Audience reviews
14 · Sample from the first available page, separate from the total number of ratings.
TheBigCheese400
Gasaraki left me wanting so much more. This should have been a high budget action movie and not a long drawn out series with tiny bits of action and lots of filler. Movies like Spriggan have little to no plot but because the animation is so well done, it stays memorable. Gasaraki could have been a cult classic if it went the movie route but instead its become a piece of obscure media that takes more effort than its worth to get any enjoyment out of it. If you're fine with skipping the boring parts to the cool mech scenes then its worth skimming through.
Read at the sourcecubelet
It's always awesome to see a good mecha series that doesn't bank on flashy fight scenes. The bipedal weapons here are presented as being very new technology to the battlefield, still very limited in many ways but much better suited for urban combat than tanks. Where the show really shines is in the story itself that it tells. It was deep and complex in itself, however the amount of time spent on any individual detail relevant to the core story wasn't quite enough to really drive it home all the way. It left it feeling like they just touched on most of the key points enough to keep it coherent but not quite enough to have me completely emotionally invested in it. Still, it's far beyond a great number of other mecha shows.
I also would've probably considered it worth much more if the charac…
Read at the sourcesyncrogazer
I could start off by saying that Gasaraki has a criminally low rating on this site. However, it makes sense that such a heady series wouldn't win over the hearts of wide-eyed mecha anime consumers who expect fight scenes to actually be mech fight scenes, and not the economic and diplomatic warfare that takes precedent in this anime. The attitude as expressed by raters here on MAL parallels the tension that defines the main theme of the series: the eternal and (probably) identical movement of progress and destruction.
Gasaraki takes place in a not-so-distant sci-fi future. Illegal immigration is a (seemingly) huge problem in Japan due to the effects of globalist economics, which has built up the illusion of economic superiority in developed, globalist economies. On the minds of the Japane…
Read at the sourcelawlmartz
The Evangelion Inspiration Saga Part 2: Not Really A Rip This Time
"He who would move the world cannot concern himself over the placement of pebbles. A god worries not over the cries of individual men. He must be detached, disinterested. That is why I can move this world." - Kazukiyo Gowa
At long last, my journey through anime inspired by (or directly ripping off) Evangelion continues with Gasaraki- an original Sunrise anime produced by Ryosuke Takahashi (creator of Blue Gender, assistant directed Ruroni Kenshin and has worked on many Sunrise mecha shows) and Gorou Taniguchi, who would later create and direct a little anime known as Code Geass.
Let me start by saying that Gasaraki is not for the every-man anime watcher. The show is a dense sociopolitical drama, drenched in hard science…
Read at the sourceQuiddity131
While most mecha anime lean towards fantastical premises, Gasaraki takes the opposite approach. The show portrays a realistic view of what mechs would be like in the modern world. Where so many mecha shows have a toy tie in, forcing elaborate designs and numerous different models, Gasaraki only has a few unique robots and they’re not the type you’d expect to make any toys from. If you are the type who is sick of how far out there the genre can be, this is a great show to watch where things are a lot more down to Earth.
The basic premise of the show is that the Gowa family, a powerful Japanese family has gotten into the industry of developing mechs known as Tactical Armors (TAs). When a mysterious explosion occurs in the middle-eastern country of Belgistan, the Gowa family jumps at the opp…
Read at the sourcebrynolf
Overall
First, this is a very slow and heavy anime to watch. It has big ambitions and demands a lot of focus from the viewer. Sadly, a great backstory gets demolished by a slow, dull and uninspiring execution.
Animation
Considering it was made in 1998, you shouldn’t expect too much graphics-wise. Particularly the characters look quite bad and uninspiring. Action sequences are confusing to the point where you don’t know who is who as all the mechas look basically the same. All is not bad though; there are unusually few recycled animations and still frames, and the dark style really creates a nice mood.
Sound
Voice acting is not bad per se, it’s just that the script runs along so slowly that every conversation turns out frustratingly calm, there is not much emotion showing at all. Backg…
Read at the sourceggultra2764
Gasaraki is one of the more trickier titles I've had to try figuring out in terms of what it wanted to tell and how to critique it. Focused on young mecha pilot Yushiro Gowa, the boy is treated as nothing more than a tool by his family who have considerable influence in Japan's military and political world, considering they have Yushiro become part of the country's military to test out their mecha, the Tactical Armor. This starts off the complicated tale of Gasaraki, a series that dabbles into political conspiracies, elements of Japanese folklore and the "real robot" genre of mecha anime.
