Star Driver is a mecha show that presents itself as passionate and stylish. It certainly looks the part; it’s brightly colored with a fairly particular style lending flair to good standard animation, including some particularly gorgeous environments. The character movements are graceful, which extends to the show’s Mechas usually moving more like dancers than lumbering multi-ton machines. The costumes range from the colorful end of ‘normal’ to the garishly absurd, and at first the plot and setting seem to follow suit with a conflict between our chronic hero and a fun, loony group of ‘villains’ who, like Team Rocket, are more amusing in their capering than legitimately threatening. Perhaps it’s a little heavier, but this still seems like it’s going to be a fun and engaging show with some kickass action.
If you, like I, watched the first episode or two of Star Driver and thought that, then the show tricked you. The presentation stays the course, but almost everything you would have guessed about the content is pretty far from the truth. And in this case, at least, that’s not a good thing.
Before I really dig into the failings of Star Driver, the plot recap. Takuto is a high-school boy who washes up on our mysterious island setting, having decided to swim there. Once there he ends up befriending broody rich boy Sugata. He also befriends and maybe/maybe not falls for Wako, a magic shrine maiden deeply connected to an ancient conspiracy about alien robots, whose personality is on par with damp cardboard. Things heat up when the conspirators who want to use their awesome robots (Cybodies), a feat currently not possible outside of a time stop dimension, try to kidnap Wako in order to nullify the seal her existence places on the Cybodies. Takuto defends her, calling a mysterious Cybody of his own to fight with. In the words of an old but good routine, their robots blow up because his robot is better.
The struggle is basically thus: each episode or so, one of the minions of the Kiraboshi Order of the Cross (that’s its real name; disregard any other titles I may bestow), an evil organization that comes dressed for a Mardi Gras masquerade, will summon Takuto and Wako to Cybody Thunderdome, intending to nullify Wako’s seal and advance their circuitous plan towards unspecified but presumably evil triumph. Two robots enter, Takuto’s leaves, the offending Kiraboshi member is stripped of rank and if female falls for Takuto, and we move on to the next one.
Slowly, we get some concept of the Cybodies being alien artifacts, and of the Kiraboshi leader (Code name: Head) having some extra-nefarious scheme that the other folks in the Kiraboshi Order of Silly Hats probably wouldn’t like. So of course, he’s going to be the Final Boss. There are a couple good and bad turns that bear talking about in more detail along the way.
First, towards the middle of the show, we get some episodes focusing on one of the Shrine Maidens other than Wako (there were four to start out with) and her sister. These characters, Mizuno and Marino, are actually interesting and well-written. Mizuno is a quirky girl, but her perspective and lively nature really do come across well. Marino, on the other hand, is also “Manticore”, a high-ranking member of the Kiraboshi Order of Bizarre Fanservice. However, she wants to protect her sister, and thus works at least somewhat against the rest of the Kiraboshi.
Things get more complicated when Mizuno is put under a great deal of stress by her troubled home life. She tries to flee the island, something we’ve been told the Shrine Maidens can’t do… and it turns out that’s a good deal more literal than we would have believed. Mizuno’s attempt to leave resets the day, where she writes off her memories as a dream and tries again. And again. Nothing she can do can get her off the island, not while her seal is active. Watching her go through the wringer, increasingly desperate to escape and not understanding what’s keeping her from doing so or why, is emotional in the ways it’s supposed to be. The whole scenario gets even more twisted as it turns out that Marino isn’t actually real; she’s a magically conjured existence, created by Mizuno’s powers. Mizuno never had a sister, she was just so alone that she dreamed one into existence.
Mercifully, as the Mizuno-Marino arc wraps up, we do discover that the creation of Marino had ontological inertia (that is, despite being generated as an imaginary friend given life, Marino isn’t just going to disappear into the aether). Also in the fortunate category, at least for the show actually moving forward and doing something with its running time, Mizuno’s seal gets nullified. This causes her (and Marino with her) to leave the island never to be seen again in the show’s run-time, and empowers the Kiraboshi Order of Constant Failure so that they theoretically present something more like a threat than what they’d been doing so far.
