GATE

GATE, a simple 4 letter word that can release so much potential with its premise. The idea behind GATE is that of a series about modernized humans clashing with fantasy (warriors wielding ancient armor, elves, dwarves, dragons, etc). By clashing, it doesn’t entirely mean a total war between the two sides. After a while, both sides begins to establish a diplomatic relationship with one another. Sounds strange right? It also kind of goes in a two-fold. Fantasy enters reality and reality enters fantasy. Both worlds are separated by a gate and at the center of it, there’s a man named Youji Itami. Gate - JieitaiKare no Chi nite Kaku Tatakaeri (Gate - Thus the JSDF Fought There) or simply known as GATE is a television series that adapts the light novel of the same name. It was originally serialized online on a novel website called “Arcadia” but later got published as a book in 2010. The series also has a manga that is based on the story with the same main characters. Speaking of which, Itami is the main male protagonist of the show and it’s easy for us to get familiarized with him. Despite being a soldier, he’s actually quite more like an otaku with his fascination for fantasy. This lands him in a position where he happily investigates the fantasy world beyond the GATE. Little does he know that is more than what he can bite off. The show itself adapts many elements that blurs between lines of fiction and reality. The fiction part obviously comes with the fantasy creatures like elves, dragons, and even a demi-god. JSDF (Japan Self-Defense Forces) has more of the reality role. Their military is equipped with high level technology and hence were able to fight against the fantasy world in the beginning. There was even an infamous event known as the “Ginza Incident” when monsters appeared in the Ginza, a real world location and made a memorable massacre. Of course, JSDF responded fiercely and showed that humanity is a doorknob to absolutely nobody. By establishing such a premise, it’s no wonder that the show has a lot of potential. Think about it really, when you have a war that is more than just about imperialism, it shows how much it can evolve. Throughout the story of GATE, we see much of that with cultural, political, and military themes. GATE’s characters are highly diverse not just because of personalities but by races. No, I’m not just talking about nationalities but also non-humans. The main core consists of three girls – Tuka Luna Mareau (a 165 year old elf), Lelei La Rellena (a 15 year old human from the fantasy world), and Rory Mercury (a demi-goddess who is apparently over 900 years old). These characters have different personalities but also creates fascination as they enter the real world. What we witness throughout the story is how they adapt with real world concepts such as modern life technology and politics. Additionally, a plus side about the show is that the human characters are fairly mature. Itami is an older male (as opposed to the high school teenagers you’d commonly see these days) and has a strong interest in otaku. His military experience also gives him an edge when negotiating with certain parties and we see a lot of what he is capable of throughout the story. His relationship with co-workers from the Third Recon unit also gives us a firm idea of his personality – a casual guy who is kind at heart and easily able to make friends with others. From the fantasy world, there are also other regions that establishes the clever creativity of this how. For instance, there’s the special region that is composed of an empire with a diverse cast of characters. Pina, the princess of that empire, hopes to establish peace with Japan. There are obvious reasons for this but the show also affirms her personality as a proud princess who is caring towards her people. Furthermore, the show has a strong emphasis of its world fiction. Landscapes and towns are built with resourceful elements of fantasy to make the other world look legitimate. Similarly, there’s a creatures that show their menacing presence while establishing dominance in their world. An interesting idea about the show also comes from the political affairs of the story. In the second half of GATE, we get politics as there’s some strong indication that not everyone is in favor of the “special region” idea. So in essence, the show plays its part with conflicting affairs that argues about political principles. The show also has some sense of nationalism although is vaguely portrayed and restrained to Japan, as other countries are pursuing their own interest. To say the least, GATE knows its principles and invests time to show ideologies from various parties. On a more military aspect, I think the show is also aware of its modern technological capabilities. The military reveals a strong degree of realism with its arsenal of weapons throughout the show. We have aircraft such as the Kawasaki OH-1, AH-1 Cobra, and other artillery that makes its presence well known. Soldiers (known to some in the fantasy world as “Green Men”) also demonstrate their degree of professionalism and ethnics. While the series isn’t entirely built about military, it certainly has an appeal to this side. I will also say that GATE’s author did a fairly decent job at demonstrating the firepower and capabilities of the JSDF’s military. The battles have cinematic sequences and is well animated on most parts especially during mid-season. While the show has lighthearted comedy from all sorts of angles, it also should be realized that its intentions isn’t a parody. Sure, the series makes a bit of fun at otaku culture such as Itami’s knowledge or the character designs of the main girls. However, there’s legitimacy with the war. The first episode easily establishes that JSDF is serious about their counterattack. Furthermore, Itami knows the stakes of war as lives are lost. Unfortunately, it doesn’t capture all the violence and more mature content of the original story. Certain contents are omitted from TV that are deemed controversial and violent. Fan service is also shortened although still exists in a few forms such as with Rory’s teasing and the bath scenes. However, the adaptation does expand on certain parts of the story, especially with events from the manga. Impressively, A-1 Pictures actually manages to capture the art style of the story. Their work can be a bit of