The legend. The hero. The character everyone knows for the vast legacy he has had upon manga as well as anime. He is in the top ten of hundreds and hundreds of people's favorite characters lists.

EAT-MAN.

The greatest mercenary, he who is otherwise known as Bolt Crank, possesses a very unique power. A very unique skill. A power that puts him above every single other action protagonist that has ever or ever will exist.

He can eat a thing (usually guns, but sometimes just assorted metal objects), and then he can materialize it in his hand! You hold a gun up to his head? Well guess what, he's gonna chomp down on that motherfucker and then HE'LL have the gun!

Bolt Crank has no weaknesses. There is no possible other way you can defeat a man without shooting him. And once you try to shoot him, he'll just eat your weapon and bam back to square one!

~~You could set him on fire though. Or you could drop a heavy object on him. Or maybe you could just knock him unconscious with a blunt object or perhaps even via a tranquilizer and then place a muzzle over his mouth to prevent him from being able to utilize his legendary eating abilities... or rather, I guess restraining him in general and preventing him from getting around guns or metal would probably do the trick.~~

This legendary protagonist who waltzed forth from the mind of Akihito Yoshitomi deserves an equally legendary anime adaptation.

Now, some will try and have you believe that the series that followed this called Eat Man '98 is the true adaptation as it's apparently closer to what the manga actually is (this is 100% an assumption on my part) and Eat Man '97 is just a bizarrely weird attempt to turn Eat-Man into some different and randomly episodic series but...

I say that's a load of nonsense. Look at this doofy ass face of the world's greatest mercenary. He can eat metal, man. He just chomps through handguns like it's no big deal.

But yet he's just this quiet lumbering goofy vagrant wandering from place to place and giving people odd smiles. Like he'll just say nothing and fire off one of his smiles out of nowhere.

If somebody smiled at me the way Bolt Crank smiles I would immediately call the space police. Like Bolt is always wearing those sunglasses. Is it to hide the demonic entity that is hiding within??? Will he chomp you if his true identity is discovered???

The point is Eat Man '97 is like completely episodic and more and more throughout, the purpose Bolt Crank plays in these stories become more and more dubious. There were a handful of which that I had forgotten I was watching a show about a man who could eat handguns until of course Bolt Crank showed his goofy, goofy face.

And more and more I just kept questioning why these characters were so friendly or at ease towards Bolt Crank. Especially those who have personally seen him down a handgun or periodically popping screws into his mouth like he was chewing gum. Or... you know, drinking gasoline which he fished out of the ocean.

Why did you let this man on our boat. HE JUST DOWNED AN ENTIRE CAN OF GASOLINE.

I think probably the most disappointing aspect of Bolt Crank's character is him actually not tapping into his full potential.

Most of how he resolves the situation is he eats something and then boom, a gun materializes.

But if your teeth are capable of biting through METAL...

...why doesn't he just bite people?

I know Bolt Crank biting a rival mercenary's arm off would flip the entire foundation of what the series is on its head, but I just feel the idea that his teeth can literally chew through anything is more interesting than the idea of his stomach being a portable dimension from he can retrieve and/or make guns from the metal he eats.

But really it's not like every single episode of this series is packed with action.

One of the episodes I remember the most clearly, all Bolt did was move a girl's arm to prevent her from killing the guy who owned the strip club the episode is centered around because the owner wanted the girl to stop doing artistic dances and just strip.

Like the entire episode is centered around this dancer character and how she wants to be in the spotlight and how she wants to be like her mother and there's just... one problem with that. Where does Bolt Crank fit into this?

He's just standing outside of the strip club in the rain pointlessly, and she, as one rationally does, decides to take this tall lumbering and odd man in. Even gets old Bolt a janitor job at the strip club!

---

#~~Conclusion...?~~#
#Truly, the world's greatest mercenary!#

...This entire review has been centered around Bolt Crank for good reason. He is the WHOLE reason to ever watch this series. Like sure, some of the episodes are weird and that weirdness is almost enough for me to call those episodes notable, but apart from two episodes in particular, it's really not the episodes themselves I remember.

It's Bolt goddamned Crank.

Like the entire way I ended up deciding to watch this was I just read the description and it was just "yeah it's about a guy who eats metal and guns." And I just remember thinking: "no, there's gotta be something more to it than that."

And at least for this anime, there isn't! He's just a weird goofy and tall guy who eats metal and drinks gasoline. There's really nothing tying any of the episodes together because it always ends with Bolt Crank just wandering off to somewhere else for some new wacky adventure. Hell, the next to last episode ends with Bolt Crank coming out of a coma (???) and he tells the lady who resurrected him for some job no because "he's not a mercenary anymore."

~~Who... decided for that to be episode 11 rather than episode 12?~~

I give it... a 4 out of 10. I've forgotten a whole lot of it, yet for some bizarre reason, it somehow managed to get lodged somewhere deep down into my brain, making it possible for me to review it despite it being almost two whole years since I originally watched the series.

...Would I recommend you to watch it? My answer would have to be...

I have no fucking clue. If you want to watch a weird episodic show with a main character who possesses charisma but only possesses it because of how odd he is and how other characters treat him, then maybe...?

The best thing about this series to me personally is that I still don't even know if it's better or worse that they strayed from the original manga. Like sure this is weird, but I have to assume Bolt Crank in the original manga or Eat Man '98 is relatively similar to this version.

Maybe he's just not quite as goofy.