committing yourself to one of the longer adaptations, Stampede is a good choice for that too. But if you really want to experience the full extent of the amazing ideas the series has to offer, I think you’re better off reading the manga.