Guyver, The

Publisher
Manga Entertainment
Director
Koichi Ishiguro
Country of origin
Japan
Format
OVA
Running time
300 mins total
Year
1989

The Guyver

By Will Byrne
28th Apr 04

I first came across The Guyver in my fathers shop, it was collecting dusk in some shelf, and being only 11 years old at the time I seen it was a cartoon and thought to myself this should be good, little did I know at that time that it was going to get me hooked on Manga!.

The Guyver is a 12 part series about a young man by the name of Sho Fukamachi. One day he and his friend come across a strange looking device that is the Guyver unit. Sho activates the unit, he soon becomes engulfed thus making him The Guyver!. He soon finds himself up against monster known as Zoanoids under the control of a company called Chronos, the company is hugely manipulative, and wants the Guyver units (3 in total) and since Sho has 1 of them, he soon becomes a target of Chronos, the company sends biologically engineered troops(Zoanoids) in an attempt to kill Sho and retrieve the Guyver unit, but armed with the Bio-Booster armour (Guyver unit) Sho can easy dispatch with the regular Zoanoids, however Chronos has other tricks to play and soon Sho's normal high school life becomes nothing more than a fight to survive the onslaught of Chronos and it's minions.

It must be said when I first watched this series when I was younger, I thought it was the coolest thing I ever saw. The Guyver when combined with Sho looks awesome. The Guyver suit has a lot of powers and Sho over the course of the series discovers these and in turn uses them. The story IMO was also good, and was well paced over the 12 episodes, with something new and interesting happening ever episodes, it keeps you wanting more. I think the art work and animation for the most part was good except for a few episodes, and that brings me to another point, the first 6 episodes were very well animated, and had good art work, however some of the episodes past 6 have some really bad animation, this especially applies to episodes 7 and 8, were it almost seems that they ran out of budget, and had to cut back on cost, it was awful to look at, in fact I laughed at those episodes I thought it was so bad. At one point in episode 6 Sho fires a blast and I swear it looks like a piece of badly photocopied paper.

Even with the above disappointment, I still feel Guyver is a great Manga, if you're interested in getting some new Manga then I recommend this, it's and excellent all round Manga experience!

8/10

-- Will Byrne 28th Apr 04

Guyver, The Images