Let's first tackle the simplest element of the series in the form of its "real robot" approach. Directed by the same man involved with 80s mecha title Armored Trooper Votoms, Gasaraki depicts a near-futu…
Read at the sourceYuvie
I was always quite eager to see this series and I managed to pick the set up cheap fairly recently. I'm not the biggest fan of mecha anime but I've been keeping an open mind and have started to appreciate them a little more now, as long as they're done properly. This series has quite an adult feel to it, it can be fairly political and it doesn't rely massively on mecha action. It's a slow paced series, which I normally quite like but I must admit, at times it did become a little tedious. Overall, the story is fairly simple until the very final episode. I thought the final episode itself was excellent and made the series worth watching in the end. I think it's fair to say that I had high expectations going into this series (I'm not sure why exactly) and it didn't live up to them but it was…
Read at the sourcecase649
Out of all the anime I've seen over the years that fall in and around the mecha genre, Gasaraki definitely has one thing going for it: Style.
The show is a fusion of unlikely elements: Gritty mechanized warfare that's so real it's almost boring with its endless chatter about maintenance and data collection. Elaborately costumed and choreographed traditional performing arts. Classical Japanese history. War in the Middle East. Trans-Pacific diplomacy.
Somehow Sunrise manages to fit all these individual pieces together into a nice-looking whole with a muted but satisfying color palette, consistent but not-too-formulaic episode pacing, and well selected musical choices that compliment the military and spiritual aspects of the show equally well, creating this harmonious whole that mecha fanat…
Read at the sourceceleste2070
I love this series because it's nothing like what you expect it to be. It's highly thoughtful and insightful into the relationships of large political families. When watching this anime, I think it's vitally important to go read up on the importance of the Noh play in Japan and what it actually MEANS. You will not be able to fully appreciate this series without having an appreciation of Noh (and wikipedia's article is totally insufficient to get this appreciation - I suggest a trip to your local library for a breifing of Japanese literature and art history). I literally had to go study up on the mythology and art utilized in this series immediately after the first time I watched it and then immediately watch the whole series over again to grasp what this story was trying to tell me. It's i…
Read at the sourceformosan
Gasaraki is a very unusual show. It doesn't mind being extremely poetic. It doesn't care that a lot of viewers will regard it as excessively high-brow. I think the director must have watched a lot of art films, especially Fellini.
Gasaraki is not a great show. It is not the next Cowboy Bebop. It does have a lot of elements that don't fit together very closely -- the giant robots don't fit well with the supernatural elements or the realistic techno-thriller politics.
Gasaraki evoked a very powerful mood in me. In the end, perhaps it promised more explanations than it delivered, but certainly it delivered more atmosphere and mood than I had imagined to be possible. I didn't care about the plot -- I didn't even care much about the main characters, and I was very frustrated by the fact that…
Read at the sourceHound_of_Ulster
From the same fellow, Ryosuke Takahashi, who brought you Armored Troopers VOTOMS and Silent Service, Gasaraki shares its 'stable-mates' interests in the politics of war and the dilemmas of the soldier, buts adds little bit of a supernatural edge to the proceddings.
The design of the mecha is what makes Gasaraki interesting, but these distinct designs can only just make up for the general lack of action in the series overall. Character development is also fairly weak, but seceral characters are forced to make difficult decisions, which adds to the dramatic elements of the series overall.
Gasaraki is also among the more ethnocentric series available on DVD in the US. Noh drama, and the early history of Japan both are key plot points, but most anime fans may not 'get it' because of the gene…
Read at the sourceWashi
Where Evangelion revolutionised the mecha genre, and perhaps inspired melodramatic experimentalism in modern anime, Gasaraki made a quieter step in a different direction for mecha. From the very outset, I’ll just say that one of the main draw points for this series is the mecha design, and the high degree of thought that was put into the functionality of the bipedal machines as effective tools of war in near-future combat. But there is a lot more to the show than that; Gasaraki is one of those rare anime that manage to rise above what could easily have become a convoluted mess of a plot. With elements of military, romance, supernatural, sci-fi, mecha, history, and politics, Gasaraki is the product of an amalgamation of a whole slew of genres and plot-lines that manages to work. But i…
Read at the sourceHuntsman
A different kind of Mecha anime.
Gasaraki is a relatively unknown anime series. Instead of concentrating on battles in their machines, it revolves more around family politics and politics.
The story revolves around Yushiro Gowa, the fourth son in the Gowa family. The largest company in Japan. His family puts him in the volunteer part of the experimental Mecha unit. Then things erupt in the Middle East, and a Nato/UN is sent in, and are pushed back by a unknown force. The Gowa family learns that there is another Mecha unit and send in theirs without UN permission. Things get really complicated then, Yushiro meets the leader of the other Mecha unit Miharu and things begin to come clear in Yushiro's life. After the UN forces defeat the Middle East country, the United States finds out about t…
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