Sit back, relax, and prepare your senses, because we are cracking into some vintage anime!
Vintage mecha shows, in particular, kind of hit differently a lot of the time. I have some theories as to why that is, but the most obvious is that mechs were some of the first things to be commonly animated with CG technology. Classically hand drawn mechas tend to have more weight to their movements than the smooth flow afforded by CG, which especially when you’re dealing with a real robot affair rather than a magical super robot one, can actually accentuate the experience.
This brings us to Gasaraki, a mecha show with real robots (in some senses), strange mysticism, and an extremely dense cloak-and-dagger political plot. Let’s watch it!
The show begins in a world where humanoid robots are an emergent tech, still in the testing phase rather than practical. We follow… honestly, a whole load of shadowy government suits looking to do a little war profiteering, but mostly test pilot Yushiro Gowa. Most of the shadowy Japanese suits are his powerful family, the Gowa clan.
Yushiro is also tied to the mystical side of this show. It’s odd, in a show that’s otherwise fairly down to earth, but it pretty much begins with a mystical ceremony where Yushiro is put into a trance in order to do a Noh performance that will summon some sort of mystical energy the suits are interested in, which only fails when a mysterious green-haired waif challenges him in mindspace and insists he not revive the terror.
With the last minute failure of that test, we leave the magic stuff aside for a while and instead focus on the United States using a shabby pretense to accuse a middle eastern nation of having weapons of mass destruction in order to gather a Western coalition and invade… when did Gasaraki come out again? 1998? Are we really that predictable?
In any case, the coalition actually struggles because the defenders may have their own mechas, which prompts the suits to sell their version to the world in order to turn the tables in terrain-heavy urban combat. This sees Yushiro deployed in order to put the machines through their paces in a live environment and convince the West to buy.
During the fighting, Yushiro encounters the young lady he saw in his mind-space. She’s called Miharu and she’s an enemy mecha pilot, affiliated with the country’s backers, a shadowy group known as Symbol. Shortly thereafter, Symbol decides the country is no longer worth bothering with, so they arrange a coup and surrender to the UN. Before Yushiro leaves, he’s drawn to the girl, Miharu, once again, and manages to form a mortal connection with her and get… not really any answers, but a layer or so deeper into the mystical nonsense that binds them.
After a fraught trip back to Japan, Yushiro and Miharu meet again when Miharu investigates him and finds he’s recorded as dead eight years ago. This knowledge causes Yushiro to investigate from his own angle, leading him to the fact that this is true in some sense (he has some kind of early amnesia, so he didn’t know), and back to the lair of his Noh master, the cave with the spooky stuff from episode 1.
There, he finds what look like clones of him and a bunch of cryptic talk from the old guy. Miharu’s team raids the site, but Yushiro enters a trance and awakens the ancient demonic samurai mecha called the Kugai.
Kugai trashes both Miharu and the other pilot with her, but spares and sort of captures Miharu herself, presumably because Yushiro still has some will. It’s unclear where this came from (and Yushiro is told to go to Kyoto to learn more) but it’s here now, this seemingly semi-alive monstrous thing that Miharu referred to as a false god that will bring the Terror.
Yushiro is dedicated to going on his trip to learn more. Miharu, who claims to have been there before (with him) goes along with Yushiro. Yushiro’s big-bro-obsessed little sister seems to be following their path, and with the help of a member of his squad, catches up just before they all get captured.
Following a sidequest for Yushiro, the Gowa family’s internal order gets shaken up when dad is deposed in favor of the most slimy and scheming of the brothers, who is working with a group that want to do a coup and make Japan great again by ruling through fear and driving out immigrants. On Yushiro’s line, he learns he is a “kai” and, with Miharu, follows the “path of the kai” again for answers. The audience gets those answers in that the kai seem to have been the special mecha pilots of an ancient clan who ruled as shadowy puppet masters and who were responsible for summoning and operating Kugai in order to enforce their will.
The titular Gasaraki is also defined here as the sort of power or deity that is contacted/contracted to provide the terror and the Kugai.
The two make their way to a run-down shrine with an inactive Kugai, where they experience a multi-episode flashback to what appear to be their past lives, at the end of the first era in which Kugai were used. There, their not-exactly-forbidden kinda-romance causes the downfall of the Kai and the clan that held them, with Yushiro banishing the terror and Mahiru striking down her power-mad elder brother.
The flashback experience does not do good things to the psyche of the Mahiru in the present. She ends up kind of a vegetable for the next arc, that sees them hiding out in the slums. They run in with a guy who has a tenuous connection to Symbol, while the Kooky Coup Clan makes plans about riots that will happen when America is forced to shut down grain exports, causing the prices of basic necessities to spike… there is a lot of shady folks talking in darkened rooms in this show in general, and especially as it heads on to the climax.
Hunted both by the Gowas and Symbol, Yushiro tries to flee with Mahiru and his new friend, but Symbol is on them and they manage to nab the still-not-recovered Mahiru.
