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"* Based on a post-apocalyptic gun-action manga by Naitou Yasuhiro.

On the forbidding desert world of Gunsmoke, a mysterious bounty hangs above the head of Vash the Stampede, and the gunslinging pacifist can't seem to find a moment's respite. Vash is no ordinary pistolero, packing a weapon capable of punching holes in a planet, which explains why the locals tremble at the very mention of his name. But sixty billion double dollars is no ordinary reward, and every trigger-happy psycho in creation is aiming to claim Vash dead or alive—preferably dead!

Source: Dark Horse"

Genre(s): Western, Sci-fi, Action, Drama, Comedy

https://subsplease.org/shows/trigun-stampede/

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I would be remiss to not lead off with Trigun this season. Trigun (OG) was among my first anime to get me into the hobby ~25 years ago. Sadly, while my other virgin series, Cowboy Bebop, aged quite well, Trigun when revisited many years ago was... unwatchable by my standards today. Nevertheless, the series still holds a nostalgic place in my heart for how into it I was at the time.

(Maybe mild spoilers when comparing to the original):

Well... how does this compare? Firstly, the elephant in my room was obviously going to be the animation, and I can confidently say... for CG, it's pretty decent. While some background characters and walking animations are jarring, it is made up for by the general action direction and some great facial work. I don't know the work flow of studio Orange, but extra attention is clearly given to these two things. The staged action set pieces are great fun to watch and the facial posing is simply radiant at times.

Story-wise, it seems to be a retelling that may or may not more closely follow the manga. I never read the manga, so I have no opinion on that, but it is already markedly different from a story perspective. Here, we start with the seed spaceship catastrophe. It's truncated, but I expect it to get fleshed out later. Also different is the characters off the bat. Meryl is now a rookie reporter accompanied by a senpai/day-drinker Roberto instead of Millie, the weakest character in the original, and I'm already loving what he brings. Vash is roughly the same except for the revised character design. A younger me could have been frustrated by his character for being so 'soft', but (much) older me gets the context of him being a literal higher being trying to not hurt the children throwing temper tantrums around himself.

When I watched the old version, one thing that captured my adolescent imagination was the (imagined) promise of other western (genre) style anime, the disappointment of which I'm still living with today... Bitter memories aside, this captures, in broad strokes, some of my favorite vestiges of the western discipline- the desert landscapes, isolated towns, and frontier justice that somehow isn't detracted from by the contrasted sci-fi and cyberpunk elements, and that's a feat to me. The OP slaps, too! Does it compare to the original? You decide.

TLDR; Would I recommend Trigun Stampede? Yes... yes I would!