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Series name: Gasaraki

Review date: 20041107

Genre: Mecha, world war

Length: 25 episodes on 8 DVDs

Fan service: none

Rewatch: no

Summary: Gowa Yushiro is a junior member of the Gowa clan, a powerful family in Japan which controls one of the biggest zaibatsu. He doesn't really understand his past, nor the "Tactical Armor" (i.e. mechas) he's involved in testing, nor the strange Noh dance he's been trained all his life to perform, nor the strange girl he sees in his mind when he performs that dance, nor why she attacks him with a knife.

Comments: This is a fairly famous series and I've seen positive reviews for it elsewhere, so I suspect my opinion is going to be quite controversial: I thought it stunk.

Generally I try to avoid spoilers in these reviews, but I'm less concerned about that when I review a series that I don't recommend, and there will be mild spoilers in this one.

There are a lot of brief dismissive ways to describe Gasaraki. For instance, one could say that it's Neon Genesis Evangelion except based on Shinto and Buddhist symbolism instead of Judeo-Christian symbolism. Or it's a battle between different Illuminati, one of which coopts the government of the US and one of which coopts the government of Japan. Or it's just an excuse for lots of cool combat sequences involving mechas. Or it's a tale of unrequited love, where the love remains unrequited for a thousand years awaiting reincarnation. Or it's Japan's revenge on the US for WWII.

Or it's a totally contrived mess which makes no sense at all if you look at it closely. I'm not even sure just how many competing Illuminati there were. (Arguably at least four, but it could have been as many as seven, all with different incompatible goals.)

And boy, does it have some nasty things to say about the US. They massively overused the English word "hegemony" with reference to America. And did you know that the President of the US takes orders directly from the head of some shadowy multinational corporation called SYMBOL, even to the point of ordering military attacks on Japan on SYMBOL's say so?

Fortunately, the good guys won in the end and America was humbled and gave up its ongoing attempts to hegemonically rule the world.

Most of the characters were either repulsive or vapid. The only character I really liked got himself killed in an ill-advised firefight with (wait for it) a US Marine doing the bidding of SYMBOL.

If you look at it as a story of unrequited love, said "loving couple" are named Yushiro and Miharu, and the plot requires them to get together, get separated, get together again, get separated again, meet a couple of times, and finally get together in the end. The second "get separated" was totally contrived, because the Marines who were there to grab her would have grabbed him, too. They had every opportunity to do so and in plot terms they'd have been ordered to get both, but that would have loused up the plot arc, so they ignored him and left him lying on the deck.

Which was the point where I gave up hope that the series was ever going to redeem itself. It had become clear that the writers weren't playing fair.

And in the latter part of the series they cheated constantly. The dei ex machina started to flow thick and fast, popping out of the blue like hailstones. One of the Illuminati finally revealed his grand plot, and it was preposterous in the extreme. A minor character was revealed as having a major and critical power. A Japanese Lt. Colonel seems to have had the ability to control the entire Japanese self defense forces. Japan's prime minister was conveniently injured in an assassination attempt, and no one bothered to consult the Diet about appointing a successor. (Said Illuminati with the grand plan took over, instead, and no one seems to have minded much.) One minor character was revealed to be thousands of years old, though it was never explained why he didn't die of old age like everyone else.

A common complaint about old westerns is the "inexhaustible six-shooter", the revolver which somehow never needs to be reloaded. I quite commonly have a different complaint about futuristic war movies: "they're using the wrong weapon". Somehow or other, they always seem to be armed incorrectly for the threat they face.

With an enemy TA ("Tactical Armor" i.e. mecha) standing in front of them, the Japanese self defense forces poured huge amounts of .30 caliber machine gun fire into it, which was just as much a waste of ammunition as it would be against a main battle tank. No one there seems to have had any kind of anti-armor missiles, even though that's standard issue for infantry even in Japan. But, well, darn it, the Japanese infantry must have left their anti-armor missiles in their other pants that day, so all they could do is pepper the TA with itty bitty bullets which had no chance of harming it.