Unfortunately, we spend a lot of the next arc on rematches, including with a pair of new Kiraboshi whose “Creepy bisexual girl pair” dynamic is not as interesting, engaging, or watchable as the show seems to think it is given the screen time dedicated to these characters.
The last turn, and it’s a good one, comes from Sugata. Sugata has both been suffering a supernatural malady for a good deal of the show’s run. Outwardly he seemed to have recovered from it, but he’s actually been secretly treated by Kate, another Shrine Maiden and also a member of the Kiraboshi Order of Infighting, who is head over heels for Sugata. Sugata also happens to be the proper master of the dormant ultimate Cybody, and is thus the sort of person that the Kiraboshi would love to recruit. And after discovering Kate’s care for him in a late hour, Sugata actually does turn, becoming the Kiraboshi Emperor.
And I know I’ve been harping on the Kiraboshi costumes this whole time, but Emperor Sugata’s getup bears special dishonor-roll mention. It looks like a peacock that choked to death attempting to swallow the Burger King, so now the King has to go around up to his armpits in bird. Way to get a stuttering laugh on what should have been a powerful reveal of a former hero’s new allegiance, Star Driver.
Of course, Sugata is still doing what he’s doing for noble goals, and in the last episodes he has a plan to free Wako from being trapped on the island by her seal and also destroy the threat of the Cybodies forever, which goes alright until the part where Head totally mech-jacks him and initiates the True Final Battle. Once Head, Sugata, and Sugata’s super-cybody are various degrees of defeated, the show stops. I say ‘stops’ because it doesn’t really provide much of a conclusion and really no denoument, but all the same it’s pretty clearly over.
There is another good element I’d like to highlight: the setting backstory and how it’s presented in the show. Through the first major arc, Head has the last Shrine Maiden I haven’t called in a human-sized birdcage in his place, her seal broken in the first episode before the attempt on Wako. Before each Mech fight, Head, playing the languid bored urbane villain he pretends to be when you still have hope that this show will at least be cheesy enough to be enjoyable, asks her to tell a story. In what seems to be an off-the-cuff offering, the Shrine Maiden tells the story of “Sam the Squid-Piercer”, a great hero of the “Fish Planet” who goes on a dangerous quest to gain the king’s great ship that can sail to the stars so that he and his beloved can travel beyond. But, when he has it, he learns that he must sacrifice the person he loves most in order to make it go. The story of Sam the Squid-Piercer is told bit by bit over several episodes, with the Shrine Maiden seeming to get more animated and invested as she weaves the increasingly complex tale. There are even some good subtle notes (some of the only ones in the show) that the relationship between her and Head may not be as antagonistic as it looks at first. And after the last Sam section, we see it’s kind of true. She was never locked in nor her chains attached to anything, and she just walks out at that point, much to Head’s never-again-referenced sorrow. And while the meta-story around “Sam” is good, it’s also worth noting that while told as a strange little fairy-tale, it’s oddly engaging. I certainly felt more for what was happening in that story than to Wako.
As a side bonus, the Shrine Maiden finishes every one of her little story sessions by singing the song “Monochrome”, a beautiful yet bombastic number that functions as the background music for the lead-up to and execution of each of the battles in the arc. Monochrome, at least the version actually used in-show, is an amazing song and I dare say it was worth watching Star Driver just to have discovered it. Honestly, its return to score the final movement of the final battle was probably the biggest moment of cheer for me in the entire ending. The proper version is a little hard to find, but it’ll turn up if you search for it well.
