YMMV / Marvel Anime: Wolverine

• Anti-Climax Boss: Oh boy, this anime is notorious for treating their villains this way:
  • Omega Red, one of the most dangerous and ruthless of Wolverine’s foes, was one of the few villains to have very nearly killed Wolverine in a battle. His first defeat was not the problem, but when he came back for the second round, he is suddenly disarmed and then killed again by Wolverine, with no mention or signs of him coming back for the rest of the show. Many fans listed this as a point of contention for this anime.
  • Hideki, just when he was about to get his Karmic Death at the middle of the show by Wolverine, he ends up escaping and coming back for revenge, only to then suddenly get killed for sure by Wolverine in a rather anticlimactic fashion after a short standoff at the show’s climax. Not to mention, he ends up making the whole plot irrelevant by fatally shooting his own fiancé Mariko before he dies.
  • Shingen, while his final battle with Logan was actually legitimately epic, as he can very much hold his own before he ends up dying, it was the aftermath that was pretty lackluster, with Shingen getting just a passing explanation from Yukio before she dies of why she killed Logan’s friend Asano; she wanted to give him motivation to kill Shingen. After that, he is never mentioned by anyone or even hinted on ever again, essentially making him completely fade into obscurity, despite him being advertised as the Big Bad.
• Awesome Music: The opening theme, called “Feel My Claws,” which is every bit as badass and energetic as you would think, and perfectly shows Wolverine’s tenacity and refusal to surrender from a fight.
• Broken Base:
  • Fans are divided as to whether the Wolverine anime or the X-Men anime is better than the other, due to their similarities and same source material.
  • At the same time, fans are divided as to whether this particular anime is in any way better quality as opposed to the other three Marvel Anime projects or whether it is severely inferior.
• Complete Monster: Hideki Kurohagi is the main antagonist alongside Shingen. Having murdered his crime lord father to take his position, Kurohagi runs his criminal empire from the island of Madripoor, allowing crime to run rampant. Engaged to Shingen's daughter, Mariko, Kurohagi regularly abuses her, implicitly planning to rape her once they are married. When Logan tries to save Mariko, Kurohagi tries to kill him several times, even unleashing a giant robot without regard for the collateral damage it causes. Capturing Logan's partner, Yuki, and nearly strangling her to death while she is paralyzed, he later executes one of his own henchmen with a painful neurotoxin. When the rebels try to end his tyranny, Kurohagi gives orders to kill them, including an unarmed teenage girl, and when confronted by Logan, Kurohagi holds Mariko at gunpoint and blows up an entire building full of dozens of people in an attempt to kill him.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Hideki Kurohagi’s lecherous and possessive behavior towards his fiancée Mariko Yashida, as well as his abusive relationship and even his last words to her, calling her a “whore,” becomes a whole lot more difficult to watch since his voice actor, Vic Mignogna, would be under a lot of heat from sexual assault allegations eight years after this anime aired.
• Realism-Induced Horror: Doubles with the aforementioned Harsher in Hindsight above. If you keep in mind of Mignogna’s recent sexual assault allegations, Hideki’s predatory, possessive, and lecherous behavior towards Mariko, such as seductively telling her to prepare for their wedding night, repeatedly and relentlessly sexually harassing and slapping her around, and even his last line to her, which was “You whore!”, becomes a whole different level of repulsive and uncomfortable to watch, ultimately leading to Hideki becoming even more of a disgusting character than he already shows himself to be.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Unfortunately, this anime is also very notorious for wasting perfectly good characters throughout the course of the story, presumably to fill the series’ runtime, leaving them with tragically wasted potential and missing character arcs:
  • The aforementioned Omega Red. He was shown to be a very dangerous threat to both Yukio and Logan, the latter of whom he actually came dangerously close to killing. But the creators knew that, so they end up giving him a prolonged battle sequence with Wolverine that lasted an entire episode, then basically threw him away by lazily killing him off just as he came back for another round with Wolverine, because apparently, Wolverine needs to focus solely on killing Hideki and Shingen, and Omega Red would seem to be too much of a distraction for that goal. This, coupled with Omega Red’s own badass, legitimately scary design, hammy voice thanks to JB Blanc, and loyalty to his source material, just makes his defeat and anticlimactic demise all the more disappointing and shameful that he ended up wasted so much.
