You know it, you love to see it: a world where it’s the modern day except secret ghosts and ghouls menace reality and are fought off by equally secret heroes. It’s the urban fantasy masquerade action classic formula. It’s Ga-Rei-Zero.
Our story starts with members of a special task force, dedicated to keeping unknowing modern Japan safe from the things that go bump in the night. We follow Section Four, which includes an obvious main character plant, a tough dude with some “obsessed cop” trauma related to a supernatural that manifests as a little boy attended by blue butterflies as his calling card, and an obvious partner in the form of a tough action girl who can outright fight monsters using her blessed motorcycle as a weapon.
Along with their teammates, mysterious chill boss, and of course the shadowy council of obstructive bureaucrats overseeing things, Section Four clashes with various specters that are invisible to normals: Category C phantoms, which seem like fodder, and two deadly Category B Kasha, which can flip cars and take a lot of effort to defeat, one some epic motorcycle and gunplay stunts and the other turning an entire dam sluice-way into holy water to drown/exorcise it.
As the team celebrates beating the second B rank, we spot more of those blue butterfly calling cards and a young lady in a black schoolgirl outfit and wielding a katana shows up. She’s briefly called out as a “category A” and promptly… slaughters the entire cast. All of them. There are no survivors. Obvious main character? Dead. Awesome biker lady? Dead. Even mission control gets murdered by little miss Category A’s allies in the last couple of minutes of episode one. This entire setup was, in fact, a complete and total mislead as to what the show would be about or who would be involved.
Sadly or gladly, this isn’t just some weird prequel to Blood-C showing Saya in her “threat to humanity” days, and the show continues.
We pick up with the cavalry, a different elite squad from a different and more experienced ministry who have to fight a regenerated Kasha, a bunch of zombie-making invisible metroids, and so on as their boss gets her in with the bureaucrat council that ran team dead. About as boss lady finds something in the footage of Section Four’s demise, the Saya cosplayer (identified as Yomi Isayama) shows up to the new elite squad, opening with culling the faceless grunts. She is apparently a former member of the squad, but now as a paranormal whatever, she’s got to be put down. Her apparent best friend, Kagura, is there too, also incongruously a schoolgirl among suit-wearing official-type veteran people.
Yomi summons a big goofy monster and flees with it after one attack, leaving a horde of zombies as a parting gift. Kagura and a guy we learn had been Yomi’s fiancee break off and descend into the undercity to track her down. They split up even further, because splitting the party is a great idea, and Kagura is confronted by Yomi. Kagura actually out-skills Yomi despite her apparent supernatural power and gets Yomi at her mercy, but can’t kill a former friend. Yomi has no such compunctions, turning the tables on a crying Kagura, revealing that she already butchered her former fiancee in the process.
Kagura disengages and threatens to take out Yomi by rupturing a gas line and causing a massive explosion, but when she exits the underground, she gets caught by an uninjured Yomi and her pet monster, which grabs Kagura’s arm in its jaws and holds her nice and still for Yomi to play with her food. Yomi cuts open Kagura’s shirt because… I don’t know, it’s not even fanservicey, but then as the episode closes she cuts at Kagura, furious at being called “big sister” and with the sound effect strongly implying that two episodes in Yomi has killed everybody else who might have been worth remembering two times.
I’ve got to hand it to Gai-Ren-Zero, that’s at least a little different. I mean, there’s a clear reason it’s not done more, but it’s different!
Yomi’s strike causes the show to enter flashback land. Three years ago, Yomi and Kagura meet when Kagura’s mother dies and her father takes up a full-time exorcist role in her place, prompting Yomi’s father, the new head of the clan, to basically adopt Kagura. Yomi, already a katana-wielding schoolgirl who otherworldly fights monsters in her spare time despite her normally chipper demeanor (reinforcing the resemblance to Blood-C), is both Kagura’s bodyguard and her new big sis.
The two of them bond, with the initial dynamic being that Kagura is a shell of a person who doesn’t know much outside of training and Yomi, much better adjusted, tries to bond with her and bring her around. Yomi is actually quite successful and as the two get a little older, a now happy and fulfilled Kagura joins her in working part time for the government doing exorcisms with the team we see in Episode 2.