hit or miss in terms of fantasy shows but I do give them some praise for adapting GATE. The character designs of characters from both the real world and fantasy world evokes interest. Military technology looks and feels real with their modern looks. Japan also has a good degree of realism with its modern cities and technology. From the fantasy world, the main female characters are distinctive with their design ranging from Rory’s goth dress to Pina’s medieval style battle gear. And like I mentioned before, the world fiction of GATE stands out as a fantastic feature with what is shown. To further enhance the experience, we get epic battles that almost always reveal the potential of certain characters and weapons. Soundtrack is powerful but not the type of mind-blowing you may expect. The OP and ED theme song has a catchy tone to it with a modest style of storytelling. What makes GATE perhaps more noticeable is the dialogues that are spoken with sharp tones. And by sharp, I mean the type that clearly defines what kind of characters’ personalities are capable of. Rory’s sarcastic and curious voice is perhaps one of the most noticeable while Pina’s voice shows a sense of her patriotism. On most parts, the OST works well enough to match the intense atmosphere of the action and lighthearted moments. When it comes down to it, GATE is a show that opens a gate with wealth of interests. There’s the certain “it” factor that makes this show stand out with both sides of the world. It blurs between the lines of fiction and reality with what it has to offer. And to be quite honest, GATE does it quite well on most parts with its creativity. This show is definitely not one that matches anyone’s tastes though. Certain audiences such as those interested in political or military affairs may find this more enjoyable than others. For action junkies, GATE can appeal to that side as well although it’s not a main investment of the story. When it comes to characters, there’s a colorful range of them and by the end of the season, there’s likely one or more that you may like to find out more. The first season is set as 12 episodes but many of the ideas and concepts opens up potentially for more.

GATE is a story about the pursuit of peace, a brave tale about setting our differences aside and to work for the common good. That common good is the Japanese military and cute girls, which are the greatest pillars of holiness that humanity has to offer. By pitting modern day Japan against a medieval fantasy-setting, GATE manages to contrast two incredibly different worlds with each other, showing how peace can be achieved by ignoring all complex questions. Just relax, turn off your brain, and worship the power of cute girls. SPOILERS Let’s compare how religion works in the two worlds. The god(s) that we know are usuallysilent, leaving us with highly complex spiritual lives, inner lives that require us to think about our morals and to question our faith at times. In the fantasy world we have a goth-lolita, a demigod who is immortal and blessed with regeneration that won’t allow her to die. Worshipping war and darkness has given her literal super-powers. If our gods took such physical manifestations, how would our society look today? If these demigods came to our world and saw how our religions impact our lives, how would they react? All of these questions are skillfully evaded by the fact that the goth-lolita is very old yet looks like a child, making her excellent fap-material devoid of any deeper meaning. Let’s also examine how GATE teaches us to deal with culture-shocks, and how to deal with such a multifaceted subject. Our main character is an otaku, which usually carries a bit of a social stigma. Otakus can however also be considered nerds, people who love to immerse themselves in certain subjects, be it science, history, or fiction. No doubt an otaku who loves fantasy would be ideal to send to a fantasy-world. Their genuine interest in the land’s complex history and customs would be valuable for the sake of embracing our differences. The protagonist however quickly finds his true calling, in the form of a big cast of beautiful girls that he must protect. Truly, when it comes to appreciating other cultures and countries, what else is more important than looking at how beautiful the women are? Never fear, the other side also encounters culture shocks. A female knight visits Japan, and we learn that she wishes to completely embrace Japanese culture. You might wonder what made it possible for a medieval knight to love our world so much, and the answer is yaoi. When she sees some gay porn, she realizes what true art is. In fact, when she has to go to an ordinary library and see classic Greek sculptures and pieces of our history, she comes back exhausted and bored with life. This illustrates that learning about history and different customs is not the true path to understanding, all we ever needed to find true peace was porn. GATE is in many ways ahead of its time, showing how someone from a medieval European-inspired culture can immediately accept yaoi manga. By never even mentioning how homosexuality is looked upon in her world, we also see how insignificant discussions about sexuality is in this show about contrasting worlds. The most masterful moment of avoiding conflict is when several of the otherworldly cute girls are about to exit Japan. The story reminds the viewer of the memorial dedicated to everyone who died during the first attack when the portal was opened. Naturally, since the ambassadors of the people that slaughtered so many are cute girls, everyone just cheers for them. Why would anyone be upset over the death of their loved ones? Clearly terrorist-organizations of today could have gained fan-clubs if they simply were more attractive. In all honesty though, GATE is a harmless show with good animation and sound, but it’s also a series that gets more irritating the more one actually thinks back on it. It likes to meander, stopping to pander to the otakus and prolong things with needless misunderstandings, which is most apparent in the last two episodes when there’s a dragon just around the corner, yet nothing is done to get to the point. If one can see past the tired tropes and slow pacing in the latter half, this show can count as mindless entertainment. A second season is coming, and I can only hope it improves.

