Review of SSSS.Gridman

tl;dr: An anime that’s mostly well done tokusatsu kaiju action but with enough depth to characters to elevate it above just that. Note: This review has minor spoilers. SSSS.Gridman is an anime that is based on Denkou Choujin Gridman, also known as Gridman the Hyper Agent, which is a live action show originally broadcasted in Japan in the mid 90s. I have not seen the original Gridman show, but I do have some familiarity with what seem to be the shows central themes, tokusatsu type action and kaiju. And I feel that this anime does a pretty good job at using them. One of the core aspects ofthis anime is the action, more specifically what basically feels like mech versus kaiju action. Various monsters known as kaiju with different power sets attack the town and the protagonist is able to transform into the kaiju sized hero Gridman in order to fight them. This action is larger than life and designed to be more cool than to actually have any depth or anything like that. The majority of fights involved Gridman being on the verge of defeat until he obtained a new form with the new form having abilities that are easily able to defeat the new kaiju. New forms are pretty common in the genre, though I think this goes a bit farther than most in how many forms there are in such a short time, though that may be because this being only 12 episodes long is quite shorter than most shows in the genre. Still, I felt that they managed to make it work, wherein the combat is simplistic enough that each new form feels like a welcome addition rather than making things feel bloated. There is also enough variety to the action and it flows well enough that it doesn’t feel like it ever gets boring.

The other core aspect of the anime is the characters. The overarching story centers around four key characters. The protagonist, Yuta, has lost his memories and the beginning of the anime involves him getting accustomed to both his normal life as a high school student and serving as a hero to fight kaiju. Once the anime gets past this phase though, Yuta as a character begins being focused on far less, basically just being a pretty standard heroic character and not really going through any development.

The focus shifts to a large degree to the antagonist Akane, the one creating all the Kaiju, and essentially the god of the world. Her character and character are quite complex. It could very much be said that she’s a psychopath, seeing as she cares not at all for those that her kaiju kill, but at the same time, she’s a goddess who created all of them in the first place, so it very much feels like she’s just operating on a completely different type of logic than everyone else. She wants to be liked by her creations and live a happy life in the world she created as a part of it, but at the same time feels like she’s a distinct entity from everything else and thus can’t simply enjoy a peaceful life there. She brings the most depth to the narrative of this anime and when focusing on her and the world building surrounding her the anime even pivots around to focusing on some pretty heavy themes somewhere around existentialism and nihilism, though it only lightly touches on them. Still, this is in itself enough to feel like the anime has more substance and weight to it than just being a story about simply defeating kaiju.

There are a number of side characters as well. There’s Yuta and Akane’s fellow high school students, Rikka and Utsumi. They have character arcs which make them feel a bit more developed than Yuta, but they’re also pretty simple so not substantially so. Still, their dynamics with Yuta and Akane and the bonds between all of them add another layer of depth to everything. There’s also the kaiju Anti who has a much more fleshed out character arc which is actually pretty solid and feels like it does a good job at adding more depth to what kaiju and the heroes that oppose them are. Lastly, there are a number of other minor characters that don’t have character arcs or anything, but most of them have well defined personalities that keep things interesting, especially from a comedy point of view.

The plot proceeds with pretty solid pacing. There’s a really good balance of action and elements surrounding the action from beginning to end. There’s a good variety to both the action and character stories as well. It all leads up to a pretty standard epic finale with the final boss and pretty standard epilogue following that. There are some minor character elements that felt like they elevated the ending to a bit beyond being completely generic, but for the most part it’s largely entirely predictable. Still, I don’t think that that’s bad in and of itself, and overall I found the ending perfectly satisfying in most regards.

The animation and art were pretty solid from beginning to end. The kaiju and Gridman were mostly CG as far as I can tell, but CG at this point is great at handling things like them so I thought it still looked great. The designs were also pretty great. Gridman is based on his old design but I feel like he’d been updated in ways that were major improvements. The variety to his form and such was pretty solid too. The kaiju designs were also pretty solid, wherein most of them were pretty stand there was a decent variety. I also felt the character designs were really solid as well all around including even making most of the minor characters somewhat memorable. The OP and soundtrack were pretty standard for the genre and thus not particularly memorable, but solid enough nevertheless. The ED was quite a bit different, with it being more centered on the character aspects of the show, more specifically Akane and Rikka, but fit pretty well and was solid.