English Dub Season Review: Getter Robo Arc

 

Overview:

Taking place several years after Getter Robo Go, Earth is now a post-apocalyptic world. Hayato, now an aging scientist, has completed Professor Saotome’s masterpiece, Getter Robo Arc. Piloting it are Ryoma’s son Takuma, the human-dinosaur Kamui, and the younger brother of Tayel, Baku. Alongside the reformed Dinosaur Empire, they fight the insectoid Andromeda Flow Country attacking from across time and space.

Our Take:

Don’t let the synopsis for this show fool you. It is not as cool as that sounds I promise you. Let me start by saying that the only people this show is for are fans of the Getter Robo franchise. Even then I’m not so sure fans will enjoy this. I haven’t read the manga but it feels like a lot of stuff was skipped to meet the twelve-episode runtime.

Another huge detriment to this show is the fact that new fans will be absolutely lost if they start here. Normally I get things like that, I mean this is the fifth series, why start here? But it is the most easily accessible Getter Robo series so this could very well be a lot of people’s first taste. I’m pretty confident that if that is the case they won’t be looking out for the rest. I have watched quite a few series that have follow-ups done well. The first one that comes to mind is the Major 2nd series. I never saw the first Major but I didn’t feel like I didn’t know what was going on and it made me actually want to watch the previous stuff. Which I did cause Major is great, seriously watch that instead of this.

The voice cast is good but they don’t really get much to do. Andrew Love does well as Takuma but the best part I can say about his performance is that it was cool to hear so many f-bombs. Scott Gibbs plays the part of Kamui and I think he suffered the most from poor writing cause everything about Kamui was cool. Until all of a sudden, he just wasn’t cool anymore cause of poor pacing.

The animation was actually pretty good for the most part. It had an awesome old-school vibe that I appreciated and the fights were very well done. If I had to gush about anything from this show the animation would be it. I love mechs and the fights were awesome not to mention I really did love the mech designs. I would definitely buy model kits of the robots featured in this show which is about the most positive thing I can say about it.

The story was terrible and that might be giving it some more credit than it deserves. It somehow manages to go in the most obvious places while also being completely unpredictable. But not unpredictable in a good way mind you, in a very bad way. Like character motivations just change on a dime and every sci-fi B-movie plot device gets thrown out like they were going for Bingo or something. The best thing I can say about the story is that it’s a wild ride and that’s being very, very generous.

My final verdict is don’t waste your time on Getter Robo Arc. Use that time to watch something better or do anything really. If you’re a huge fan of the franchise or grew up watching bad SyFy channel movies you might find something of value here but I doubt it. I really enjoyed the show when I started it, it had a lot of cool things going for it but I feel like it’s the epitome of the “Jumping the shark” trope. Look elsewhere for your mecha fix, take it from a pseudo-expert on the topic.