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There are a few series that older anime fans hold up as being classics. Truly great examples of anime from the good ol’days before everything started sucking and moé took over. Since I’m technically a younger fan (even though I’m 20 years old, which is older than most of today’s anime fandom from what I can tell) I never had the chance to see these series when they first showed up, and these days some of them are out of print and expensive or hard to find. Well FUNimation recently re-released Trigun, a series that gets included in the previously mentioned classics. So I took the opportunity to finally check it out.

Trigun tells the story of Vash the Stampede, a lone gunslinger with an insanely high bounty on his head who leaves a trail of destruction in his wake. Meryl Strife and Milly Thompson, two employees of an insurance company, seek out Vash in an attempt to prevent him from causing any more damage. When they find him, they learn that Vash isn’t the man they thought he was and end up joining him on his journey.

Trigun starts out enjoyable enough as a kind of silly western. There are gunslingers, damsels in distress, corrupt sheriffs, and every thing else you would expect from a western. Everything is handled in a goofy manner, with Vash solving most problems through dumb luck and goofing around as opposed to shooting everything in sight and the series doesn’t take itself too seriously. Vash himself is an interesting character, having the ability to kill anything and everything around him, but choosing instead to solve problems through non-violent means. This is respectable in the beginning when the only thing Vash has to deal with are normal thugs with big guns who are barely a threat most of the time. Once it gets to the point where he has to deal with people who sometimes have strange powers and are entirely willing to kill innocent people to get to Vash, his pacifist ways make him seem more idiotic than honourable.

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