Small wonder it just stood there and ignored them. Lucky thing for the TA pilot, too. As tall as it was, an infantryman with a Javelin couldn't possible have missed it at that range. In real life, it would have taken multiple AP hits and been converted into a smoking hulk in about ten seconds.

Fact of the matter is, in real life it would never have gotten there at all. The helicoptor which carried it into place and carefully lowered it with a winch would have been shot down, and that TA would have fallen 400 meters and become a scrap pile. But, well, darn it, the Japanese self defense forces left all their SAMs in their other pants, too, and didn't even have any heavy machine guns to shoot at that helicoptor.

In fact, every time infantry got into a serious battle in Gasaraki, they invariably had the wrong weapons with them, no matter whose infantry it was or what they were fighting against.

Later on, the bad guys (i.e. the Americans) tried to attack a building, and the good guys (i.e. the Japanese self defense forces) knew they were coming. Yet no one seems to have bothered calling in the Self Defense Force Combat Engineers to let them set up any booby traps along the path the bad guys were certain to follow in their attack.

Hasn't anyone in Japan ever heard of a land mine?

Things happened the way they happened because the writers needed them to, not because it actually made any sense or because it's how real people in such a situation would actually have behaved. Virtually everything that happened in the last six episodes rang false.

I stuck it out and finished watching, mostly because I felt I had to so I could write this review, but also out of mild curiousity to see if somehow, miraculously, they could redeem it all and convince me that it had been worthwhile. They didn't.

Complaints: Check out this conversation:

mysterious thousand year old guy: You have assembled all of Japan's financial information, all her assets, and have stored it in one specific spot.
Japanese Illuminati: All so that we can strike back against America for what she attempts to accomplish. It is our means to counter a declining superpower, a nation about to attempt to reclaim power over the globe.
mysterious thousand year old guy: There is no doubt that America has targeted Japan, to show the world what it intends to do.
Japanese Illuminati: America has exploited Japan repeatedly as a scapegoat for its own shortfalls in trade policy. Then there is Japan, obediently kowtowing to US policy. But no longer can we afford to let this practice go unopposed. Especially now, when they're willing to resort to such extremes.

And this one:

Advisor: Mr. President, we are ready to launch our strike. Please grant us the authorization to undertake a full-scale attack. Mr. President, we don't have any more time! Might makes right, Mr. President! We cannot hope to secure international support without a clear victory against the Japanese! The United States of America is a nation that cannot tolerate defeat!
POTUS: No, you are mistaken. The United States of America owes its responsibility to the world. It's over.
Advisors: gasp!

And this one:

POTUS: It seems that I will have to be the first president in the history of the United States to concede defeat.
Japanese Illuminati: No, that's not true. This was a war where there could be no winner.
POTUS: No winner?
Japanese Illuminati: It's true that now your nation has abandoned hegemonism, but that does not mean your nation failed.
POTUS: Has not failed? What do you mean?
Japanese Illuminati: To set aside mistrust and deepen our understanding of each other, a simple act such as this is rarely ever realized in the field of politics and diplomacy, but you were willing to do so.

Who wrote this script, Jacques Chirac? (Or has Chomsky been moonlighting?)

Is the ending satisfying? They even copied Evangelion to the extent that they included a weird, semi-symbolic soul-searching ending. It isn't as incoherent as Evangelion's but it isn't any better. I thought it was pretty disappointing.

Recommended? No. If you want a series about mechas which will get your pulse rate to rise, you're much better off with Full Metal Panic. If you want a series full of symbolism and imagery, go with Serial Experiments Lain. If you want a series that fills you with dread, Noir is what you're looking for.

Of course, if you think that Halliburton secretly runs the US government, and have been rooting for someone else in the world to take America down a peg, you'll love Gasaraki.