Tobikage Bullshit

Okay.

So you're reading Brunom's LP of SRW UX, and you might be thinking to yourself "wow, this Tobikage is a good show, I should go watch it!"  But I'm here to warn you.  I don't ever tell people not to watch a show, because I believe that the easiest way to understand whether something is good or bad and why is to actually experience it, and this is no exception... but I'll say this - I'd rather watch through the Linebarrels anime, the Demonbane anime, Wings of Rean TWICE, and then fall asleep to UX's version of the Macross F music, Linebarrel, and Joey and Heroman (those mixes drag down the soundtrack, yo!) than have to sit through Tobikage.  I'd rather watch through all the episodes of Naruto, filler included, than sit through Tobikage again.

Tobikage is BAD.

Like, it's not "well this show had its ups and its downs but it was overall kind of alright, I liked X but didn't like Y" like, I dunno, Cross Ange, or whatever show got into SRW recently that people meme about it being bad.  It's FUCKING AWFUL.  It's possibly the worst show to ever get into SRW, and while it does have stiff competition - things like Linebarrels anime, Tales of Neo Byston Well, the E7 movie, and Aquarion Evol spring to mind! - it's number one on my list.

But you've never seen it.  You don't KNOW.  And I can't begrudge you of that.  So instead of me saying "don't watch this", let me explain my reasoning I think you should not watch this and then let you make your own choice.

Here we go.

1)  It's not properly subbed.

Well, ok, it DOES have English subtitles all the way through.  Anime Sols did the first 15 episodes, if you are good at searching you might find them, but it had subs before that.  But, well... how long have you been an anime fan?  A few years?  Probably after the big subs boom, maybe a little before, but you've ridden the wave like we all have.  Have you experienced the hell that came before?

Because Tobikage IS fully subbed... in CRABSTICK.

For those of you neophites, "crabsticks" are subs made in Hong Kong that translate from Japanese to Chinese to English, named because of an infamous Mazinger Z sub in which the Staff of Bardos was Dr. Hell's crabstick.  ("Only with this crabstick...")  Once, a lot of shows were crabstick subbed in the mecha community, but over the years, many have gotten real subs.  A few still only have them, though.  Dendoh, Dragonar, Might Gaine, Getter Robo, Machine Robo RoC, and, yes, Tobikage are all examples of this.  If you're experienced with crabstick, deciphering what the subs are trying to say can be an experience of its own.  If you're not... well, it's going to be a very confusing trip.  Tobikage only has those subs from Episode 16 to 41.

("But wait," you say.  "Tobikage has 43 episodes!"  We'll get there.)

So, if you are willing to sit through those subs, what can you expect?  Well...

2)  "Sorry, forgot to shift off idle."

Did you know Tobikage was made by Studio Pierrot?  You know what else Pierrot did that was ninja related?  Oh, only the anime adaptation of Naruto.  And, hey, what's the first thing that comes to mind when you think anime Naruto?  MASSIVE FUCKING FILLER ARCS, right?  So imagine they made a show of their own, what do you think most of it would be?

To put it bluntly, Tobikage is 41 episodes of about 20 episodes of material.  Most of the show can't be safely skipped, as plot does come... but SLOWLY.  A lot of episodes are fairly pointless and could have been massively condensed.

But hey, decompression works if the show is fucking awesome.  Lots of people love Dougram, and that had a lot of it!  So, what's the plot like?

3)  why is everyone so fucking dumb

The show starts when the Elshank gets to Mars and encounters Joe, Reny, and Mike - there is a cool bit where like two episodes have the aliens unable to understand human speech until they get some translators in the humans and finally figure things out, but it's one of the few good moments.  Each one gets an episode where they get a robot, then Tobikage bails them out and combines, wrecking everything.  Neat.

Then they go to the North Pole and join the rebellion against Hazard Passha's general assholeishness.  The rebels are a bunch of stereotypical anime ninjas.  The Elshank is looking for ninjas, because ninjas are the only ones capable of piloting the giant robots Joe, Reny, and Mike are currently piloting.  No one comments on this obvious ninja village.  Instead, they free the kids parents, they go to the pole while Damian joins the aliens, and everyone goes to Earth to find some ninjas to pilot the robots the kids are piloting.  There's a bunch of episodes in space as Hazard and Zaboom get together, Tobikage shows up and doesn't combine for a while, and Yllbora slowly starts leaving because Joe is a giant dick (and we'll get there).  Eventually he does leave, the group gets to the Moon and then to Earth, and they have to fight the Earth Federation despite Zaboom being literal puppy kicking evil monsters and the Elshank going out of its way to avoid civilian casualties, including an entire episode where they save a hospital from dying from a deadly disease.

