The opening says all it needs to about the first three episodes of Needless: loud, brash, and utter nonsense. The plot, flimsy as it is, concerns a nefarious corporation called "Simeon" who are brazenly chopping up the "Needless": a group of super powered twits cluttering up the Japanese post World War 3 landscape. One of these happens to be the sister of a small, annoying child who is saved by an outlandishly dressed, wood carving of a man known as "Blade". From there all semblance of continuity is lost and the episodes devolve into poorly animated fights with contenders announcing their attacks after which the names are emblazoned on screen, usually with flames coming off them.
To call Needless silly would be doing it an injustice: it is so outwardly ridiculous that at times it feels like it's trying to be po-faced serious but failing miserably. The cast balloons outward to incorporate a number of noisy and paper-thin characters including: a scantily dressed brawler with a penchant for changing people's names and whose breasts are unsure of what shape or consistency to take; and a short-on words antagonist that has a collar so freakishly huge that one could hang glide with it. The character designs are fresh up to a point - obviously there are mixes of other similar characters, Blade for instance has a healthy dose of Vash the Stampede mixed in with some generic masculinity from the likes of Heat Guy J or Fist of the North Star. Unfortunately they are entirely wasted when given such protracted and atrocious dialogue that it becomes painful to listen, exacerbated by the typical shounen budget-saver of extending every scrap of action with an ongoing diatribe by each character on the vagaries of their fighting style.
The obvious influence for Needless seems to be the Arc System Works games, specifically Guilty Gear and BlazBlue mimicking the heavy-metal soundtrack most closely; however even mentioning them in the same sentence as this series would invite comparisons when ASW's output trumps all pretenders. While ludicrously oddball, the characters are stripped of any kind of detail or nuance, leaving them as deformed caricatures left to dance ineffectively about on screen. Antagonists are dispatched alarmingly quickly but hold all the menace of a Corgi yapping incessantly at one's feet, so the titular powers of the series are left as puzzles for the weaker characters to figure out or as food for Blade to consume. Adapted from the manga of the same name and apparently toning down some of the violence, Needless is apparently only running for half a season, however the worrying suffix of "Season 1" on the Wikipedia page indicates there is more of this ridiculousness to follow. It would, however, be hard to surpass the ending for its drastic change of tone - featuring three young girls in various states of undress and entanglement, three episodes in and the characters had yet to be featured in the show itself.
Needless suffers by being too absurd and too unrefined. The characters are designed well but suffer in execution, not living up to their colourful introductions or accoutrements - details that would otherwise elevate this above the poor, childish entertainment it currently stands as. The battles are banal and uninteresting while the world - perhaps the biggest draw for the series - is left completely unexplored in favour of generic apocalyptic backdrops and villainous mega-corporations. This is humourless tosh that threatens to drop dramatically in animation quality after the first three episodes if such a thing is even conceivable.