Gasaraki
#6: Fires of War
ADV
75 minutes
English/Japanese
English Subtitles
09/25/2001
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Gasaraki
ADV
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It must be "atrocious use of the English language" week here at fan-service.com or something. I know you can't read the stuff in the picture to the left, so you'll just have to take my word and believe it says "This human discovery" which is completely inappropriate to anything that doesn't involve an innovation of sometime. What's more, anyone who's taken a month of any course in English above the kindergarten level should know that, Nihonjin or not... there's just no excuse for a butchering of a language. Save when I use my limited knowledge of Nihongo to impress short haired Japanese chicks. I'm such a tool. It's been a long time coming. I watched the fifth disc of Gasaraki about a year and a half ago and since I'm now a penniless college student I couldn't afford to buy the rest of the series. How I long for my fat cat days working for $9 an hour and slaving over every job one could imagine possible in a restaurant setting, and even some that you'd never expect! Have you ever been asked to pretend that you were the manager of your workplace? That crap was practically a daily occurrence at my place of business. And people wonder why I can't seem to quit smoking. I swear I get flashbacks that would easily rival those of anyone who suffered agent orange. |
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Well my friends... I just realized that I left my notes for this wonderful production at the Casa of Jerry "Pat" Garcia and Jonathan Hugh Skabla. Looks like I'll be writing this one sans assistance, so if it doesn't turn out as pretty as you'd like please accept my apology in advance, and blame the Filipino fellow that probably mixed it in with the dog stew he was boiling. I'll get you some day Jerry, I swear it. I promise to do my best not to turn it into a "pictureless review". Nobody needs to see that. Much like the children I may or may not have floating around parts of the greater tri-state region, I refuse to authenticate my reviews of Gasaraki until I do one that I consider worthy of the effort. And since this is the first review I'll actually fess up to writing (without being forced into a blood test, that is) I'll tell you here and now that I love this show more than life itself. It has robots and exposition. Which, as anyone knows, is two out of the three keys to my heart. It kind of falters in the hot punk chick department, but it's got a really badass old guy so I'm willing to cut it some slack. |
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This fellow holding the H&K grenade launcher over there is my main man, bearing the unfortunate name of Wan. Not necessarily unfortunate if anyone else is watching this... I just found myself making "Wan Hang Row" and "Wan Rong Dong" jokes for the entirety of episode one, much to the chagrin of Jerry and Joel. Please don't blame me for my childish sense of humor, I went to an all boy's high school But our man Wan seriously hooks up the feeling Yuushiro and Miharu by letting them hide out in the Asian viscosity and far away from the peeping eyes of everyone who wants to come down hard on them. And what is the "Asian viscosity", you might be asking? As far as I can tell it's a place where a lot of transients live, and as such is a place of constant turmoil, according to Shaw and McKay's theory of Social Disorganization. I managed to pick that up during Crime Theory class when I wasn't a) Sleeping or b) Living in dreadful fear that my Irish robot professor was going call me out for sleeping. I don't know about you guys, but I'm deadly afraid of the Chinese Mafia. I mean, this is a group of organized crime that sprung from a civilization that was so bad they'd give you 50 lashes for having sex with a woman before you were married and then they'd expect the woman to kill herself to keep her virtue... and THEN they turned Communist! My scariest dreams involve chicks I've dated coming back to murder me, but my second scariest dreams are about Triads slicing me up like a Christmas goose. |
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And the Japan of Gasaraki doesn't seem much better. When it's revealed that the harsh weather has cut worldwide grain harvests down to 40% below the minimum needed to keep the world *alive* you know things aren't going to do very well... and the evil Gowa brothers are right there to capitalize on every single moment of it. I still haven't learned their names, and after eighteen months of not watching the show that doesn't seem like it's going to be much of a possibility anytime soon. They'll always be old Gowa, evil Gowa, and fruity Gowa to me. Much like the women I know, the names of the characters in this show are just too hard to remember. But not Wan. Me and him go way back. I think I just immediately form an intense respect for an ex-intelligence officer turned vigilante who seems to have a gun for every circumstance. He certainly has no qualms about using them either, anytime he arrives on the scene you can fully expect to see him carrying some sort of anti-armor weapon. From rocket launchers to antitank rifles, he's really got it all. In the short time we knew each other I'd like to think we really got a lot out of it. Wan, like me, does not have much time left in the world of Gasaraki, but at least we both know it was well spent. |
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