Review of SSSS.Gridman

Recommendation: From the perspective of someone that isn't a tokusatsu fan and knows nothing about the original Gridman series, I still found this series to be very entertaining. It approximates something like an adult version of Power Rangers. If that piques your curiosity, you'll almost certainly enjoy Gridman. Story: The series follows Yuta, a high school kid with amnesia that can become a large robot man named Hyper Agent Gridman, and his classmates as they fight off kaiju that attack the city. It's difficult to talk much more about the plot without spoiling several of the plot twists, so I'll just say thatit is pretty wild and goes places that you don't expect, even with the cliched amnesiac protagonist setup. It's a lot of fun and never boring, but sometimes the relentless pace of the plot leaves it little time to do anything else, especially with so much of the series' run time consumed by kaiju-of-the-week battles.

Audio/Visual: Both the sound and art are excellent here. The voice work is consistently strong and the sound effects during battles have weight and really get you engaged in the fight. The music is solid as well, not just the OP and ED, but the little things like fanfare when Yuta turns into Gridman, which really gives it that Saturday morning cartoon feel. The animation is tremendous as well, it features some of the best integration of 3DCG that you'll ever see, the fights are lavishly animated, and the background art and character designs are very good as well. From an artistic perspective, it's a real achievement.

Characters: This is probably the main area in which Gridman stumbles. As mentioned before, the fight scenes and the pace of the plot eats up so much time that the characters have very little time to be developed. Yuta is a black hole of personality, an almost perfectly generic protagonist. Rikka is similarly flat, and their "romance" has no heat behind it at all. Yuta mentions that he likes her in the 3rd episode and then it's never mentioned again until the last minutes of the finale, so it probably should have just been cut entirely. The exception here is Shinjo Akane, a very well written character that gets more development and opportunities to shine than the rest of the cast combined. She really helps to rescue an otherwise terribly uninteresting main cast.