The King of Braves GaoGaiGar is an anime that began in 1997, created by Sunrise's internal "Studio 7" under the direction of Yoshitomo Yonetani, and was the eighth and final in the Yūsha metaseries funded by Takara and produced by Sunrise. It takes place in 2005 (initially referred to as only "the 21st Century"), two years following an incident where the first identified extraterrestrial intelligence—classified as "EI-01"—crash-landed on Earth and absorbed a large number of machines into itself before disappearing without a trace. Following this incident, the Japanese government created a secret organization to combat potential alien threats: the Gutsy Geoid Guard, or "GGG", based beneath G-Island City in Tokyo Bay. Parasitic alien lifeforms known as "Zonderians" have begun to emerge; using the Zonder Metal of which they are made, they can assimilate various kinds of matter to form "Zonders." which use humanoid beings as their hosts.
The Gutsy Galaxy Guard gains three key resources with which to combat this threat: Galeon, a sentient mechanical lion of alien design; the alien child Mamoru Amami, whom Galeon had left with human parents eight years earlier; and the human cyborg Guy Shishiō, whose life was saved by Galeon two years earlier and is capable of fusing with him, forming the mechanoid GaiGar. When combined with the GGG-made GaoMachines, GaiGar becomes the Super Mechanoid GaoGaiGar: a mecha capable of defeating Zonders, recovering their cores for Mamoru to "purify" and saving the human host in doing so.
This is just the beginning, however. The series starts of kind of slow in a monster-of-the-week format, but starts picking up more in the range of episodes 15-17. That, and it has one of the best final attacks ever:
My Rating: 8/10
