The animation moves like nothing else Marvel put on TV that year, fluid enough that you forget you're watching frames instead of motion. The U-Men cult feels genuinely alien against the X-Men's moral clarity, which gives every fight weight beyond spectacle. But the show spends so much energy on plot momentum that Armor never becomes more than the mission she's attached to, and that hollows out what should have been the emotional core.

Brought back together after the death of one of their own, the X-Men are called to Japan by Charles Xavier when the mutant Hisako Ichiki, known as Armor, is abducted. There they come up against the U-Men, a deranged cult that takes organs from mutants and implants them to make its own forces stronger. What follows is an action-driven drama about the team's fight against the cult and its crimes, with justice at stake.