Guyver: The Complete Box Set Blu-ray Review

Posted June 11th, 2010 by Brandon DuHamel

Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Video Codec: AVC/MPEG-4
Resolution: 1080p/24
Audio Codec: Japanese Dolby TrueHD 2.0, English Dolby TrueHD 5.1
Subtitles: English
Region: A
Rating: TV-MA
Discs: 3
Studio: Funimation
Blu-ray Release Date: June 22, 2010
List Price: $54.98

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Overall

The Series

Video Quality

Audio Quality

Supplemental Materials

Click thumbnails for high-resolution 1920X1080p screen captures

(Screen captures are lightly compressed with lossy JPEG thus are meant as a general representation of the content and do not fully reveal the capabilities of the Blu-ray format)

The Series

Guyver is an anime series based on the manga by Yoshiki Takaya. It falls into the mecha category of anime, that it is to say it is a science fiction-driven series that concerns itself with humanoid-type robotic machines. In this instance, the “mecha” are referred to as Zoanoids and they, along with the series’ central character, Sho Fukamachi, are pivotal to the series.

As the story goes, high school student Sho and his best friend Tetsurō Segawa come across a mysterious item one day when curiosity gets the best of them. It turns out to be a powerful secret weapon, a techno-organic suit of bio-armor, from the evil and powerful Chronos Corporation. The item takes over Sho’s body and he becomes a Guyver. From that point on, the Chronos Corporation endlessly pursues Sho and Tetsuro in an effort to recover their highly valuable and powerful weapon. Sho must battle an ever-increasing onslaught of Zoanoids seeking to destroy him and take back the Guyver.

The series writers do their best to inject corporate conspiracies, romantic subplots, and other running elements to make Guyver interesting, but in the end it is a straightforward science-fiction/mecha series in which one battle bleeds into the next. Adolescent males with raging hormones will probably love all the action and violence, but ultimately there’s not much depth here to satisfy anyone looking for something a little deeper than one prolonged Friday Night Smackdown. Guyver still excels with excellent visuals, however, and it’s impossible to deny the guilty pleasure it provides with its no nonsense approach to action.

Video Quality

Guyver arrives as one of the better looking series on Blu-ray from Funimation recently released, although it is most likely still an upconversion from standard definition. It does show some signs of artifacting on occasion, such as aliasing around edges, motion jaggies, and an overall softness to detail in depth, but these seem to be very minimal in comparison to some recent releases we’ve seen from Funimation. Color reproduction is consistent even of not fully vibrant.

Audio Quality

Both the original Japanese language track and the English dub are provided in lossless Dolby TrueHD, with the former being 2.0 and the latter 5.1. The 5.1 mix is typically boosted and a bit squeezed in its dynamic range, but it is still rather impressive and less fatiguing than usual for a Funimation soundtrack. Dialogue is clean with good ambience, sound effects sound rather natural and there is ample opportunity for the subwoofer to get a decent workout. The Japanese 2.0 track is no less aggressive, only squeezed into two channels rather than six. It has equally clear dialogue and, good, wide stereo imaging.

Supplemental Materials

There are a good bit of supplements supplied with Guyver, including a few episode commentaries, but the coolest of the bunch is the side-by-side manga-to-anime comparison.

The supplements provided with this release are:

Disc 1:

Episode 01 Commentary

Disc 2:

Episode 13 Commentary

Disc 3:

Episode 23 Commentary
Episode 26 Commentary
Manga to Anime Comparison (480i/60)
Clean Opening Animation
Clean Closing Animation
Trailers

The Definitive Word

Overall:

Guyver: The Complete Box Set is a solid Blu-ray experience for anime fans that prefer their action straight up. Fans of mecha will no doubt love this sort of stuff.

Additional Screen Captures: