Monsuno

Monsuno, released as Jūsen Battle Monsuno in Japan, is a Japanese–American anime adventure television series produced by Dentsu Entertainment USA (part of Dentsu Aegis Network), Jakks Pacific, and The Topps Company and distributed by FremantleMedia.

Why It's Such a Rip-Off

 * 1) To get the elephant out of the room, it rips off shows like Pokémon and Digimon (remarkably based by name), Dinosaur King, Beyblade and Bakugan.
 * 2) The story gets off to a bad start without introducing the characters and just showing the main protagonist, Chase Suno waking up in camp and heading off to find his father.
 * 3) It suffers from utter blandness like Redakai.
 * 4) The concept of the Monsunos and Dr. Jeredy Suno (Chase's father) creating them is confusing and difficult to understand since he mixed different animals and crystals.
 * 5) * Furthermore, it doesn't make sense that he created the Monsunos without bearing in mind that they could end up being weapons of war, especially based on the fact that he worked for a military organization.
 * 6) Fight scenes between the Monsunos are often boring, repetitive, and uninteresting always ending with the opponent's Monsuno being destroyed and returning to the core compared to Pokemon and Bakugan. Sometimes they are even unnecessarily brutal.
 * 7) The Monsuno's designs aren't very creative, most of them are just giant realistic animals with crystals over their bodies, and some of them even look ugly.
 * 8) In the first episodes Jinja demonstrates an attraction to Beyal, but this ends up being forgotten throughout the episodes, but also the relationship between the characters is very poorly worded, and no flashbacks are shown about Chase's relationship with his father or his deceased mother.
 * 9) The anime feels like it was created only to promote a toy line consisting of figurines and a card game (very similar to Bakugan), but it fails miserably to promote them.
 * 10) Medea's attraction to Chase is disturbing, mainly because Medea is an adult while Chase is just 15 years old, making Medea a PEDOPHILE!
 * 11) Speaking of Medea, her group (Darkspin) is a clear rip-off of the Team Rocket trio (although they are a foursome) and she is an equivalent of Jessie (her main Monsuno is even a snake!). Medea's design even looks like a rip-off of Bayonetta from the video game of the same name.
 * 12) Cheap animation such as Medea's monologuing in one scene.
 * 13) Chase can be considered a Gary-Stu since he always wins battles (especially when he uses Lock, which is put into battle EVERY SINGLE EPISODE) and the show mainly revolves around him at one point. Bren, Jinja, Beyal and Dax don't have much importance in the plot and have almost no development.
 * 14) Speaking of Chase, he was responsible for revealing his father's location to the villains at the end of season one, even knowing that this was just an accident, Chase did it just because he wanted to see his dad again without thinking first about the risks.
 * 15) Dr. Klipse's goal for world domination is very mediocre since he only wants to become a Monsuno (just like in the accident that happened to Jon Ace) and have the world be led by Monsunos.
 * 16) * By the way, Dr. Klipse is a very generic and forgettable "mad scientist" stereotype with absolutely no character development or originality.
 * 17) This show can be considered the beginning of the fall of Man of Action that would later make other bad series like Mega Man: Fully Charged.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) The animation and art style is very good, especially when considering that it is a series co-produced between Japan and the USA.
 * 2) Both the American and Japanese openings for the first season are catchy and memorable.
 * 3) The voice acting, especially from Kenichiro "KENN" Ohashi in Japanese and Cam Clarke in English, is decent.
 * 4) Although not having much prominence and development in the show Bren, Beyal, Jinja, and Dax are likable characters, and they are much better than Chase.
 * 5) Some funny moments.

Reception
Monsuno received a mixed to bad reception from both the Nickelodeon audience and fans of anime and toys of the Mon genre. It scored a 4.9 on IMDb. Also, many of the videos talking about Monsuno on YouTube usually criticize the series as uninteresting.

Trivia

 * The series was Man of Action's first production outside of Cartoon Network and also the first anime series developed by the team.
 * Show creators Jeremy Padawer and Jared Wolfson used to work as executive vice presidents of marketing at Jakks Pacific, but currently no longer work for this company.
 * The third and final season had only 13 episodes and was exclusive to the United States on Hulu, not airing in Japan.
 * Nickelodeon was shut down in Japan in 2009, as a result, the show was aired on TV Tokyo instead.

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