One Punch Man Episode 1 (First Impression)

I’ve…been waiting for this to come out for a long time. The minute after I read the announcement that this manga would finally get an anime adaptation, I knew that I just had to grab it for myself. And that’s exactly what I did. A few weeks ago an early screening was shown and somehow someone had uploaded it on the internet and subbed it. I had only watched the first four minutes of it when I decided that I would just stop and wait until the official episode would air, because the team would probably tweak with the animation a bit or something. So I thought it was better to just watch the finished product, though the only difference I saw was the adding in of the OP after Saitama killed Vaccine Man. So for some people, they’ve seen it already. For others like me, we barely watched it now. And man that was worth the wait.

Now…being the strongest in the world, what are you supposed to do next? How are you supposed to feel? I mean when you’re so overpowered, you don’t have to worry about your safety as you can take down any kind of opponent. Here we have Saitama. He’s just a hero for fun as it was always something he wanted to be when growing up. He wanted to be a powerful hero where he could take any foe down with just one punch. He decided to become this hero as a hobby after multiple rejections from workplaces and during with his encounter with Crablante, who used to be human but turned into Crablante after eating a lot of crab. Yup. Saitama protected a boy with…with…a balls chin, okay holy shit I totally forgot about the kid with the balls chin in the manga and I almost spit out my coffee when they showed him. I’m sorry but…

LOOK AT HIM I ALMOST DIED FROM LAUGHING.

Ah…anyway, Crablante was looking for this kid because while he was sleeping in the park this kid drew nipples on him with a permanent marker and he’s so pissed that he wants to kill the kid because he kills anyone who makes fun of him. Saitama protects the kid and in this moment he decides to become a hero and he kills Crablante. Three years later, Saitama is bald and dead inside. Now with usual shonen anime or just anime in general, we have a character who starts off barely able to protect themselves. Then things happen where they need to power up however they can, and later they become so overpowered and can defeat anyone in their path. But what then? What happens after that? Saitama trained for three years and now he’s powerful enough to just punch their enemy once and defeat them, like he always dreamed of. But that’s the thing. One punch, and it’s over. The fight hardly lasts a minute. Giant monster ravaging the city? Swoop in, punch, then leave. It’s not even a real fight. Before, Saitama really enjoyed all of this but then when realizing that he’s too strong, well…there’s no excitement. The poor guy is just too strong! There’s no tension, no excitement, no fear, no fun. Nothing. And it sucks. That’s why he walks around with this dead look on his face.

And that’s what’s brilliant and what I loved the most about the manga. He’s too strong and it sucks. This manga took the overpowered trope and turned it around, making the main character already too overpowered in the beginning and showing that having so much power isn’t all it’s cracked out to be. Especially since Saitama is only doing this hero thing as a hobby, that just makes it all the worse for him. What is he supposed to do now with all this power? Yeah he can take down the monsters and aliens, but he’s not having fun.

Later on in the episode he took down a giant, who used to be a regular human. But he was obsessed with becoming strong, and his older brother who was a scientist created a steroid that turned him into the monster he became. Saitama lands on the giant’s shoulder, while the older brother was on the other, and when the older brother told his younger brother to squash the man on his shoulder….the younger brother squashed the wrong shoulder, and accidentally killed his brother. Oh my god. And Saitama had this stupid smile on his face that had me reeling. And sure enough, he was able to defeat the giant, but accidentally destroyed the city he was supposed to protect from being destroyed. WHOOPS!

Next we get a scene where Saitama gets attacked by the Subterraneans and enters an epic fight against these things before they would destroy humanity. And for once, Saitama was having fun. These things were actually putting up quite a fight for him and he was enjoying himself. And when he was about to fight the Subterranean King…his alarm clock woke him up. BECAUSE IT WAS ALL A DREAM. This poor guy really wants a good fight. When he wakes up, he hears the voices of the Subtarraneans saying they’re going to take over Earth and when he leaves his room, he finds the King but it’s a scrawny thing and he kills it and is about to fight the others but they surrender and leave immediately. And that’s where the episode ends.

For the one year I’ve been on this blog, this is the only show so far where I’ve actually read its source material. So I’m going to avoid talking about the manga and what things they changed and all of that, but for this episode they followed it extremely closely and it was the perfect setup to the rest of the show and Saitama’s character. The one thing I was really excited for when waiting for the episode to air was just how the animation was going to be. Originally the One Punch Man manga was actually a web comic from someone named ONE, and…no offense but their drawings were really bad. But then it was picked up by Yusuke Murata, who left the story as is and did the art from the beginning and WOW JUST LOOK AT IT. It’s extremely detailed, it’s just fantastic. The fight scenes were what I was excited for the most as there’s a lot of fighting and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s incredible. MADHOUSE took all the money they had and put it into this, and I really hope that the rest of the show looks just as perfect as it did this episode because then I will be a happy woman. The music was rock music throughout which I expected.

The OP. Wow. Fantastic. It sounded perfect for a hero theme and that ONE PUUUUUUUNCH in the beginning sealed it for me. Though my critique would be that it showed too much Saitama punching monsters and not enough of the other characters. The ED though was surprisingly beautiful. That I thought it could have fit another anime and not this one. It was a little unexpected, but it was pretty. As for characters, right now we only got Saitama and the villains he defeated. We’ll get introduced to other characters soon and trust me, they’re great. Like…

Genos gets introduced next week! And I can’t wait. I do wonder how many episodes this is going to have because the best battles are later on in the manga, so I hope this anime gets at least 24/25 episodes. Please…And of course, I’ll be covering the rest of this show as I used my shotgun on it. Until next week!