Yushiro then falls somewhat out of focus as we get the schemes about the price of grain, and the Japanese conspiracy planning to beggar the world because this is somehow a moral imperative while the CEO of Symbol bandies back the philosophical talk like some sort of ageless entity while goading the Americans into acting on their worst and Yushiro’s kinda-brother thinks he’s going to be the shadowy puppet master of the world.
In a skirmish, Miharu starts to summon the dark powers, but Yushiro interrupts her and talks her into reclaiming her soul, at which point she buggers off saying they’ll meet again for sure but there’s something she has to do.
Yushiro and the gang fight off the deniable assets. Rather than pulling the trigger on mutually assured economic destruction, the president of the US lifts the grain export ban, which causes the top conspirator who was babbling about beggaring the world to call off his plan, and then off himself in the face of the one play that wasn’t part of his philosophical nonsense.
However, that still leaves the Gowa schemer and Symbol in play for… the final episode? It feels like there’s at least a minor act of stuff available. You know, a few things left unresolved here. In just the lines I’ve mentioned there’s the Gowa guy who wants to be puppet master of the world, Symbol doing whatever it is they do, their immortal boss, Miharu challenging them from the inside, and then the entire supernatural angle. There are even more plot threads, like the Kugai that did a thing exactly once in the present responding to the little sister who has been in the show constantly without doing anything of import. This is all going to be tied up in one episode?
They decide to just go esoteric. Little sister gets used as the Kai to try to create an artificial Kugar because… something about the main Gowa schemer wanting absolute destruction. This has some ramifications
We get a lot of mindscape scenes, the elder Kai pair (Miharu and Yushiro) race to the scene. Even that weird immortal CEO shows up to monologue some. I’ll give you the brief version. Kai have other memory of past lives, so their pain in particular can stretch over eons, and this is the beacon for the Gasaraki. This happens, the schemer thinks the Gasaraki will listen to him and make him a god. Everybody gets sucked into Gasaraki space, where it turns out the Gasaraki is a host of souls of damned would-be immortals who transgressed against reality in their quest to become immortal.
They tempt the assemblage with infinite power as vessels of the Gasaraki, who manipulated the history of life on earth to create the kai for this purpose of escaping weird purgatory. The offer is a pretty raw deal as most of the mortals point out that it would no longer be their will using the infinite power.
CEO melts into the amalgam apparently happy to die after two thousand years. Yushiro and Miharu convince the little sister to not give up on life so they can go back to reality and be, I guess, a happy family. Gowa schemer begs to be taken by the Gasaraki instead, so… he does. And disappears with them. Dunno what he hoped to achieve, but the show’s over.
Gasaraki was a profoundly strange show, and was particularly inconsistent all things considered. It led in with scientifically investigated supernatural nonsense, dropped that for an arc to do real robot mecha fighting, then decided to be about supernatural intrigue, then politics, then exceptionally detailed politics, and then it just finished with a big supernatural something-or-other for… no real reason except to have some kind of a climax, I guess.
That said, I did enjoy the vast majority of the show. The last episode, for all that I’m going to poke fun at it for being a clear evocation of Evangelion, did manage to tie off most of the dangling plot threads by making the sister useful, doing something with the supernatural side, and eliminating both the Symbol CEO and the Gowa schemer.
That said, it still feels stapled together. The robots never feel like they’re weird biomechas made from studying ancient otherworldly sources, they feel like Real Robot robots. When the mystical stuff gets going, it just drops the modern tactical combat, and then when we’re arguing about trade wars and global famine the supernatural side just gets shoved out of the picture until we need the last episode. Its only through-line is that Miharu and Yushiro have some kind of psychic bond while also being star-crossed mecha-pilots.
I’d love to say, oh drop this angle and that would fix it, but that’s not true here. Gasaraki does need both sides of its existence to really operate. I just wish they were better integrated throughout, maybe with a little less cloak-and-dagger politicking. I like that stuff as much as the next guy but we have the US, Japan, Gowa, Symbol, and the weird blind Japanese schemer who isn’t exactly a national interest even as he seemingly usurps authority who are all making power plays at least semi-independently. And then we have at least two slum gangs and a the starting middle east nation who are all relevant for parts of the show and who all have this complex web.
There is value in that, but there’s also value in telling a cleaner story. A lot of emphasis could be removed from the US as opposed to Symbol, and Symbol’s evil plan (which I guess was “CEO suicide by Gasaraki”) could be more the forefront. They’re an explicitly insanely wealthy multinational corporation, they could be the main baddies. They could even still use the Americans as puppets. And the fact that we have both Gowa and the blind guy over in Japan might be streamlined all the same. I’m not sure why we needed the latter when it was clear that Gowa was getting influence in the government through tactically placed family members and, ok, making giant death robots.
In the end, there’s no quick fix for Gasaraki… but it doesn’t need to be fixed all that much. The show has issues, and can be a strange, fractured viewing experience, switching between badass mecha combat and creepy dudes talking quietly in darkened rooms about important-sounding stuff, but all the sides do work. I’m going to issue this one a B. It’s heavy and dense and difficult to approach but I do think it’s worth the effort more than it isn’t.