The show progresses in this line for quite some time: mostly the sisters (though doubly not by blood – Yomi is adopted and her adoptive father is a branch family head distantly related to Kagura’s) bonding and going through the growing pains of being schoolgirl exorcists. Kagura has trouble with human-shaped or formerly-human foes like zombies and possessed because she doesn’t want to kill, but by in large the action stays a minor part of their lives as we get to learn more about their circumstances
Eventually, Yomi’s cousin and uncle are introduced, who want to secure family head position for their line rather than letting it fall to Yomi the way her father (who is very good to her) wants. All part of the complicated web including her engagement (which sees her and fiancee doing the kind of dance only a top-tier Tsundere and hot-tempered guy who really love each other can do), the ties to Kagura’s family, and so on.
This comes to a head when the little white-haired boy with the butterflies reappears. He takes out the cousin, herself a talented exorcist, while the mayhem he’s raised means that Kagura has to put down the school nurse she was close with, and where a couple of her friends can see it at that. The cousin doesn’t stay dead, though, seemingly restored with the dark butterfly power while Kagura busily spends most of an episode having a meltdown at what she’s done. We see the seeds of Yomi’s jealousy regarding Kagura’s skill yet unwillingness to employ it that seemed to drive her hatred in episode 2, but smothered under a very tender scene with her fiancee.
Then Yomi’s father is found brutally murdered – by his possessed niece, but it’s not as though anyone in-character knows that. Uncle seizes control of the family, and he and his daughter basically take everything from Yomi – her inheritance, her role, her room in the house, her hopes for marriage, and even the sacred sword she wielded. That last one bites the girl in the rear, though, as drawing the blade causes her to remember her death and everything she’s done under possession, leading to another encounter with the little boy mastermind. This corrupts her fully and causes her to draw Yomi into a duel to the death while everyone else important is busy elsewhere.
Cousin acts a lot like Episode 2 Yomi, consumed by the darkest corners of her emotions. Yomi manages to get the upper hand and overwhelm her seeming-immortality to finish off her father’s killer, despite the fact that she snaps back to her normal personality and begs for her life at the end. Unfortunately for her, the white-haired kid shows himself to her afterwards and takes her out.
However, unlike her cousin, she’s not taken over immediately – she’s stabbed 108 times and crippled with nerves and tendons severed, but left alive and in that state. We spend basically an entire episode with Yomi in the hospital, mute and bedridden, having to watch as the last vestiges of her life are stripped away with the white-haired boys words to her festering in her mind along with her guilt over killing her cousin. This eventually brings her to a low enough state that the boy senses. He reappears and uses his evil magic rock to heal her injuries and turn her to the Dark Side.
Thus, we catch up to the present: it seems Yomi’s disappearance before her reappearance at the end of Episode 1 was very recent, leaving Kagura with no time to work through her problems and Yomi’s fiancee, who was getting into the “obsessed cop” role with her case, clearly off his game. We’re early in the night, though, as Yomi goes after her wormy uncle to get her sword back and Kagura gets the moral support she needs to start facing those Kasha monsters, with an eye to facing and saving Yomi from whatever’s taken her.
As the timeline retreads Episode 2 we actually see Yomi’s confrontation with her fiancee, and that he wasn’t able to bring himself to kill her even when she told him to, and used one of their coworkers as a hostage. Of course, she wasn’t willing or able to kill him, either. The coworker? Totally dead. This is still a dark show and still corrupted Yomi we’re talking about.
We thus end Episode 10 with the resolve to the cliffhanger from Episode 2, when Kagura is saved at the last second by the appearance of her father, ready to kick ass.
Dad gets Yomi on the ropes, but only bound in chains, calling out to a wounded and wavering Kagura to finish her. In Kagura’s moment of hesitation, Yomi takes advantage of the situation. She has her summon attack Kagura and when dad has his summoned monster interpose, Yomi’s chains loosen enough for her to break free and strike him down. Further cavalry arrives a moment too late, and Yomi, though reaching the end of her strength for the moment, escapes.