The show opens with some loser otaku in his twenties named Itami doing his loser otaku things before a mysterious portal opens in the middle of the city, causing a bunch of fantasy soldiers to enter the real world and slaughter everyone in sight because they’re dirty racist foreigners who hate Japanese despite having just met them or something. No really, that’s it. We never get an explanation for why this portal even exists, let alone why these soldiers have a beef with Japan other than “because there’d be no story otherwise”. Also because they wanted to show that nerdy losers can kick ass too,because it turns out that said loser otaku is actually in the military - and I never got the backlash for this by the way because we have a fujoshi in the military running a fairly popular anime blog right now, so it’s not that much of a stretch. After that admittedly exciting conflict, the show proceeds to dump a whole lot of boring plot on us by deciding the best response to this act of aggression is for Japan to send their own military into the portal and weed out the foreigners before they come back to weed-whack them. And any sympathy you may feel for the country due to the “innocent slaughtering” in the show’s opening act will quickly dissolve when every character seems to forget about the first act long before the audience does. In fact, Itami forgot about it as soon as it was over. No, I’m not exaggerating here. After all the killing that happened in front of him, he just thought about the anime event he was supposed to attend rather than helping civilians in the aftermath. You literally could have just had the otherworldly portal appear out of nowhere, send the military in for no good reason other than “human curiosity”, and it would have made no difference to the story. For a fictional product centered on soldiers, death is really cheap in Gate. And by god does it get even cheaper as it goes on, with a good helping of one-sidedness to go along with it. Most of the battles that happen in this anime have very little purpose other than to show how outclassed magic and dragons are compared to machine guns and tanks, and whenever a powerful fantasy creature who can go toe-to-toe with the military does show up, they’re always on the protagonists’ side so there’s no tension to follow our heroes. Itami’s group literally gains three fan-pandering fantasy “anime” girls within the span of a single episode, and one of them is a demi-god who is immortal, far superior in terms of fighting prowess to everyone else to the point that she resembles a cheat code, and joins because the plot says so - along with the fact that it wouldn’t be a light novel adaptation if we didn’t have physically fit females falling in love with clueless male leads. They didn’t even try to explain anything regarding why she finds him or helping the Japanese interesting. It’s just a masturbatory power fantasy that gets in the way of the plausibility and the excitement of the scenario. And this may just be me, but am I the only one who thinks "Japanese Adam Sandler" whenver Itami is on-screen? I know most light novel anime feel like they were produced by Happy Madison, but Itami in particular really comes off to me like someone who'd be played by Sandler in the live-action Hollywood adaptation. The show just can't seem to decide whether or not they want to portray him as a bumbling loser or a heroic badass, so one minute he's a highly trained advanced special forces guy who's undergone rigorous training and the next minute he's getting pussy-whipped by princesses who always assume the worst. This unlikely scenario is brought to attention by some of the characters, but the show never gives a good reason for it, and he's not even put in situations where his special training would be of any use, so he might as well not have it. Literally, the only reason he's the focus character is because the show needed a male protagonist to suck dick on since it'd have no idea how to progress anything otherwise. Gate has the usual light novel problem of going from act to act without much of a clear end goal in mind, and thus the only way to proceed is to put our leads in situations where they make things happen without undergoing any personal arcs of their own in the process. A small town is raided by bandits for the sole purpose of having the military show off their superior strength without suffering any losses on their side. Soldiers from other countries are massacred by the demi-god girl just to show how deus ex she is whilst also carrying the usual anti-American themes we've come to expect from most anime that involve government in one way or another. There's this court debate involving the elf girl that I can't be bothered to describe. And assuming you can get past the Japanese nationalism in all those scenarios, most of the credit for everything good always seems to go to Itami and no one else, even though all he did was get important women to fall for his charms. Are you seriously telling me that no other military unit accomplished anything significant in some other part of this world, let alone did more than this dude? No one else bothered to learn the fantasy