In any case, this doesn’t initially seem to connect to anything, but there’s an episode later that puts it together. The Drama Club (which seems from this episode to be chaired by an alien observer, and which our heroes are also all members of) puts on an “original” play that functions as something of a prequel to Sam the Squid-Piercer, featuring Takuto as the man who first gains the magic ship, Wako as the girl whose heart he seeks, and so on. During the play, we get the occasional cut to the Cybodies behind the story. For instance, the defeated witch is briefly depicted as Marino’s shattered Cybody, which shared her name. The great ship, in this story a happy prize and in the tale of Sam the Squid Piercer a cursed thing, seems to be representative of Sugata’s Cybody. The play ends happy with Takuto and Wako’s characters off to journey, but Head (who went to see the school play) remarks that it was good the story stopped where it did, as it would inevitably end in tragedy (like Sam’s story did).
Does this stuff about Fish Planets and Aliens and Magic Ships make a lot of sense as an origin story for the Cybodies? Not exactly, but I’m not sure anything could given their numerous plot-convenient traits and statuses, and the Fish Planet stories do by that metric about as well as you could hope, which showing some subtlety and intelligence that gets real character out of, if not our dull heroes, at least our main villain.
This probably doesn’t sound so bad, but now it’s time to start with the problems.
First and foremost, the action in this action show is terrible. And I know what you’re thinking: didn’t I say this was a show with gorgeous animation? I did, and it is. However, there’s only so much that actually matters. Pretty animation is, maybe, third priority for an action scene behind the emotion and the choreography.
The choreography is where Star Driver fails the hardest. Good action, like you see in a show like Shakugan no Shana or Fullmetal Alchemist, has an ebb and flow to it. The characters don’t just pull fancy looking stunts, the tide of combat legitimately turns. And turns back. And turns again. We have time to get wrapped up in the experience, cheer for the hero to rally, and fear now and again that they won’t. What’s more, each major battle is different. The heroes face unique foes with notable powers and abilities that shape how they must be combated, and even in the case of a rematch the circumstances of the fight are different enough that the blocking and outcome are hugely different. The fight with Thousand Changes Sydonay in his appearance as a hired gun in the middle of season 1 doesn’t have a lot in common with trying to take him on when he’s defending the Palace of the Stars at the end of Season 1 or the Effigy of Pride at the end of season 2. Edward Elric clashes with Gluttony several times, but under different circumstances and with different additional forces on each side so it never gets stale.
In short, good action should be dynamic, engaging, and unique. Star Driver’s action is, for the most part, none of those things. For the first part, the fights in Star Driver are extremely short. In order to be sure of myself, I went back to one of the early episodes (Episode 5, for those curious) and timed it. “Monochrome” starts up at about the 16 minute mark, after the episode’s edition of Sam the Squid-piercer, but an extended sequence plays for both the villain of the episode and Takuto activating their mechs as the stage is set for the battle. In this particular episode, there are few small interjections, and it lasts until 18:45 when they all get down powering up and posing and someone actually goes on the attack. The enemy robot blows up at 20:45, followed by a somewhat less repetitive and extended denoument-of-battle sequence until, at 21:45, the episode’s combat sequence is completely finished. On the whole, I’d call that episode’s fight a very average Star Driver fight, essentially representative of what the show does in a majority of the episodes.
The entire sequence lasted for 5:45, which is actually very solid for an action show with a discrete battle (rather than a continuous conflict). I’d say most of the action sequences in the other shows I’ve highlighted this month have a fairly similar heft to them. Some would skew shorter and others longer, and all of them, even Demonbane would have more variance in the run time of combat per episode, but 5:45 is a fair and respectable run time. You can do a hell of a lot with 5:45.
However, only two minutes (on the dot!) of that is actually used for action. The remaining three minutes and forty-five seconds consist of the villain’s Cybody activation sequence, Takuto’s Magical Girl Style transformation and the simultaneous activation of his Cybody, and Takuto conjuring his magic light swords to fight with via over-the-top shouting. Then at the end there’s a bit of essentially reused animation where Tauburn looks over its shoulder at its defeated enemy as the explosion shoots into the sky and clears the technicolor nebula battlefield, and finally a short denouement scene with the villain emerging from their control pod and being stripped of their little badge, which at least has some unique dialogue to it unlike the rest of the 3:45 that’s on repeat.
