Everybody loves music! All of us listen to music, some of us can play covers. There are a few who compose… Ever thought of starting a band of your own? Oh yeah? Then BECK will be your ‘The Thing’.

BECK (The Mongolian Chop Squad) is an anime of the music genre like no other. Passion has truly been seen in the making. Except for their low budget on the animation, the anime is sound. Animation plays a big role in making an anime interesting as you all know. Even then, BECK has quite stood out from the crowd. It has a great storyline, and I am sure if the animation quality would have been even slightly better, it would be one of the best anime out there. For the same reason, it is a bit overlooked too.

A little praise… BECK has a more or less high school plot with crushes, fighting and bullying, etc. MC sure is a natural at music and his temperament makes this show even more enjoyable. He is a very reasonable person. His bandmates on the other hand are eccentric esp. Chiba who I thought was quite funny. The music was great, honestly. I’m not sure whether I liked the OP or ED more. Maybe the ED, just a lil’ bit…

BECK turned out to be a good show, but it seriously could have been just 12 episodes long. Cut all the mafia parts and boring drama. In a way the number of episodes helped it to get the viewer feel passing of time as our MC got better and better at playing and singing. It’s nice how they kept close attention to minute details. Also, the way characters entered the MC’s life and how they exited were done well. Never again did we see Izumi! But that was just weird. Why wouldn’t he see her even though she went through all the trouble of finding Maho and telling her that there was nothing going on between her and Yukio.

I often found some friends on an anime group comparing Kids on the Slope (one of the best anime of 2012. I gotta review that soon…). Sakamichi no Apollon (same thing) is a josei anime and their main focus is on the drama whereas the music is not that highlighted. I couldn’t have got an inspiration to play an instrument by watching Kids on the Slope. But I did get that feeling after I watched BECK. Kids on the Slope was just 12 episodes long but the timeframe was much longer than in BECK, but that was only due to the last episode. Well, enough with kids on the slope. You guys should watch it if you haven’t yet.

BECK had a ton of drama. Well, they couldn’t talk about music forever ;) But it was enjoyable nevertheless, even for the characters. Yukio had a genial character which made him pretty popular among girls. There is some love rivalry, but we all knew who was going to win. Their band had extremely talented members and good chemistry. So, as long as problems stayed out of their way, they were going to become big. But problems are always there…

Maho was cool, but she got on my nerves sometimes because she hung out with that other jerk. But girls are players, can’t be helped. Koyuki (his name in the dub, fir some reason it’s different) played his part well in the love rivalry. It felt absolutely normal watching it in the anime. I must admit, that I like at least one girl from every anime I watch. Not sure I can say the same about this one. Probably one reason is because none of the girls get a lot of screen time. Another plausible reason is that I would like Koyuki to keep Maho for himself. It’s rare for me to like teen boy MCs, who often screw around with girls and stuff. This guy however, is serious about music and loves playing in the band…

The premise is small comparatively, don’t expect too many of unexpected people to pop up every now and then. There’s some politics that was played by Ryuuske’s rival’s band manager, and by that mafia guy. An anime of this sort cannot have a large premise, if it does though, you have to be really good at shaping the plot the way you want it to go instead of circumstances in the story to lead you to making decisions. BECK is about the band and the MC. Those are the two things that stand out in my memory clearly.