directed by Katsuhito Akiyama
Japan
780 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Another review for a TV series today. I held off watching this for a long time because all I ever heard about it was that it was less gory than and generally inferior to the '89 series - which I hold dear in my heart - but after finally watching it, I have no idea what everybody was talking about. This show rules.
I think you should listen to the absolute ripper of an op while reading this for maximum effect.
It would be an understatement to say that a lot of anime and manga focus on high school students stumbling into a dangerous or bizarre situation and ending up gaining (or finding out that they've always had) special powers. It's probably impossible to reckon the number of series that use that trope. But Bioboosted Armor feels like it does it differently. The story begins with a high school boy, Sho, and his friend Tetsuro coming across a Control Medal (the device that allows a wearer to bond with and activate a Guyver suit) in the woods. Sho touches it and it immediately and forcibly equips him with the Guyver suit, leading him on accident down a path that will entangle his life with the destiny of the entire planet. Pure chance - not fate, not destiny; unless you want to headcanon it that way.
Sho himself doesn't get a lot of characterization, he's just sort of A Guy, but the people around him are presented in really interesting, faceted ways that I want to explore before getting further into the review. One of the standout characters to me is Mizuki, Sho's classmate and maybe-girlfriend, who is dragged into the chaos by virtue of being Tetsuro's sister. I will never forget a YouTube comment I read when I was watching the '89 series that said something like "I feel so bad for Mizuki, she's just a little girl and her entire life got turned upside-down". Mizuki is in a lot of ways the exact opposite of the traditional anime schoolgirl: she's clearly immature, not equipped to handle everything that's being thrown at her, constantly depressed and anxious, etc - basically, she's the only person in the show who acts realistically given the situation. I love how when everyone around her talks about fighting and dying and giving one's life to protect the greater good, Mizuki is there essentially saying "What THE HELL are you people talking about, you guys are my FRIENDS and you're GOING TO DIE. That is NOT NORMAL and why are you acting like it is."
Tetsuro is also cool because they never shoehorn him into either being the funny fat guy comic relief or the funny smart guy comic relief. He is clearly very smart but he has his own issues and deals with the ongoing trauma of the series in his own way.
The thing about watching this after having already seen the original series was that I knew I was eventually going to get to the part where Sho's dad (Fumio) dies. I swear, man, I've seen NGE, and Sho's dad dying bothers me almost as much as anything that goes on in that show. Fumio is one of the most normal anime dads I've ever seen: he loves his son very, very much; when we get to read his diary, he talks about how he's concerned for Sho (who has acquired the Guyver suit, but keeps it secret), but he trusts that he'll open up to him sooner or later. The set-up of Fumio as a caring, kind father who believes in his son makes it incredibly painful when - and this is a big SPOILER, but I want to elaborate the whole scenario for emphasis - it seems like both of them finally escape from Cronos, but Fumio has secretly been processed into a Zoanoid, and because Sho refuses to fight him after both of them transform, Fumio as Zoanoid crushes Sho's skull and activates the Guyver suit's incredibly aggressive autopilot mode, rendering Sho into a passenger within his body as he literally vaporizes his own father.
I knew it was coming and it still hit hard.
The concept of the series is premium juicy sci-fi, although the pacing suffers at points due to repeated exposition dumps that bring the show to a halt for several episodes in a row. I love stories where humans are left to infer information about an alien species through their technology because the aliens themselves are absent. We know the Creators' basic goal - engineering humans as perfect living weapons - but we don't know why, or how they operated on Earth. The Guyver suits were never meant for human use, and seeing Sho and the others wear them and eventually even pilot an abandoned Creator ship feels like this almost Rendezvous with Rama scenario where something beyond our imagination is left to us with no explanation.
Unfortunately, most Guyver series seem to have "non-ending" syndrome. After building up a ton of momentum Bioboosted Armor fizzles out into a final three episodes that halfheartedly introduce a future where Cronos rules the world and Zoanoids are integrated into human society. This could have been interesting if it was given the proper time to be fleshed out, but as it is, it feels like an afterthought. The fight between final-form Guyot and Makishima while Sho is desperately trying to pilot the Creator ship out of a volcano and get everyone to safety is more riveting than anything the final few episodes contained, and that's a shame. For a series that had been so epic before, we should have gotten an ending that felt more cathartic than this.
I'm going to stop here, because I've gone on way too long, but I want to go to bat for this series that seems to be dismissed in favor of the earlier one. I do think that I like the '89 series better, but it was so hamstrung by budget constraints and other production issues that it never felt like it achieved its full potential. This series gets closer - but again, the rushed ending does it a disservice.
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