Shelf Life

Come At Me, Bro

This is important knowledge mainly because as you watch Ikki Tousen: Great Guardians, you might think, "What happened? I thought this show used to be kind of good. Why is it bad now?" Well, it's bad because production switched from J.C. Staff over to Arms (as of the second season), and because at some point, someone decided that boobs were more interesting than story. Mercifully, for those who were only on board from Day One because of exploding clothes, there's still plenty of that.

If you think back to the first season of Ikki Tousen, you might remember how fun the story was. It was a modern take on Romance of the Three Kingdoms, only instead of feudal lords and provincial clashes, Ikki Tousen was about seven high schools in the Kanto region of Japan duking it out in a massive turf war. All of the fighters are characterized by the sacred stones they wear, each of which contain the spirits of the warriors from the Three Kingdoms. The action was crazy, the fights were fun to watch, and yeah, everyone's clothes exploded on impact. As a guilty pleasure, Ikki Tousen was great. It was basically just fights and boobs, and lots of panty shots.

Now, flash-forward a couple years (to 2008, when the third season was released) and things have changed. Arms, first of all, is pretty great at drawing boobs—they were originally established as Studio Pierrot's division for making adult OVAs, with titles like Kite and Night Shift Nurses. They've since gone on to animate not-porn, but their talents for drawing painstakingly detailed camel toes and nipples have apparently remained. The crotch shots in Great Guardians are as juicy as they are meaty, which is probably what the target demographic wants.

What Great Guardians doesn't have are interesting fight scenes, or actually even many fight scenes at all. The vast majority of the episodes are filler, and involve such silly scenes as the girls punching gigantic sharks, or failing at their part-time jobs. There's also a lot of girl-on-girl molestation that goes on, although aside from questionable scenes, the series is largely devoid of any excessive pining or simpering at men. As much as the show is written for a male audience, and features panty flashes and boobs and ripped clothing every 20 seconds, the women on the show can handle themselves, and are rarely shamed (although that seems to be more prevalent this season than in the first (read: unfortunate girl-on-girl groping scenes); supply and demand, maybe).

What story this season does have is back-loaded into the last four episodes or so, when we learn the true identity of one of the newly introduced female characters, figure out who's behind a series of body takeovers, and watch as the girls work together to tackle a common enemy. Some of the scenes are still pretty tedious—after the third or fourth body takeover, that entire shtick stops being interesting—but at least the story shows forward progress, and the girls have something to do besides just show various parts of their body. In fact, before episode eight or so, this season was squarely in the Perishable pile for me (despite my guilty pleasure love of the first season!), but the efforts of the last few episodes nudged it into a begrudging Rental.

It goes without saying that unless you've seen at least the first season of Ikki Tousen, this third season might not make too much sense (good luck finding the second season). But, I also think that, unless you're a serious diehard fan of all the characters, that this season isn't really worth watching. It doesn't really add to the story, although you do get some interesting scenes with characters like Shimei Ryomou, and a chance to see Housen Ryofu again. In that case, I feel like Great Guardians is worth checking out at least once, but know that you're going to have to wade through five or six episodes worth of filler.

Of course, if you're just on board for the fanservice, then by all means, check out Great Guardians. The fight-related fanservice isn't as good as the first season, but like I said, Arms is really good at boobs and butts, so there's always that.

Overall, as someone who liked Ikki Tousen, I was really let down by this season. There are some good moments, but they're much too few and far between to ever want to watch this season again.[TOP]

Zetman is based on a manga by Masakazu Katsura, whose name might be familiar for fans of his other works like Video Girl Ai, DNA², and I"s. This particular work is a little grittier than some of his others, which lends itself to a cool aesthetic that's simultaneously grotesque yet seductive, but regardless of the characters' chiseled abs and sharp jawlines, the story just doesn't translate that well into a 13-episode run.

The first few episodes are particularly messy, as they try to set up the differences between the two main characters that will carry on throughout the series. One of them is Jin, an orphan who lives in the slums with an elderly man he calls his grandpa. The other is Kouga, a boy of the same age, who used to play with Jin. After a sloppy series of time skips, we see the two now as men. Whereas Jin's upbringing has made him a champion of right over wrong, Kouga's different background has made him obsessed with the idea of justice, undergoing extensive tests to become an ideal hero. Both are "heroes," but they are vastly different in their idealogies and definitions of justice. Also, both can transform into muscular super-dudes, who reek a special combo of metal and testosterone.

Along the way, of course, the series tries a little too hard to also cram in a half dozen other ideas, including one about Jin's secret identity as a genetically enhanced test tube baby, a secret organization that involves laboratory-created monsters, mad scientists, and an explanation for Zetman that is so hare-brained, characters will literally say, "I don't understand this either."

And yet through it all, Zetman is oddly captivating. It definitely embraces the "train wreck" school of entertainment, wreaking out increasingly terrifying scenes that dare audiences to look away. The series is not only excessively gory in parts, it also seems to have a strong penchant for showing violence and abuse towards women. Some scenes are flat-out repulsive, although the series doesn't shirk away from showing perpetrators as deranged and evil. Even so, there is so much rampant murder and rape that even the most de-sensitized would be hard-pressed to not squirm in discomfort.

While Zetman is hard to put down, it still stands to be much improved. In its efforts to carry out as many story threads as possible, the story gets jumbled along the way, leaving plot holes the size of trucks, and mixed messages on both sides of good and evil. By the time the series careens to a finish, there are so many random threads and conspiracies that it feels like someone is screaming inside your head. It's an interesting show, but perhaps one to be watched moreso for its novelty than anything else.[TOP]