At some point they find a ninja village, only to find that a)  it's a trap, because Hazard is actually smart and rigged the only ninja related place with traps, and b) it's a fucking tourist trap.  A few episodes of angst later, everyone goes "wait, if we can pilot your robots that only ninjas can pilot, we must be ninjas!"

This is HALFWAY THROUGH THE SHOW.  But no, it gets worse!  See, around that time, someone finally went "hey, Damian, you were from what was clearly a ninja village", and then literally out of nowhere he goes "oh yeah, and did you know we actually had legends and shit about a giant space crane with giant ninja beasts?  Odd, huh?"

Yes, HALFWAY THROUGH THE SHOW, Damian finally remembers the vitally important background details that he should have known the instant the Elshank showed up in his village.  The information everyone in his village knew, and no one mentioned.  But he doesn't remember anything and he lost the flashdrive where he carries all that info (WHY) so he can't help any more (WHYYY).

This is about where Zerokage shows up, as it turns out Annex Zaboom, the leader of the Zaboom Army and why I will always call it "Zaboom" (Because otherwise his name is Annex The Boom, which is silly) somehow knew about Tobikage and decided to do nothing about it.  He had an excuse, though - its counterpart, a very not-in-any-way explained robot named Zerokage, also only accepts specific pilots, and he has none.  But then it turns out Yllbora can pilot it, and... wait, Yllbora is a ninja?  Why the fuck wasn't he piloting the robots?  Did he seriously never even check if he could during fucking any of the times he was bitching about how he should be the pilot of the robots instead of Joe?  Goddamnit Tobikage!

But anyway Zerokage has the special power of "kick Tobikage's ass", as it is the only thing to ever damage the robot.  Also Yllbora finds out that Tobikage is coming from the Elshank, and probably is in the mysterious chamber in the middle of it that no one ever goes in because reasons.  He also decides to never tell anyone any of this because... well, reasons.  (Ok, giving the show slight credit here, eventually Joe decides "fuck it, I'm looking at what's in the box" and it turns out that if Tobikage IS in there, it keeps invisible.)  Through a series of events, Joe becomes the pilot of Tobikage, and Damian pilots the Black Lion, something he apparently could have done all along, because... you know, ninja.

Lots of filler where they don't do much but plan to beat up Zaboom's big ship in orbit.  Eventually, Damian decides to take off his headband, and goes "oh yeah, my flashdrive of vital background information was inside my headband all along.  You'd think that I, a master of the senses, would have noticed a large object inside my fucking headband in the thirty five or so episodes of content it took to get here."  It turns out the headband only gives info of things they already know and vague, not-at-all-helpful other info.  Joe eventually starts going SUPER NINJA and Tobikage gets glowing powers that no SRW has really used, though UX does in a fun way, sort of, and then Yllbora gets them.  Eventually they blow up Zaboom's battleship, he gets away back home, Hazard does some tricky shit to bomb Zerokage and nearly kill Yllbora after he finally decides "gee maybe trying to kill the person I'm sworn to protect and have spent the whole show talking about how I'm sworn to protect is a bad fucking idea" and joins up.  Tobikage and Zerokage join together, glow gold, fly inside the secret chamber, and then two episodes away from the end of the show, the Elshank glows gold and warps off back to Romina's home planet, where Zaboom was hiding.

And then...

4)  WHYYYYYYY

...the last two episodes are clip shows.

The show has no actual conclusion.

There is no great final battle, no final conflict where they do the thing they wanted to do all show and dragged their feet on because they wanted to free Earth first, no nothing.  It just ends, then we get two clip shows, one of which was commentated on by Hazard Passha.

FUCKING.

5)  Dicks Everywhere!

Also, fuck's sake, literally every character except a few are unpleasant, either having no character at all, barely any character (Romina, Mike, Damian, Shaff), or they're fucking dicks.  And, like, not funny dicks either - just straight up fucking assholes.

Joe Maya is one of the most unpleasant protagonists I've ever seen, but don't worry, the show is aware - Yllbora, himself a massive asshole, switches sides purely to fuck over Joe, and Gameran - despite being basically the only character who can really protect Romina for most of the show - tries to get him, the main protector of their ship, killed MULTIPLE TIMES all the way into the goddamn thirties.  The fact that no one on the ally side wants Joe alive would be funny if it didn't lead to every episode being the fucking same thing.

(And seriously, this show is as samey as GOD MARS.  At least God Mars had good characters and things like a pirate galleon in space.  And Zuul in general.  And God Mars itself being cool and poorly represented in SRW.  And... well, ok, it's not that good, but in comparison to Tobikage I'd rather watch through all sixty four episodes of it twice!)