Now, far be it from me to say that reusing animation, or even episode structure, is a bad thing. Lots of shows do it, and many of them make it work. But the writing has to have a sense of scale. To use a show I haven’t formally talked about yet, (almost) every episode of Cardcaptor Sakura features Sakura invoking her magic staff and cards with a sequence that is, with the exception of her outfit, the same every time. However, the wind-up for Sakura using her magic is typically much smaller than the time she spends using novel magic and/or having novel magic mess with her on either side of the invocation. There are exceptions, where she goes through the whole rigmarole for a fairly brief moment of doing magical girl things, but they’re few and far between compared to the editions where the repeated animation is used well. In Star Driver, the lead-up alone is close to half again as long as what we’re leading up to, and if you include the outro it’s nearly double instead. Even if you’re fairly patient and tolerant about the animation going on repeat for a long sequence because, hey, it’s a good sequence, the fact that it outweighs the “signal” of new and theoretically interesting material goes a long way to eroding that good will into nothing.
We’ve got some red flags already, and I haven’t even gotten to that two minutes of actual content yet. Because the fact is, if we were being served a really good two minutes, it would be entirely reasonable to accept that it comes in a 3:45 sandwich of repetition. The thing is, we’re not. Again, Episode 5 (which I used for my time figures) is a good example of what I’m talking about. The two minutes between when Takuto charges into battle and when his rival explodes features the mecha combat we’re getting but it’s also jammed with the villain blabbering to herself/the audience about her particular superpower and other similar “close-up of a face” dialogue. This is something that action media does all the time, and like the repeated animation it’s again not something that is technically wrong. We need to understand what’s going on in a fight, and when we’re talking about a genre with magic, alien robots, superscience, powers, and the like, we pretty much have to be told what the fighters are doing sometimes because the visual storytelling would not cut it without some exposition. Unlimited Bladeworks has a lot of characters that really like the sound of their own voice when it comes to cluing us in on what their spells or Noble Phantasms are doing, and it’s quite welcome. But Unlimited Bladeworks would also a lot more than two minutes for a major clash, interspersing the talking with a sufficiency of the characters actually using the awesome powers they’re talking about.
Star Driver doesn’t do that. It has two minutes for everything, exposition and utilization alike. As a result, there are a countable number of blows exchanged in the entire battle: Takuto makes the first strike, his opponent bats him around a bit to the tune of three or four good hits, and then Takuto finishes it off in one good blow. We don’t have the time to really soak up the feel of any of those movements because they’re required to have so very little to them in order to fit the short time-table.
Speaking of those movements and getting back to something I mentioned earlier, the movements are either too few or too short. Every Star Driver fight is like this: Enemy shows off new ability for a moment, Takuto counters it and one-hits them. Nobody has a plan b, nobody no-sells the finisher, nobody challenges Takuto on his own terms, and most damningly nobody shakes up the dynamic. I know I’m asking for this out of the Kiraboshi Order of the Disposable, but could somebody actually manage a second wind and an aura of menace rather than grandstanding for literally one minute and then taking the super-move on the chin?
A comparison can be made between good opponents in an action show and good bosses in action video games. They have similar needs to create a feeling of high tension, and thus a good boss fight will often naturally have a similar flow to a good action scene, with multiple phases that need to be mastered in order to succeed. Compared to the realm of video games, the Kiraboshi goons in Star Driver are all written and their encounters structured like one boss in particular: Glass Joe, the first and weakest rival in Punch-Out!. They have a singular trick and drop just as easily once a counter is landed.
Though, the blame doesn’t entirely lie on the Kiraboshi. It lies on the writers for setting it up like this. You could claim that Takuto is more the issue than his opponents; the Kiraboshi Order of Using Giant Robots For Fun And Profit does endow each of its members with a signature technique that’s different than all their other signature techniques. The one in episode five, for instance, can technically activate precognition to see moves seconds in advance, which should play out very differently than expert swordsmanship, bull charges, a conjured boxing ring, or any of the other powers and skills the Kiraboshi bring to the table. Takuto, however, counters it all by using basically one move, so the unique traits of his foes don’t end up mattering very much. He changes what that move is after the midpoint of the show, but he’s still firing on an extremely narrow move-set at any given time.
In good action, when faced with different foes, a hero approaches them in different ways. In Neon Genesis Evangelion, Ramiel prevents enemies from closing, forcing NERV to come up with a daring sniper plan with no margin for error in order to bring it down. In contrast, Israfel is taken out in hand-to-hand combat, but with the twist that Asuka and Shinji must do so in perfect synchronization. Every angel requires a different, sometimes radically different, approach to manage. Because of this, the battles with them are engaging to watch and memorable in the long term. While Takuto unlocks a new instant-win power a couple times, he rarely has to adapt in order to win. His path to unlocking the OHKO is, because the fights are so short and basic, always fairly straightforward. If we’re making an analogy to video games, Takuto is the player who has discovered a “cheap” strategy that the AI simply cannot counter and has no compunctions with spamming the action in question to win.
Whether or not you think that’s fun to do yourself, it’s no fun to watch as a third party. Star Driver’s action fails to be engaging or memorable as a result of its poor structure and lacking choreography. It didn’t have to be on the level of a great like Evangelion, but it needed to be better than it is.
Next, we come to the problems Star Driver’s action (and Star Driver as a whole) has with emotion and investment. While probably not quite as critical nor as critically failed as the structure of the action, this is another important element that trumps the fact that the animation looks pretty. In order to really get sucked into an action scene, to enjoy and appreciate it for all its worth, the audience needs to be invested in what’s happening. You can draw two figures executing a lot of cool combat moves, with a solid duration and a good interplay that sees them switching off who has the upper hand, full of near misses and dramatic comebacks… but if the audience literally does not care what the outcome of the fight is, it loses a good deal of its luster, becoming more of a curiosity than an effective and intense experience.
Part of doing this well is that stakes are important. We, the audience need to understand, on an emotional level, that something we care about is in jeopardy, and that something’s fate may be decided by the outcome of the action sequence. Stakes can be as objectively large as the fate of the world (or universe, or omniverse) or as objectively small as one character’s health (or general happiness, or specific and acute happiness regarding one particular event). That, frankly, doesn’t matter in a direct sense. What matters is the ability of the writers to make whatever’s at stake feel real and present for the audience, and Star Driver does none of that.
In abstract, Star Driver is a “big stakes” affair – if the Cybodies are unleashed from all of their seals, we’re told that it could have a disastrous effect on the entire world. We’re told this… but we don’t feel it. Part of the problem is that our villains, being the Kiraboshi Order of Unclear Motives, don’t present a unified threat. It’s hard to feel threatened by their organization when you don’t actually know what their evil plan is other than “Step 1: Unseal Cybodies. Step 2: ???. Step 3: Profit”. In fact, we don’t even know that! Some of the leaders of the various sects within the Kiraboshi are out for profit, while others seem to want control, prestige, or just to achieve what their family line has been working towards. We know the Cybodies are powerful machines with varied capabilities, and that they’re especially good at fighting so they’d probably be used for fighting… but would they try to take over the world despite the fact that the world is a bloody big place, wander the earth as an unstoppable team of soldiers of fortune, reverse-engineer the arcane technology of the Cybodies to utilize in battlefield and civilian products, or what? They could use those Cybodies to commit genocide (though most of the Kiraboshi we encounter seem a little too lighthearted and fruity for that) or make shoes for orphans, we really don’t know.
