Cheesy and over the top mecha for kids that escalated into Evangelion by the drop of a hat.
Bakuraiga is a one-volume manga by Eichi Shimizu and Tomohiro Shimoguchi. This post will be pretty short because honestly, I have no clue what happened.
Bakuraiga combines mecha with motorcycle gangster aesthetics. Basically this Baku dude and his sidekick fought against this random ‘banjo’ to rescue his childhood friend and Asuka Langley-lookalike whose name I forgot. Baku’s dad brought his son to his secret base and showed him the superpowered mecha Bakuraiga that he prepared. His dad became known as the ‘muteki banjo’ (invincible sovereign) in order to fight against an organization called ‘Dragon Circus’ or DC for short. DC is anti-god, anti-everything, and it’s got a pretty confusing ideology in general so I’m not going into that.
Anyway, the story is your classic villain-of-the-week morning anime kid stuff until halfway through the volume… where the story introduced us to ‘Seigi’, a very promising character with complex stuff going on inside his head. On one hand, he’s hell bent on serving justice, on the verge of using his sense of justice to cover his thirst for blood, which one of the villain quickly pointed out. But then what happened? All that got thrown aside when Bakuraiga got the ‘axe’ warning, and the authors decided to shove everything they planned for the manga into a few chapters, resulting in a mess as if it’s hit by the Third-Impact. A cheesy and cliched overpowered mecha manga turned into Evangelion both in plot and mood, and it really caught me off guard. I only have images for two pages but I think you get the idea.
So overall, I would like to leave Bakuraiga in the realm of oblivion and just forget about it for good.
bonutzuu 