Possibly the defining experience in So Bad, It's Good anime.
Musashi Gundoh is set in a fictional feudal era of Japan, when the Toyotomi Shogunate (instead of Tokugawa) governed the nation. This 2006 anime tells the story of Musashi, a young practitioner of "gundoh", a martial art involving the use of guns. The series deals with Musashi's battles against a group of monsters called "Ayakashi". The art is terrible, the action is terrible, the plot... well, the series was never officially translated into English, and so people are reluctant to talk about the plot. Legend has it that it's funny.
That the TV broadcast version is considered superior to the retouched DVD release certainly says something.
Possibly the only reason this ever got made is that it was a discarded idea by Monkey Punch. Yes, THAT Monkey Punch.
Musashi Gundoh contains examples of the following tropes:
- Action Girl: Kaguya, who can take on enemies empty-handed in midair.
- Ambiguously Human: Kaguya if she and Yumehime are biological sisters, as the latter is an alien.
- Bloodless Carnage: Thanks to a bunch of "sleeping" bullets!
- Bottomless Magazines: Musashi's guns — which are six-shot revolvers by the way — never seem to run out of ammo.
- Enhanced on DVD: The DVD version remedies the Off-Model. Unfortunately, the QUALITY animation is an important part of the viewing experience, so most people prefer the TV version.
- GIS Syndrome: Go ahead. Count the number of times the background isn't an obvious .jpeg image.
- Gun Fu: Gun-doh, though most of the time it only really amounts to just a whole lot of jumping around.
- Lazy Artist: Many scenes are left out because the animators claimed that they were too hard to draw. The "Wow, it's dazzling!" line was added without showing the dazzling thing, making it an unintentional non-sequitur.
- Mind Screw: Even if the entire series were subtitled, apparently the show wouldn't make any sense anyway, as a horrible editing job left out many key plot details.
- One-Man Army: Implied with Musashi, seeing as one of his favorite past-times is "castle-taking."
- Set Swords to "Stun": In the first episode, Musashi slices up a bunch of people with an electric sword that stuns but does not kill.
