If You Want Another TTGL, Don’t Watch GaoGaiGar (Final Thoughts on GaoGaiGar TV)

GaoGaiGar is nothing like Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. The reason why non super robot fan can get into TTGL is because it can be seen as both a parody and a celebration to old school super robot show. It’s also a coming of age story where little boy grows into manly man. Most importantly, the characters are the focus, not the robots.  It also break away from being formulaic very early on.

GaoGaiGar on the other hand is all about the robots. They even make half of their fucking cast sentient robots. That’s why if you don’t like your transforming robots, you wouldn’t enjoy your GaoGaiGar as much as  a robot fan( I am not a robot fan). The formulaic nature is also tedium.

Watching GaoGaiGar is a weird experience because I used every passing minute to wish that their characters will just self sacrifice and  die but that never really happen. Didn’t they watch Gekigangar 3? Super Robot anime should have manly self sacrificial scene where people die protecting their friends. The only death in GGG is for this old man that no one really cares. They even have the nerve to prepare another character that looks and acts like him in case you miss this type of character.

Also, whenever they are in a pinch(which I might add, only happen once or twice), I would want them to use their guts and will power to overcome it but they love to use some science fi bullshit to solve things. Who the fuck watches Super Robot anime to see science? Guts and hotblood is all you need! Kick science out of my robot show.

You also better stay off from GaoGaiGar if you hate kid characters because their main character is a 8 years old kid called Mamoru. Damn, I fucking hate Mamoru. I died a little inside whenever he shouts “WAHA!”.

Fuck Mamoru because he is the character where 8 years old kids insert themselves into. He’s like your self insert harem character but instead of hot chicks, he gets the chance to hang out with transformer robots.

Fuck him. He’s not cool at all. Everytime I watch him, I can’t help but think that some 8 years old kid will be thinking about how cool he would be if he’s Mamoru and that makes me angry because Mamoru sucks. I also can’t help but think that every motive and move made by Mamoru is to pander and appeal to 8 years old so it would be easier for them to insert themselves as Mamoru. That makes Mamoru looks like a ball of contrived and calculated shit.

Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t good episodes of GaoGaiGar. Like I said before, episode 28 to 30 are pretty sweet and hit every expectations you have for a super robot anime. It also explains how robots kill dinosaur and cause ice age which is kinda cool and unpredictable. The last episode was pretty cool as well but they have to spoil everything by making it so anti climatic. A good analogy for the last minute of GGG would be like changing Gurren Lagann last episode and make Simon uses his spiral power to revive all his buddy.

Fuck GGG man. I wasted so many time on it, thinking and hoping it would be cool. I was so hyped up to see some hotblooded super robot cliches but GaoGaiGar didn’t live up to my expectation. I can’t fault it though because it’s clearly a 49 episode transformer robots commercial aimed at 8 years old kid. I can see myself liking it if I was 8 because cities got destroyed and there are some messages about family value with some character development. 8 years old think that’s edgy and deep because they are only exposed to stagnant shit like Barney.

Hell, I remember thinking Spriggan is so deep and edgy and not kid stuff when I was 10. Never know it’s a laughing stock among anime fans. Fuck them because Spriggan is cool and I am 10. It’s still too bad though as I am 2 years older than GaoGaiGar’s targeted audience.

 

GaoGaiGar is Still Average After 35 Episodes

Super robot show should be hotblooded, passionate and courageous. It should have stake so high and adversaries so huge that it seems impossible to overcome.

Then with guts, passion and manly speeches( in this order), our heroes would then harness just enough will power to beat the boss until the next boss appears and beat our heroes down.  Repeat this process until you get so manly that you can’t be any manlier. Some of our heroes die in this process but we will learn and benefit from their death and place them forever in our heart.

At least that’s what I expected out of a good super robot show and GaoGaiGar has little to none of that for 35 episodes.

The fundamental flaw of GaoGaiGar is that all but 2 fighting characters are AIs. That itself lowers the stake because AIs are not human and can tolerate high strain while being able to get repair midway during the battle. This took away the joy of seeing the grit of our heroes after their humanly body gets abused.

It removes tension since who the fuck care if robots are destroyed?  They are just robots so you can always rebuild them! Even still, after 35 episodes, they only have 2 near destroyed instances and they came out all right without having the chance to say manly speeches during their revival. Their revivals are always anti climatic because they just appears out of nowhere and sometimes even fully repaired.

Now, I agree that being able to repair midway during battles and using AIs to fight aliens make logical sense and that itself makes GaoGaiGar a pretty smart super robot show. In fact, GaoGair answered a lot of our questions that we have when we watch robot show.

For example, we always ask, why don’t the enemy just gang them out and not always deal 1 on 1? This was actually answered and there are instances where we have 4 on 4 and 2 on1 where our heroes have numerical disadvantage.

Then there’s also the question of why not use your final move or change to your final fusion when you  first encounter your enemy? Why even change into power ranger when you can change into your super robot form and unleash your final sword cutting move? GaoGaiGar answered this shit since episode 2 because sure as hell they change to their final fusion and unleash their final move as fast as they could.

After watching GaoGaiGar tearing through enemies with no buildup to the final move, you would finally understand why power rangers took their time to transform into ranger first then fight with robots for a while before unleashing their final move. Unleashing your final move without buildup is anti-climatic.  Doing it once or twice is maybe cool and subversive but having 20 over episodes of final moves after 50 seconds of action buildup is painful.

Here’s another instance where you know that GaoGaiGar’s characters are very smart.  Midway during the show, after they found out that the final move cause lots of strain to the user’s body, they came out with a new special move that get rid of all repercussion . As smart as that sounds, this further lowers the already low stake and make things very anti-cliamtic and unexciting.

They took away all tension and drama with that plot point. Imagine this, finally, our heroes might die anytime and things are starting to get a little tense but they went on and remove this repercussion which led to killing off any tension that we might once have. What a killjoy that is.

Oh, and that big reveal that every GaoGaiGar’s fan hyped up for during that legendary episode 31 is not that big of a deal as well. I expected it to be a plot twist where our main characters are actually fighting the good guys that are trying to prevent the destruction of earth by extreme means or something epic like episode 15 of TTGL but what we have got is that the enemies they are fighting are just the scouting units and there are actually bigger enemies out there. There, I fucking spoiled the huge reveal because honestly, you would be disappointed if you expected too much out of it.

These bigger enemies are just 31  robots that only seem threatening for 1 episode anyway so who the fuck cares. Fuck, they even told you the amount and it isn’t something impossibly massive like 1 million. What kind of number is 31 anyway? Bleh!

Then after episode 31, they gets into the formula of fighting one or more of the 31 robots, introduce new partner AI robots/tools , fight enemies robot with slightly more buildup again and again and again. The only change is that they make the formula of monster per week into monster per 2 weeks! How incredible non-formulaic like how all the fans told you.

Fuck it man, I heard that it gets awesome after episode 36 because they fight in Jupiter or something but by now, I don’t even believe anything anymore after so many failed “it gets good after this episode” promises.

I personally think that GaoGaiGar is not worth it considering it needs so many episodes to build up to the supposedly good part. Some find it good after episode 27,  some episode 20, some episode 13 and some episode 30. For me, only episode 28-31 are good because they have what I stated in the first paragraph. Other than that, it has a lot of middling episodes and many downright boring one.

Ah, how I wished I can get all pumped out and passionate about GaoGaiGar when I sing along with the opening theme, too bad that never happens after episode 28-31. I still have that tiny hope of the Jupiter arc to do good because please, at least make this last 13 episodes a good memory for me where I would say that 23X49 mins of my life is worth it.