And yes, we are told, multiple times, that it would be bad. Power balance this, that, and the other thing. But there’s not a path or a roadmap, or a sensible chain of cause and effect. And okay, maybe it’s a mystery. For most of Neon Genesis Evangelion’s run we don’t know why an Angel carving its way to Terminal Dogma would result in “Third Impact” (itself a nebulous end-of-the-world scenario). But the continual assault of these otherworldly beings and their seemingly single-minded struggle to get to that win condition means you feel the threat. Seeing the devastation they wreak on their way, you believe that everything could and would be destroyed if the Angels have their way. That way, even if we don’t understand why the Angels are bad news, we believe that they are. In a similar way, in Demonbane we don’t really know what the endgame of the Black Lodge is for most of the show, but we do know that they kill people, blow up large swaths of city, and so on. They’re generally cruel and nasty pieces of work, card-carrying villains who obviously will bring ruin and destruction if they seize power, whether we ‘get’ the esoteric end of their aims or not. With the Kiraboshi, I’m not feeling it the same way. They’re an assortment of horny teens, spoiled rich, muscle-brain fighters, and a couple schemers salted throughout the lot. If you give these goofballs ultimate power, they’ll probably use it badly, but not obviously in the way the show wants us to think.
That leaves the immediate stakes: what’s on offer right here and right now, in the moment? They’ll nullify Wako’s seal which when you take out the threat of the Cybody onslaught because we’ve got no idea what would follow if that occurred, means what exactly? We see one seal nullified in the first episode and it looks like it kind of hurts, so I guess that would be mean to Wako, but it would also free her from being stuck on the island which we’re told is something holding her back so I guess it’s not that mean. The show could still make that work if it knew where to focus, but it doesn’t focus on Wako’s fear or distress at the prospect of having her seal nullified for her own sake. She doesn’t really seem scared by it, on a personal level. She’s scared some of the unspecified Kiraboshi evil-doing and maybe a little of being manhandled by a giant robot, but her own health, happiness, and wellbeing aren’t discussed or meaningfully endangered.
And, the emotional stakes in the action let me segue to my next problem: the emotional stakes in the show in general.
The writers, or at least someone on the writing staff, could do good work with this. Mizuno’s fear, isolation, and pain are handled very well in her arc, so there is emotionally effective material in this show. It’s just a pity that it has nothing to do with the main characters. Our core trio of Takuto, Sugata, and Wako are very thinly sketched, being left as basically empty vessels that could be discarded and replaced fairly easily. I give Takuto some credit that, while he does have a lot of generic hero time, he at least has something resembling a consistent and unique personality. It’s not much, but his dogged dedication to the “no-kill fighter” deal does constitute the start of a character. Sugata could have been better, but the show doesn’t treat him very well. The Emperor Sugata arc ultimately doesn’t have the time it needs to work (more on that later) and during the final act of the show… I don’t know, maybe his voice actor had strep throat or something, because the poor boy gets barely any lines to let us know he feels about all these monumental changes going on in his life. Instead he just kind of… broods. And Wako… Wako is the walking incarnation of the neutral female. She says little interesting, does little interesting, and exists solely as the McGuffin, desired by Sugata and Takuto for romantic reasons and the Kiraboshi for Seal Nullification. Wako doesn’t have any thoughts or opinions of her own, remaining a perfectly passive prize to be pursued. Hell, the show even ends with her giving a very hollow speech about how very hard it is for her to “love two people”, referring to her never choosing or expressing a real preference between Takuto and Sugata. The difficulty (poorly explained in that little ending speech) isn’t something that had ever been a matter for her before then, either.
It’s hard to like her when she doesn’t seem to really have any likes or dislikes of her own. She is one of the most dull and uninteresting characters I have ever met, utterly generic and indecisive. Inori had more personality, even if it came out when it was largely moot. Princess Peach has more personality.
Long story short, we don’t care about our main characters. The time and effort that should have been spent developing them is instead wasted week by week on the Kiraboshi Order of Pointless Arcs. The Kiraboshi side characters get more development and focus than our leads do. And maybe that would be alright, since they largely get one episode while the leads theoretically have the whole show, but the time for the leads to shine is never found. Instead, they’re a trio of dreary gray blobs in a colorful world. Even when they threaten to have meaningful character arcs, those are fairly botched.
