The Anime Review

Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer

Somewhere in the country, sometime soon, a group of college guys will sit around a small TV and bask in a few hours of anime. They will watch Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer. After downing a few cold ones, they will laugh at the silly jokes and the absurd plotting. They will talk back at the screen as if they were watching MST3K at the lame dialogue. One will most certainly make some off-color comments about the surgically enhanced nature of every single female character's body in the show. At the end of the show, some will love it and some will hate it. A couple of them will race down the dorm halls pretending to do the characters' special moves, laughing hysterically. When the hangovers wear off the next morning, however, the show will be utterly forgotten.

Unfortunately, my memory is clear, and I'm not so easily amused.

Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer is one of the weakest shows I've seen in recent memory. It follows all the anime stereotypes, particularly for fight shows, and never once becomes something new and fresh. The artwork is usually excellent, though at times the frame rate and character shots become downright awful. But I digress. Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer's plot (what there is of it) centers around Isato and his girlfriend. They go to a special school, and there's a new exchange student, Kyosuke, who nearly gets them killed as he walks in front of Isato's motocycle by accident. However, nothing is as it seems (as if you haven't heard that before)...it turns out the headmaster of the school is the holder of the Caizer stones, which can give their users unimaginable powers. He has distributed a few of them to those he thought he could control, but now some of the bearers realize that he is evil and must be destroyed. That's the plot in a nutshell, and the rest of it involves the different Caizer stone owners beating each other's brains in. Excitement central.

I will say that the show is more exciting than some of its recent fighting counterparts, such as the unbelievably bad Tekken. As my opening shows, too, I think this one will play better to groups of people who enjoy this kind of thing. Bad shows somehow play better to groups who can laugh off some of the worst parts, so you never know. A couple notes of caution, too...first off, women may be offended by the nature of the female characters in the show. Although they do some fighting themselves, they wind up being quite a bit weaker than their male counterparts. They are also ludicrously proportioned, and there are plenty of "fan service" shots both clothed and unclothed, which I found a bit much myself. Also, two of the "bad guy" characters are brother and sister and are carrying on an intimate relationship--nothing is shown, but it's still very disturbing. On the whole, I'd advise against this one unless you love the "fight" genre of anime.