BULLET/BULLET

The world's been dead for a long time — civilization's a memory, and what's left is pure wasteland. And Gear, a guy who runs a junk shop, spends his days tracking down stolen goods with his two partners — White Bear, a gambler who's probably in over his head, and Qu-0213, a robot who has four separate personalities, which is exactly as chaotic as it sounds. Things are going fine in a scrappy, barely-getting-by kind of way until a mysterious girl named Noah shows up and drags them into a heist that's way above their pay grade. What follows is a mess of assassins, high-speed car chases, and explosions, and the crew is clearly not prepared for any of it. This is a 12-episode ONA from E&H Production, directed by Sunghoo Park — the same guy behind Jujutsu Kaisen's action sequences — so the fights and chase scenes have real weight to them. The post-apocalyptic setting mixes scavenged tech with anthropomorphic characters, which gives the whole thing a vibe that sits somewhere between Trigun's desert outlaw energy and Cowboy Bebop's ragtag-crew-doing-odd-jobs charm. There's humor threaded through the action, and the dynamic between Gear, White Bear, and a robot having an identity crisis keeps things loose even when the stakes ramp up. If you liked Desert Punk's wasteland tone but want something with a tighter story and better production values, this one's worth the time.