For instance, Takuto, we learn, is on the island at least in part in search of his deadbeat dad. And, when Takuto finds him, he’s going to punch him in the face. Said poor parent is also revealed (to the audience before the characters) to be none other than Head. So you think maybe they’re going to go somewhere dramatic with this, and make a big deal out of the familiar reunion and inevitable punch, like maybe the “punch to the face” will be Takuto’s finishing blow in the final battle, or if he learns sooner than it will make for a much more intense and engaging rivalry, like the discovery by the audience of the relation between Holland and Dewey Novak in Eureka Seven does.
Nope! Takuto finds a fairly random moment, on foot, to slug Head after figuring out the secret, and their interactions in the last arc don’t really have anything to do with being father and son. You could take their relationship out entirely and it wouldn’t change anything about how they play off each other as hero and villain. Takuto is no more incensed against Head than he would be against anybody else doing evil things, and Head doesn’t seem to spare so much as a thought to the fact that he’s doing battle with his own offspring. This is why I left such a reveal out of my plot summary; it’s an irrelevant detail. For the love of Haruhi, Kazuma and his father, estranged though they were, at least were acknowledged as having a relationship that transcended the bounds of the plot-required interactions between them, and that show was pretty bad.
And here we have Star Driver’s biggest failing: I don’t care. I never cared. It wasn’t able to convince me to care. Nothing the show did got me invested in the lead characters nor the central struggle. And if you’re not at least a little invested, you’re not enjoying yourself.
Now, I promised I’d talk about Emperor Sugata, and so I shall. In my mind, that turn of events – Sugata learning all about Kate and, with her at his side, joining the Kiraboshi and in fact taking them over – was the point where they could have saved a good deal of the show. There should have been something of a meaty arc after the turn, giving us a chance to really see Sugata’s motivation and conviction, how he deals with now fighting his friends and how they deal with the fact that their steadfast ally now sees the path forward as being through their enemy’s temporary victory. I’d want to see Wako bloody well CARE that the boy she supposedly loves and has spent much of her life betrothed to, while still having strong feelings for her, is now up for giving her away to the other man. Is she relieved? Grateful? Or is she instead jilted and bitter at the thought of being replaced? I want to see Head scramble and machinate; he tried to recruit Sugata earlier, even though Sugata’s ascension ends up being against his interest in such a way that he needs an eleventh hour power up to take his place as final boss. So, Sugata is here and invoking the endgame ahead of schedule – what does Head do that makes us actually fear him?
Already, in the show as it is, the more sympathetic Kiraboshi get a redemption arc (really, more of a moment) in the final battle, so why not draw it out? We get a ton of internal conflict out of the Kiraboshi Order of Backstabbing, why not see how and where and why it plays out in response to Sugata? In having him turn, the writers had a brilliant idea, but they failed to actually execute it to its potential because they didn’t spend the time on it that it deserved. And when there’s so much fat earlier in the show with the creepy couple and the one-off Kiraboshi, that really is a shame.
So, what’s my final verdict on Star Driver? In my mind, it gets a D. The competence shown with some of the secondary elements, particularly the arc centered around Mizuno and Marino, is enough to drag the show out of Fail range. There are a couple dynamite scenes with those secondary characters, and while the action in the show is largely so very bad, there are three action sequences that work as well: the first battle with Head when Mizuno’s seal is nullified works at least a little, the final battle is at least as grand as it ought to be, and once again in the middle arc the battle against Marino’s Cybody is unique and atmospheric, with enough of a special flair to the struggle that I would have forgiven the show a good deal more if the same effort had been put into all the normal episode fights.
That said, while it has upsides, it is without doubt not a good show. I wouldn’t rewatch it and I wouldn’t recommend it. There are bits and pieces here that could serve as the building blocks of a good show, one that’s fun and vivacious, a kind of midpoint between Eureka Seven’s love and passion and Demonbane’s cheesy insanity. But Star Driver isn’t that show, it’s an action show where the action is terrible, and a teen drama where we don’t give a crap about the teens. If you get a chance to pass it up, do so.