English Dub Season Review: “The Silver Guardian”

The Silver Guardian is a fun-filled series. It’s chock full of endearing characters, exciting role playing game (RPG) designs, and stellar technical aspects like animation and music. Plus, the plot is on the whole intriguing. It doesn’t end as well as it started, and the biggest downfall is its run time. But The Silver Guardian offers a good time if you can look past its muddled plot and under cooked story.

Before I delve into the review, let me offer a list of what you should watch instead of The Silver Guardian:

1. The Star Wars prequel trilogy
2. Dune
3. Jaws 3
4. Battlefield Earth

“It cant really be that bad,” you’re probably thinking. And you’re correct. It’s much worse.

I wanted to enjoy The Silver Guardian. And in some ways I did. As a gamer with an appreciation for RPGs like Diablo and Marvel Ultimate Alliance, the latter of which I will gladly evangalize about, I initially enjoyed The Silver Guardian. There was an intriguing plot about a video game, a character stuck in a game, and gothic imagery balanced by campy humor.

Unfortunately, the air of mystery I soon found out wasn’t really intentional. No, it was the batshit crazy plot which tried to juggle far too many plot threads and characters. After watching the finale, I can’t even really sum up what happened. So much occurs, and yet it feels like the show goes nowhere. That’s because of the condensed run time and atrocious narrative structure.

The plot jumps from storyline to storyline, constantly adding new scenarios and characters. Often I found myself struggling to keep up simply owing to the ridiculously disjointed narrative. Compounding the situation, it’s ridden with plot holes. Characters whisk in and out and aren’t really introduced properly. The finale ends by concluding a completely new subplot which gets introduced in the penultimate episode.

I can’t really in good faith recommend The Silver Guardian. It’s confusing, disjointed, and frustratingly short. However, the animation does try, and the music is pretty decent. If you want to put this show on in the background and mute it, purely enjoying the visuals, that’s not a poor decision.