The Celestial King is retiring. He's begun a tournament to decide who will be the next Celestial King.  Each Celestial Candidate must choose a junior high school student to represent him in the tournament.  Each student is then given a power to aid them in these tournaments.  If they ever use these powers to harm a non-power use (as the students are called) they will lose talents.  Each student has a limited amount of talents and if they are all used up they cease to exist.  However, Power-User's can gain new Talents by knocking other Power-User's unconscious. This is the backdrop for the story that follow Kosuke Ueki, a Power-Use who represents Mr. Kobayashi (also known as Mr. K), a Celestial Candidate with an astute sense of righteousness.  Ueki is given the power to trash into trees.  He must defeat his opponents and get the coveted 'Talent of Blank" so that it does not fall into evil hands.  Along the way he makes friends with Ai Mori (a normal female junior high student who eventually gets wrapped up in the tournaments), Sano (whom has the ability is to turn Towels into Iron), Rinko (whom has the power to turn beads into bombs), Hideyoshi (whom has the ability to turn voices into portraits) and Tenko (a celestial beast whom was imprisoned for consuming a million Celestials).  As the tournaments continue Ueki's Candidate is sent to the underworld for saving Ueki from certain death after a fight with Robert Hadyn (whom has the power to turn ideals into reality).  Ueki vows to continue winning his matches in the name of Mr. K.'s righteousness.  This becomes tough when Robert Hadyn forms the Robert's 10, an elite group of Power-Users bent on making sure Robert wins.  Despite this Ueki manages to defeat them, and continues on in the third round.  The third round shakes things up by allowing the formation of teams.  It's also discovered that Ueki is actually a Neo-Celestial (basically a Celestial with even more power than a normal one).  Ueki and his friends team up and continue to fight in order to obtain the Talent of Blank, and to free Mr. K. and Inamaru (Sano's Candidate whom went to the underworld for giving Ai a power).

This series focuses on many different things.  It tackles each individual character in the series giving them more depth then most series give even one of their characters.  It also focuses a great deal on Ueki himself and his pursuit of Righteousness and what he must due to obtain the Talent of Blank in order for it not to fall in the wrong hands.  It also works a great deal on the villains of the stories, giving them an unusual amount of character and depth of their own.

Presentation

This 13 disk box set comes with two hard plastic boxes, both sharing the exact same artwork.  The artwork shows a myriad of characters in fighting poses on a blue and black background.  The inside artwork of the boxes merely display an episode listing of each disk.  Each disk has a portrait of a character from the series.  Now, if there is one complaint I have about this disk set is that none of the disk are labeled.  In a smaller set, this would not be a problem.  But in a 13 disk set, you sometimes will have to go through a few disks just to find the right one.  The artwork itself is pretty good and original.  It has similar style to Slayers, though it lacks some of the sharper edges that Slayers had.  The animation in the background and character design flow very smoothly.  The fighting scenes are done rather well also, though the attacks at time look rather simplistic for a fighting anime.  The music is light-hearted for the most people and very pleasant to listen to.  It also has two different openings throughout the series and FIVE different ending themes.  Despite this, they are all appropriate for their places in the anime and help bring it together swimmingly.  Voice actors on both sides do great.  The voice actors on both sides did so great that I hardly recognized a difference when I switched between the two.  The story unfolds kind of episodic. Each episode has its own theme and story to it, but at the same time still fits as a coherent story to the rest of the series.  It's this type of meaningful story-telling that needs to return to anime, where each episode is a story within a story.

Extras

Holy lord, we've hit the mother load.  Each of the 13 disks carries THREE trailers on it.   That makes for 39 Trailers.  Now, some of them repeat a bit especially towards the end of the series, but there is still quite a few.  It also has textless versions of ALL the endings and openings, as well as the original Japanese Commercial, original Japanese Promotional Trailer AND the American promotional Trailer. Also if you look through the trailers, you can even find a commercial for a Yoko Ishida (the singer of Cruel Angel Thesis from Evangelion) concert.

Overall this a fun, feisty romp of a series with lots of fighting, lots of story, lots of bizarre and creative powers, and lots of deep character development. I heartily recommend this to anyone who has the 72 dollars to spend on it.