The Tales of Gilgamesh are grand epic fodder that could make for an amazing and fun anime series full of adventure. Sadly, this is not what the anime that takes its name accomplishes at all. Instead we get poorly animated drivel about super powered kids in a post-apocalyptic future with mind numbing exposition and some of the ugliest character designs known to man. Watching an episode feels like punishment from the heavens for all your minor transgressions in life.
Gilgamesh starts with a scientist named Enkidu talking to some Babylonian masks while listening to classical music. This somehow sets off the apocalypse. People die, electronics stop working, and the sky is replaced by a shimmering rainbow dome. The remaining survivors exit the cities for some reason beyond comprehension, except for the ones who don't. While all electronics are supposed to be dead, the series immediately contradicts itself with people using cars and home stereo equipment.
The series follows a brother and sister team, Tatsuya and Kiyoko. Their mother ran deeply into debt while trying to fund their father's research, and now that she is dead the debtors have come knocking, wanting to harvest Tatsuya's organs and put Kiyoko to work on the streets. Understandably enough this is a fate that the two want to avoid, so they live life on the streets, taking shelter in abandoned buildings for as long as they dare before moving on. It is during a close encounter with their debtors in one of these abandoned houses, one that just happened to house cloning vats for some reason, that the two run into a bunch of strange children their age wearing uniforms. They are invited to join the others in a fight against the devil's children, an invitation that confuses them and they ultimately turn down. Soon more children appear and they all gather outside to fight, leaving Tatsuya and Kiyoko indoors. As the kids are throwing balls of random light at each other and transforming into demons things fly about the house and break. Clearly there is some relation, but the show fails to establish it and it ends up seeming more like the boring dialog caused the furniture to become suicidal.
There is no clear winner to the fight, but the Tatsuya and Kiyoko are taken by the second group of children to meet a woman they call the Countess. She offers them food and shelter if they will lend their powers to her cause, which is to defeat their father. They don't really care what happens to their father, but don't want any part of any fighting, so they try to decline. In reaction, the Countess pays off their debts and claims that this means that she has bought them, a rationalization they quickly buy. Soon there is a climatic fight with a disembodied wing that teleports around and shoots purple energy at people, as well as a technobabble that would make the writers for Star Trek blush as they go on about antimatter from another universe being coated with molecules for ours.
The above summary might give you the mistaken impression that things actually happen in this show. Do not be fooled. There are lengthy, boring conversations before, during, and after every event, as well as poorly drawn reaction shots for every situation. No characters are particularly likable or loathsome since none of them seem to have any personality. There's no tension because it's impossible to care about any of the characters or the barely comprehensible plot. Just when you think things might be looking up someone has to go and badly summarize some term they have lifted from the Tales of Gilgamesh or from Greek and just make your head hurt all over again.
Adding to an already miserable package is a terrible presentation. The animation is incredibly low budget, with some sequences running as if they were an animated .gif loading over a 56K modem. The character design is certainly unique, but it's also wildly inconsistent. The characters always have mops for hair and large lips, but every other feature changes completely at random. It's as if the series is so bad that they had to have several separate teams of animators locked away with no contact with each other create the different scenes so that they wouldn't go mad. Add some terrible audio, obnoxious opening and ending themes, and one really hilarious attempt at singing in English and you have an anime fit for a Lovecraftian nightmare.
This series presented a fight with a disembodied wing, complete with boys in tuxedos getting zapped by purple light, without a hint of irony. If it weren't so hideously slow and dull it would be hilarious for the absurdity, but in the end this series just hurts. Friends don't let friends watch Gilgamesh.
