Overman King Gainer
| Overman King Gainer | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Original Manga | |
| Director/Artist | Yoshiyuki Tomino |
| Format | Anime(TV) |
| Made By | Sunrise |
| Episode Length | 22 minutes |
| # of Eps/Volumes | 26 (Anime) |
Contents
Genre
Sum it up in a Sentence:
Yoshiyuki "Kill 'em All" Tomino attempts to make a family-friendly comedy about a convoy of refugees fleeing Siberia with the aid of giant robots, somehow pulls it off.
Main Description
In the far future, Earth's ecosystem has collapsed, plunging the globe into a new Ice Age. The remnants of humanity huddle in domed cities, forbidden to leave by a totalitarian government. Despite official propaganda, rumors persist that the environment is recovering, and a rebel faction called 'Exodus' dreams of journeying to a green land far beyond the domes, to the ancestral homeland known only as 'Yapan.' A false accusation finds gaming champ and series lead Gainer Sanga sharing a jail cell with Gain Bijou, a famed Exodus operative. Together they escape, and Gainer is dragged into Gain's plot to start the largest convoy yet, and steal a legendary bio-mechanical giant: the Overman.
If You Liked This, You Might Like...
- GaoGaiGar
- Full Metal Panic
- Mobile Fighter G Gundam
- Mecha anime that don't take themselves seriously
Personal Opinions
Rangpur
Tomino supposedly intended this to be a show parents could watch with their children. Despite the potentially grim premise, most of the series is light-hearted and colorful, with a good chunk humor meant to go shooting over the heads of younger viewers. Much of the comedy is derived from a large and quirky cast of pilots, princesses, militia, mechanics and villains. It's light on exposition--to the point of being mildly confusing for the first couple episodes--and the robots resemble rubber costumes from Ultraman more than the traditional mecha of Tomino's own Gundam franchise. So if you really need an encyclopedia's worth of background and engineering schematics, give this one a pass. You'd be missing out, though.
Overman King Gainer isn't deep by any means, and the plot is something of a shaggy dog story that drags in the middle. But it's funny without being juvenile, it has a decent animation budget, a catchy score, and some surprisingly engaging characters. Plus the requisite 'orphan child dragged along for the ride' that all Tomino series are required to have by law is neither annoying nor creepily objectified! Amazing, right? Give it a try! Don't be a stuffy, humorless mecha fan like all those VOTOMS jerks.
tsob
The show starts off kinda slow, and the premise is pretty confusing at first. Probably only really comparable to Turn-A amongst all Tomino's shows, or at least those I'm familiar with - much of the show follows a monster of the week formula. The characters are engaging enough that I don't actually mind though personally.
In fact, two of the characters really impressed me much more than I ever expected them to. Princess Ana is the annoying child character - only instead of being annoying she's smart, politically savvy and courageous. She never really becomes a nuisance and helps out in several situations. The other is Adette Kistler who I expected to just be a fanservicey character but who doesn't seem to provide much (if any?) of that. Instead she's just a very earnest person who takes a while to find her feet in the show, but is awesome once she does. Most every other character in the show follows in that vein, I don't think there's a single character I disliked. Bonus points for having a ninja character yell out the line: "Shotguns! A ninja's favourite weapon".
The mecha are fantastic as well. There's both super and more grunty suits, and loads of each in the show. The silhouette machines have a very mechanical look, and while they never achieve much they see some nice action. The Overman's are much more biological and have some pretty far out powers, which seem to be RPG inspired and make for some great fight scenes.
The last 6 or so episodes make up the final arc, and while I honestly couldn't have seen how they could make it last that long during the first 2 or so of these episodes it never felt dragged out and I was actually left disappointed that there wasn't more of an epilogue to the show. I cried throughout the final few minutes, and had a huge grin stuck to my face when the monkey dance finally got performed right at the end.
I watched some episodes in dub form, and watched the subs in others and preferred the sub overall for consistency. Some of the actors in the dub sounded bored at times, even the main characters but they performed a great job at other times.
The story itself is as nonsensical as Super robot shows tend to be, enough so that I'm not even sure of the full details after watching it. There's a great catastrophe and humans are pushed in to the Siberian Wilderness and one or two other areas for several hundred years or something. Then some of them decide they want to see if the rest of the earth is habitable again and exodus from their prescribed area. London still seems to be intact though and controlling the rest of the world, and blah, blah, blah.
It doesn't even matter. It's just there as a backdrop for the characters and if you can stand a show with slow pacing but fantastic action and great characters then you should watch this - A/π.
Links
- HD series opening on YouTube Features dancing robots, girls and ferrets
