While Trigun: Stampede may be how anime fans know of Yasuhiro Nightow today, older audiences may be more familiar with his earlier work, Gungrave. While it started as a sci-fi shooter game, its best rendition is Madhouse’s anime adaptation. Despite its flimsy premise, it led to a fantastic mafia tale that strove for maximum drama and tragedy.
Gungrave‘s outlandish premise of an undead cowboy taking on an alien-drug-peddling mafia is as cheesy as it sounds, but when it came time for Madhouse to adapt the story in 2003, they clearly found an emotional core hidden underneath it all. Ignoring the game it’s based on, anime fans owe it to themselves to watch the tragic rise and fall of Brandon Heat and Harry MacDowell.
Gungrave Takes Full Advantage of Anime as a Medium
Produced by Madhouse, based on Yasuhiro Nightow’s original story
Madhouse’s wisest decision was to translate the story of Gungrave, rather than the gameplay, or even its outlandish aesthetic. To accomplish this, the studio chose to dedicate the first fifteen episodes to a lengthy flashback, detailing Brandon and Harry’s rise in the mafia. It’s a very slow burn plot, setting up many original details that pay off in the time skip that makes up the second half. It was a controversial choice in the past; the iconic Beyond-The-Grave and his coffin full of guns seemed missing in action, making Gungrave seem like a sci-fi revenge tale in name only.
In hindsight, the choice to slow the story down was the right one. If the cast of Gungrave were paper-thin action game clichés before – the amnesiac warrior, the traitorous best friend, and all the evil lieutenants who stand in the way – the anime resuscitated their personalities and turned them into fully realized human beings. Brandon, prior to his death, becomes an introspective and intensely loyal man whose internal monologues give him a voice. Harry, rather than a cackling backstabber, becomes a tragic deuteragonist trying to grab hold of everything before he loses everything.
The mafia drama is so pitch-perfect that when the game’s sci-fi elements finally do appear, they ironically feel out of place, even if Brandon’s resurrection is a perfect metaphor for the skeletons in Harry’s closet coming back to haunt him. The anime also masterfully uses Tsuneo Imahori’s compositions, who worked on the original games; his melancholy acoustic guitar tracks and jazz numbers give the anime an unmistakable audio signature. Long before Cyberpunk: Edgerunners revitalized Night City, Gungrave was already one of the best game-to-anime adaptations, showing that writers needed to use the world and characters, not the mechanics, for storytelling.
