HellLyter

Warning: spoilers and sarcasm are featured below Hey, are you feeling down because you have this great idea for an anime but keep getting rejected by every studio that you try to sell your pitch to? Well it's time to turn that frown upside down, because Studio Trigger will gladly produce your anime for you, as long as your anime contains a few specific things of course. Here are the three easy steps that you must follow in order to have your anime green lit by Studio Trigger! 1. Make sure to have a LOT of steamy hot fan service. It's best if your main source ofsex appeal comes from your leading female character, because being hot waifu material > having a personality and depth. 2. Have your main character (who has to be an edgy teen btw) fly around in a giant mecha all the time because BIG ROBOTS ARE AWESOME!!! 3. ADD ALIENS! Especially as twist villains for the final arc of your story, because there's nothing better than kids in giant robots fighting against aliens in FREAKING SPACE!!! Follow these simple steps and your anime will be practically guaranteed to end up as Trigger's next unsuccessful imitation of great anime like NGE and TTGL just like SSSS.Gridman is! ...On second thought, maybe you should just try your luck with a no-name studio. I'm starting to think that creativity died at Studio Trigger. Yet although they seem to consistently recycle the same exact ideas, I've still enjoyed their works. I loved Kill la Kill because it somewhat deviated from the traditional Trigger formula and was just a great and fun anime all around. I even really liked Darling in the FranXX up until they butchered the ending because Trigger just HAD to have aliens. But with StopSoundingSoStupid.Gridman (Seriously, are the four S's supposed to mean something?), it just felt hollow. I never got the impression that this anime was trying to stand out and make a name for itself, and it unfortunately ended up being painfully average because of it. Interestingly enough, my score for this anime fluctuated several times throughout its run time. I actually did find some episodes to be enjoyable and even thought provoking, yet others were the embodiment of mediocrity equipped with bad character interactions and bland scenarios. The only things that remained consistent throughout were Rikka's sexy legs. But even those thick thighs weren't enough to salvage the dysfunctional plotline of this anime. The setting is quite bizarre. Our protagonist has come down with a rather unfortunate case of amnesia that is poorly explained near the end of the anime and finds himself in a city surrounded by a bunch of giant kaiju that only he can see. But he doesn't really seem too concerned about any of this. In fact, he doesn't seem to care about anything at all except for getting in Rikka's pants. And when other characters finally realize that our hero Yuuta isn't insane and see the kaiju too, they also don't seem to care too much about their situation. And that's one of the glaring issues with this anime. If the characters are completely nonchalant about basically everything, then why should we the viewers care about what's going on? Not that the story itself is anything exciting. It's just a typical monster of the week that Gridman and Yuuta beat up and then everything resets (the damage to the city and the memories of everyone who isn't an important character) because plot. And despite what you may be thinking, there really isn't much more to this anime than that. If anything, it just became even more confusing and convoluted by the end of the show. For the most part, the characters are pretty stale. Gridman is the most bland sentient robot ever conceived and is piloted by the most uninspired kid imaginable. Utsumi is that typical friend guy who never does anything useful except crack a joke or two every ten minutes. Rikka is the attractive female lead who's personality unfortunately isn't as good as her looks. Alexis is some random alien that's randomly in this anime because Trigger has an alien fetish. The other characters bar one aren't even worth mentioning. *This short segment contains spoilers as well as positive thoughts on this anime* The one person who keeps this anime from falling into garbage territory in my eyes would be Akane. She takes the role of the antagonist, making all of the kaiju herself and trying to kill Gridman and people she doesn't like with them, and the anime literally revolves around her since she is, you know, a god. She seems like a fun and energetic girl at first, but after peeling away her mask, her true colors as a heartless, attention seeking psycho are exposed. And the anime even further sheds light on her intricate and delicate psyche later on in the show. The dream sequence episode, while weird, was one of my favorites from the anime simply because of how it portrayed Akane. She's just a really engaging character who I enjoyed watching. She's also pretty hot, I'd say even more so than Rikka's (Yeah, I said it!) Akane is definitely the highlight of SSSS.Gridman for me. *End of spoilers and positivity* Despite my obvious displeasure with a decent chunk of this anime, it was still semi enjoyable to watch. Sure, the anime doesn't have much heart, but watching a giant robot beat up giant monsters is always fun, despite how repetitive it gets. And Rikka and Akane were a pleasure to watch (for more reasons than one~), so that's always a plus. Show'sStorySeriouslySucks.Gridman is underwhelming. It never really went anywhere and just felt sort of pointless. A lot of things didn't make sense and when the anime did try to explain something, it usually just made it even more confusing. Let's hope that Studio Trigger is able to improve with their next project. And hopefully not include any aliens.

RiverRode

When SSSS.Gridman first began, people really didn’t like it. I think a lot of the surface-level elements turned people away, especially since the first few episodes were fairly slow and predictable. But once the show actually got going, the actual content there kept us coming back week after week, and it ended up being not just one of my favorite shows of its season, but of the year as a whole. Gridman is a precarious mix of genres, balancing seemingly everyday school life against giant mecha fights. The former goes against what people expect from mecha anime, and is likely responsible for the show being labeledas slow. However, these two disparate halves somehow built off each other, with the tension of the daily life feeding into the catharsis of the action scenes. Since it's the more mundane material that seems to have garnered the most criticism, that'll be the focus of this review. Interestingly enough, this means I really don’t need to talk about Yuta. While he may pilot Gridman, his amnesiac protagonist bit gets in the way of him having a particularly interesting school life, and instead Rikka steps forward as the protagonist. Rikka is the more emotionally-driven of the two, and while she’s aware of all the kaiju shenanigans going on in the show, it’s never really her main drive. Instead, Rikka’s conflict is her trying to reconnect with Akane, the antagonist of the series with whom she used to be close friends. Akane creates the kaiju that terrorize the city, and it would be so easy to just view her as the villain, especially since this is how she presents herself. But unlike the other protagonists, Rikka doesn't look at her through this lens. By refusing to play on Akane’s terms of mecha and kaiju, she is the one who is able to genuinely reach out to Akane and save her from her isolation. This story of reconnection could have been treated as secondary to the main action, but instead it’s given the same level of attention, receiving much of the show’s expressive animation and relatable character moments. Also, the show absolutely nails atmosphere. Though everything seems mostly normal for the first half of the run, the show's use of its claustrophobic camera and tendency for long pauses serve to constantly instill a sense of discomfort in the viewer as they try to figure out why the world seems off. The summer heat is tangible and oppressive, and the rainy days are all the more miserable. The soundtrack goes a long way to sell these scenes, and the opening and ending are both fantastic. Briefly, I’ll talk about how the show handles homage. I think a lot of the criticism leveled at the show is based on it being too steeped in references to other shows, to the point that animator for the original Gridman Obari Masami complained that they weren’t doing anything new with the material. With that said, I don’t mind having these callbacks as fanservice to fans of the original, especially since they don’t conflict with the story being told. Plus, how upset can I really be over all of the character designs being based on obscure Transformers? That’s adorable. In conclusion, Gridman is just really good, you know? If you’ve been on the fence about watching Gridman because of the initial negative reception, I'd say it's worth trying for yourself. I'm still not entirely clear why so much of the community is down on this show, but I absolutely loved it, and I hope that more people will give it a chance.