peoples' language at all? I mean Japan eventually claims part of the other world as its own territory and instills its own customs on the local residents with no backlash whatsoever unless you count the occasional bandit, and yet only Itami can help out when a woman seeks "the green people" in order to hunt down a dragon? At least put him in scenarios where he actually has to work for his respect if you're going to go that far in rewarding him. But of course, whilst I could go on and on regarding these issues, the truth of the matter is that Gate's scenario writing is so fatally flawed that you could have made James Bond the main character and it wouldn't have upped the quality to any significant degree. Its "evil" end goals regarding the Japanese military and the obnoxious fan-wanking are just supplementary reasons to hate it compared to how unimportant and phoned-in everything plays out due to a lack of a convincing reason to care for the conflict, along with a lack of a compelling antagonistic force. If anything, they at least add flavor to pay attention to, even if it's for the wrong reasons. I mean what's left if you strip that all away? A really bland product with no clear sense of progression, no clear end goal, no tension, and ridiculous-looking animation that isn't very exciting to the eye. Even its fucking sequel hook is just to setup a random adventure that has virtually no bearing on the conflict between modern and magic. I guess I can credit it for being honest with the audience that there's nothing to look forward to come next Winter, but why don't you go the extra mile, A-1, and put up a disclaimer whilst you're at it?

This show has so much potential, so while I did enjoy it (perhaps simply because there are not much similarly-themed anime to compare with) don't expect too much from this harem comedy anime. Quick review below: STORY = 6/10 While having so much to offer, sadly GATE resorts to generic comedy harem theme every time it hints serious development to the main plot. I mean, we rarely have a chance to explore a situation where modern world clashes with fantasy world, and everytime I expect a progress after those "serious scene", all i get are filler-like episodes that took main plot almost nowhere. By the time Ifinished this series, I still have no idea WHY the empire attacks Japan (an otherworld they know nothing about), HOW they build the dimensional GATE - IF they build it at all. + Genuine, refreshing idea - Wasted its potential despite serious atmosphere hinted in early episodes - Some plotholes and illogical actions taken by the power players that I cannot discuss without spoilers ART = 6/10 + Main points goes to detailed render of war vehicles & weapons - Char and background are so-so, and it's pretty weird if you notice how the male and female eyes are in very different style, i mean i can understand if it was used intentionally to highlight the difference of real and fantasy world, but that is obviously not the case. SOUND = 7/10 Similar to art, main points goes to detailed modern warfare sounds : engines, gunshots, etc. OP is pretty generic and ED is less than mediocre. Not that it matters much. Seiyuus did their job perfectly for characters they represent, but then again this is a standard we should expect from today's anime , so.. what else can i say? CHARACTER = 4/10 Main screen time are spent on these main protagonists: Itami, Rory, Lelei, Pina Co Lada (in order of appearance), each represents a stereotypical harem casts in a slightly diferrent, original seting. It means they base their actions on harem logic. WISH I KNEW IT FROM THE START. That way i can prepare my mind by setting my expectation as low as possible. Wait, what is harem logic? Let me illustrate by a few samples without spoiling it too much : - Instead of asking the enemy "why did you attack us", or asking ANYONE that might have the answers.. you hang around with her and her harem army to get into harem situations as much as you could. - Almost every main girls the main protagonist met succumb to his "charm" , by default or nice coincidence, whichever is more convenient. Also, the story at some point completely disregards plot logic and progress it has built.. to get main protagonist into harem situations. Again. As for the other side characters.. they don't have much screen time. Even if a few of them have any, it's because they happened to be together with those main casts I mentioned above - and are used as "dolls" to complement whatever Itami's doing. ENJOYMENT 6 / 10 Reflecting on how GATE treats the gate as a tool to build a comedy harem situations around it, instead of exploring its full potential and develop realistic / serious plot using up-to-date "modern warfare" know-how (yes it was being hinted in a few conversations, but they never develop it), I hereby judge GATE as "guilty pleasure" anime of this year .. the pleasure mainly comes from a few action worthy moments & serious/ logical conversations in the first 2 episodes, which steadily drop as the series progress. I give it a 6 anyway, considering that some people may still enjoy it by adjusting their expectation or just because they like comedy harem theme.