TRIGGER is back, baby.
And in Fall, they began an answer to a question. That question is: “What if we threw Haruhi Suzumiya and Neon Genesis Evangelion into a blender, hit puree, didn’t put the lid on, and dumped a shitload of Gurren Lagann into the mix?” While Gridman is already a developed “franchise”, SSSS is just so uniquely TRIGGER-flavored that I really can’t compare it to its source material other than saying that it’s definitely my favorite show of its kind.
Like I said before, watching Tokusatsu shows is pretty tiring by yourself because they take a very long time to tell what is usually not a very complicated story, so distilling one down into a single season and pacing it perfectly is enough to really pique my interest all on its own, but in a year where this exact studio already collaborated on a different robot-themed show that made my want to tear my hair out, and a year where Gundam Build Divers let me down, Gridman was such a breath of fresh air that I found it compulsively watchable and very deliberately saved it for (almost) the last show I finished this season.
It looks how you’d expect from a TRIGGER production – that is to say, cool as hell – and this is probably the best integration of CG and traditional animation that I’ve seen in a TV production, and without spoiling too much, the story really seriously manipulates the viewer into thinking they can predict what happens next, just to keep the Holy Shit Quotient healthy when it starts sprinting in the opposite direction.
This really sounds like I’m about to give it a perfect score, but I’m not, and it’s because of what happens in episode six, which I’ve already discussed – namely, that the main character gets the crux of the plot essentially infodumped at him by a character who then vanishes for the rest of the story. I hate so much that this happens, even though it is basically the last time any sort of exposition dump happens in the story, because it forced me to compare it to Another, which is utterly heinous in comparison to Gridman. Blech.
Still though, it’s easily the best “mech” show I saw all year, and it’s sitting at a ridiculously low 7.48 on MAL, and that’s a damn shame, because this one’s going in the Hall of Fame.
9/10!
The Arcane Archive 