  • Mariko, especially when compared to her comics and film counterparts, where she actually serves some relevance and characterization to make her fleshed out enough. She was supposed to be somewhat better here in the anime series. Instead, she was only being used as nothing more than a generic damsel in distress and a pretty face to look at and serves as basically a plot device for Logan to do something throughout his entire anime. She basically spends the entire series either looking sad, thinking about how she doesn’t deserve Logan’s love, switching randomly between being a whiny defeatist who believes she deserves her Arranged Marriage and subsequent miserable life, and standing around being used as a walking punching bag for her fiancé and even her ‘’own father’’, no less. And then at the end, because of her random and anticlimactic death, she ultimately ends up making the whole anime a Shoot the Shaggy Dog story.
  • Speaking of her father, the aforementioned Shingen was another tragic example. From the comics, he was a viciously cruel, ruthless, murderous, and even sadistic person who contrasts his evil with a sense of honor, legitimate motivations, and even a backstory. Despite this anime setting him up to be just like he was in the comics, maybe even more dangerous and evil, Shingen instead became unfairly reduced to being nothing more than a boring, generic, and listless Invincible Villain, who seems to be treated much more like an inhuman, unstoppable, inexplicably dangerous force of nature than he is as an actual character. During his very few screen time, he basically spends it waving his sword, growling Logan’s name, meditating, and during his interactions with others, he just walks over everyone, even on his own ally Hideki, who was doing nothing more than actively helping Shingen fulfill his ambitions in the first place, even though Hideki’s reasons for doing so were purely self-serving. Worst of all is that he ultimately ends up undervaluing his own character to such a degree that not even his Badass Normal skills could compensate, primarily because of his one-dimensional Jerkass behavior, his stereotypical, combat-hungry arrogance, and somehow never once being called out for his attitude. In addition, a lot of his overall characterization leaves a lot to be desired. For starters, it had never been mentioned of what precisely he plans to do with Madripoor once the marriage was finalized. For another example, Shingen’s exact relationship with Hideki has never been explored or even passively mentioned other than Hideki apparently being afraid of him and the whole arranged marriage between Hideki and Mariko being used basically as a power play for Shingen. And then during the final battle, when it seems like he shows some sign of depth, he gets killed off and then a passing mention of him and his actions, and then that’s literally it, the anime ends afterwards. Many fans agree that Shingen deserves a lot better, same with Omega Red.
  • A.I.M. is another comic book villain example that was criminally underused, despite them appearing to be the Greater-Scope Villain of the story. Despite frequently being mentioned many times throughout the show, not a lot of actual members of A.I.M. actually appear, nor appear to make any relevance to the story other being the backer and supplier for Hideki. Worse yet, the two times that they do show up only feature the Mooks, who are often quickly dispatched, not important members like MODOK, Monica Rappucini, or even a Scientist Supreme of any kind.
  • Agents Takagi, Tsukino, and Machida, part of the squad that Asano leads, were actually pretty interesting characters who had plenty of badass and insightful moments throughout the show, as well as being another legitimate threat to Wolverine. Unfortunately, they strayed too far from, again, Wolverine’s end goal to kill Hideki and Shingen, so they had to just disappear from view with no apparent explanation as to why, especially as they found out that Wolverine wasn’t the one who had killed their leader in the first place. They don’t even show up to avenge Asano and prosecute Shingen or Hideki during the show’s climax, nor at least witness Wolverine fight and then kill Shingen. Too bad we will never know what had happened to these three agents, as we don’t even know about their fates on top of this.