Reny, as an aside, isn't much better.  While the modern anime tsundere asshole technically can be blamed on things like Love Hina, it does (also technically) have its roots in Mazinger Z, with Sayaka Yumi and her occasional attempts to murder Kouji Kabuto with a live audience.  And Reny... well, she's that.  The bitch who occasionally shows her [i]love[/i] despite being a horrible fucking person.  She'd be bad enough in any show, and being in Tobikage makes her slightly better because Joe actively eclipses her in terms of asshole.  Good for her!

6)  HONTO NO KOTO SA~

Hey, who here likes good animation?  Well, ok, everyone does.  Who here can't watch shows that have bad animation?  I know I don't have that problem, but lots of people do, and if you're one of those... honestly, grow up, but also don't watch Tobikage.  See, Tobikage comes from the 80s.

Oh, what's that?  "The 80s was the best era of animation?"  Wow, you spoke that exactly like I'd expect someone who's never seen an 80s show outside of a few OVAs from the boom era.  Here's a fun note - Tobikage is from 1985, the same year as Dancouga.  Dancouga, at one point, had literal slideshow animation - 1fps or less.  While Tobikage never dips that low, it does look very consistently like ABSOLUTE FUCKING ASS.

Juuma's combination sequence gets redone halfway through.  While I'm not sure, and there's no info on this, I've got a hunch that this bit of stock was actually done by Masami Obari, early in his animating days and before he got ahold of things like God Bless Dancouga and Dangaioh.  It has a lot of his design notes - the half shaded face with the lights, for instance.  It still looks like ass, because the show's animation always looks like ass.

UX, in that regard, is pretty true to the show, as the Tobikage units all have pretty bad animation outside of one particular bit.  Also, basically all combat is stock footage, and if new animation is used, get ready to see it again many times more.

7)  It can't even use its concept right!

So, like, Tobikage combines with any of the three robots, and their combination is stupidly powerful.  Kurojishi becoming Juuma makes it the literal Beast Demon, a monster who can make massive shockwaves, move lightning fast, fire powerful lasers on its tail, and has a sword for some reason.  Houraioh becomes Kuuma, the demon of the skies, who... gets a bit of the short end of the stick, but works well in space unlike the others, and is the absolute god of the air, flying fast and free, which also has powerful lasers but can more importantly set itself on fire and crash through basically anything, spreading its flames in a wide radius.  It gets a lot more use in the last arc when Joe is piloting Tobikage, as they are in space, such that I don't think Damian ever uses Juuma, which is really bad.

But, like, man, you want to know the winner of the lottery?  Bakuryu becomes Kaima, the beast of the seas, a massive dragon robot who can crush things in its large claws, fire lightning and fire from its mouth with army-destroying spread, shoot Touhou levels of projectiles and two massive shoulder cannon lasers, and who has complete control of all water, even being capable of becoming totally impossible to find in a small pond.  It literally kicks the shit out of Zerokage, despite Zerokage having an elemental advantage, because they fought near water.  Zerokage had to hit it by accident as it was falling over, defeated, with an extremely lucky strike that hit a combination joint to "win".

Kaima's prize for this big showing, its second appearance (after Episode 3, where it first showed up), is that it never shows up again.  Joe never uses the form.  It's ridiculously powerful... and they never try and use it.  Fucking hell.  They're literally looking for a way to destroy a massive battleship and no one thinks "well maybe we should use the massive multi-element death dragon", instead going for a very risky infiltration mission.

So Tobikage fails to show off its mecha very well, but on top of that, it fails to show off its ninja theme very well.  At times it can seem pretty ninja... but then the robots come out and it's a bunch of human robots beating up evil ninja mooks, occasionally led by non-ninjas.  The closest any of the ally robots get to a ninja outside of Tobikage itself is Kuuma being sort of a ninja-kite, but this is barely relevant.

8)  To sum up:

So this show is poorly animated, poorly subbed, has shit characters, has a shit plot, barely executes its theme, criminally underutilizes some really cool things it DOES get into, and is boring to watch because most of its episodes are the same shit over and over again.  What does it have, then?

Well... the music is cool, though I only really remember the rocking opening (shoutouts to the Ninja Robots dub using the tune but changing it from "Love Survivor" to "NINJA ROBOTS, NINJA ROBOTS", which... well, it's inferior, but the dub tune is fun, at least) and Tobikage Has Arrived - by the way, "flying shadow spotted" is a dumb translation and don't refer to it as that, the "flying shadow" is Tobikage's name translated (herp derp) and Kenzan is more "has arrived".  Hazard Passha is a goddamn treat, and his balancing the Zaboom army and the Earth Federation for half the show was entertaining, even if he suffers from being a dick in a show of dicks (at least he was entertaining!).  And some of the designs are cool, at least.  SRW makes this show look a lot better than it really is, too.

But overall, the show is fucking bad, and I heartily recommend you not watch it.