As the main team reals from loss and betrayal, Yomi finds, in a moment of lucidity, that the dark magic that has her in its grasp won’t even let her kill herself. But, the darkness soon takes back over, and she starts bumping off the teams of seers that act as the agency’s eyes and ears.
Meanwhile, it seems that dad’s not quite dead yet, despite the gaping chest wound. However, he’s weakened enough that death is certain, giving him just enough time to make up with his daughter before kicking the bucket and leaving her with the ultimate power and ultimate burden of their family.
Most of the final episode is dedicated to the Yomi versus Kagura showdown, over the course of which Kagura finally finds her resolve to fight, to put down what’s left of her beloved sister despite, or even because, of how much she loved her. White haired boy doesn’t interfere, but tells the audience this isn’t over.
We then cut to a longish epilogue two years later. The squad (what’s left of it in a lot of senses) is doing their things. Kagura’s friends relate that she disappeared to them, and they’re starting to doubt whether all the ghost and monster stuff was real. As for Kagura? She seems to have a new boyfriend, and hair grown out as if in imitation of Yomi. They fight monsters side by side. Thus ends Ga-Rei-Zero.
A note on the production: Ga-Rei-Zero is an anime-original prequel to the manga Ga-Rei, in which Yomi evidently does appear despite her seeming death here in Zero. I guess Phantoms or people turned into phantoms don’t stay down very well. And by the fact I’m relating this, I can kind of say that Zero did its job: as a prequel and an advert, it made me look up the source material with positive interest.
True, a good portion of Zero feels like the remix of every other supernatural battler. But, as I’ve often said, something doesn’t strictly have to be original to be good. As viewers, even as reviewers, we yearn for the truly novel and brightly original. But while that’s typically the most exciting sort of find, I must none the less acknowledge that refining the familiar and honing it into a superior version is also plenty worthwhile, and that’s what Ga-Rei-Zero does.
I think you can really compare Ga-Rei-Zero to Venus Versus Virus, which came out a year earlier. Both shows are urban fantasies where the defenders of humanity, largely in secret, bump back against the things that go bump in the night. Both stories center around two girls with a strong bond. Both stories feature a good deal of weight on magical corruption, dealing with whether or not it’s right and when it’s necessary to kill something that used to be human, and perhaps even still has some degree of humanity. Both stories have one of the girls become swallowed up by the darkness, and that largely at the hands of a mysterious magician villain who doesn’t amount to a whole lot directly. And both stories start in media res, if not with the final battle then at least with something very close to it.
If you’ve not read my review of Venus Versus Virus, allow me to summarize: I didn’t like it. But Ga-Rei-Zero does right everything that Venus Versus Virus did wrong. Let’s take for example a topic I really harped on when reviewing that other show, the decision to have most of the show be a flashback from an opening scene that takes place at the end. In Venus Versus Virus, it was one scene of the main girls fighting with no real context. In Ga-Rei-Zero, ignoring the WTF Episode 1 for the moment (I’ll get to it), we got an entire episode that set up the broad strokes of who these characters are, why they’re fighting now, and why that might be complicated.
Further, in Venus Versus Virus opening like that seemed to serve no purpose. Since it didn’t set up enough emotion or context, it was just showing us some action at the start, and there was enough of that at the proper start. In Ga-Rei-Zero, the meat of the show is a slow-burn drama of the sisters bonding and working out their lives, an exercise that, because of episode 2, you know is going to end in tragedy. Having that information colors all the chronologically earlier work, because you understand that you’re seeing the sequence of events that drives Yomi to the dark side and also makes it hard for Kagura to put her out of her misery. At the same time, seeing all this – the bulk of the show – makes the events of the first and last episodes a lot more powerful, because you’ve really experienced the road leading up to them. You understand Yomi’s pain, and the power that has her in its grasp, because we saw what she’s like, felt what she went through, and witnessed what it did to her cousin before her. You understand Kagura’s pain as well, because you were there for all the good times, the two of them growing as close as real sisters, and you know that Kagura’s not yet hardened to a life of slaughter.
There is a solid argument that you could probably have told Zero chronologically, going from episode 3 to 9 before running 10 and 2 in parallel and then finishing off with 11 and 12. But while that would tell the story just fine, I think it would miss a small something. Not knowing that Yomi would face corruption, her downward slide would ironically be a good deal more miserable and hard to watch. It hurts enough knowing she ends up a baddie, and thus will probably get to avenge herself as well as doing bad things, and with the perspective that you probably shouldn’t empathize with her overmuch because she’s going a bad place. Without that, it would be nothing but feeling bad for her. And, of course, while Ga-Rei-Zero does have plenty of fighting, there’s actually not a lot near the start of the flashback, so getting that action taster is more relevant.
So, let’s talk episode 1. When I went over this in the summary I may have quipped a bit, and it does deserve that. Make this whole colorful cast just to be kill fodder for the real one? That’s kind of a gimmick, and one that stands a fair chance of alienating audience at that. It feels like the move of a show that’s going for pure shock value without intelligence, rather than what Ga-Rei-Zero actually is: a show that can work subtle emotions and form a strong connection that will then be used to deliver what blows it needs.
All the same, it’s not as though it’s in service to nothing. If we had opened on Episode 2, we’d have no idea what this situation is like or what kind of danger Yomi represents. By having the serial escalation of forces in episode 1 – the grunts taking out weak spirits, the Kasha taking out grunts, the “main character” squad taking out Kashas, and finally Yomi taking out the main character squad – it creates a palpable sense that this schoolgirl with a katana is serious business.
Is it worth it? In my mind, probably. It’s absolutely a trick to not try to repeat and that would backfire really easily, but in context I guess it does balance out the price involved in subverting audience expectations like that.
So, what’s the finally grade for Ga-Rei-Zero? I have to ask myself a few questions. Did it do anything great? I think it did: it created great characters. Sure most of the accessory characters are single-noted design sheets, but Yomi and Kagura are deep, complex, dynamic, and interesting. I could watch either of these characters alone and when you put them together they play off each other with all the chemistry you’d expect out of the roles they’re given and then some. Did it do anything wrong? Not really. There were quite a few ways in which Ga-Rei-Zero gambled, and while it didn’t always win those gambles, neither did it entirely lose. As much as episode 1 has to be mocked, I would have been interested enough just from pure morbid fascination with what just happened to go on to two and get the real hook.
But there are a few places where, without failing, Ga-Rei-Zero falters. The setting is either relying on a load of cultural touchstones that aren’t familiar to westerners like me (when I can actually pick out and recognize the names of various youkai and spirits like Kashas, Nueh, Yamabiko…) or isn’t explored as deeply as it could or perhaps should be, and I’m leaning towards the latter. We learn about enough about Vanquishers and the magic system around them to understand the emotions the sisters are going through. We know they’re both heirs to dangerous jobs, and that Kagura in particular will have a spiritual component liable to bitterly shorten her life like it did for dear old dad at the end. We get that “evil energy” attracts spirits and causes a feedback loop of more evil energy, but there’s not a great concept of what that means for the setting. Clearly, secular forces are aware of the supernatural and they don’t seem particularly inclined to keep everything totally secret, but at the same time the world mostly plays out like there’s a masquerade going on.
And of course there are elements that are clearly meant to be resolved in the Ga-Rei manga itself, like the white-haired boy and the brief intercuts to all his weirdness. Knowing this is a prequel, it makes perfect sense, but within the context of Zero we don’t know who he is, what he wants, or why he wants it. He’s got an evil rock in place of one eye and even gives us the evil rock’s whole backstory but… was he normal before it got installed in him? Is he corrupted like Yomi and her cousin? Was he ever human? Why is he here? Why is he going though this circuitous scheme of empowering others and never actually fighting himself even though he can take out badasses like Yomi without a saving throw? And why does he then just watch without a care in the world as to the outcome? That’s a lot to not know about the main driving force behind team evil. This isn’t like the Star Wars prequels – Palpatine is simple, he wants power and control and it’s not easy to take. I think we even knew more about the bad guy in Venus Versus Virus than we do about the kid here, and he was terrible.
At the end of it all, my grade for Ga-Rei-Zero is an A. If you want some dark bloody action brilliantly paired with some emotional slice of life sisterly bonding, this is your show.