Review: GATE KEEPERS

Of course, for every successful sci-fi manga there are far more that fail to find an audience outside of Japan and this is just one of them.

GATE KEEPERS (Geto Kipazu), based on an original story by Hiroshi Yamaguchi with art by Keiji Goto.  First published in 1999 and first published in North America in 2003.

PLOT:

It is 1969, and Shun Ukiya is hoping just to make a good impression on his first day of high school.  On his way there he is waylaid by a strange man with a suitcase machine gun.  Shun escapes with the help of a girl in a mask named Ruriko and by producing an equally strange power from his own hands.  No sooner is Shun saved than he is swept up by AEGIS, a secret organization using his school as a front while protecting the world from alien invaders.  He is immediately declared captain of the "Gate Keepers," which just so happens to be a team of cute and quirky high-school girls ready to fight back against alien invaders and the human traitor worki
ng with them.

STORY:

Gate Keepers might be the most naked Sakura Wars ripoff I have ever seen.  That's because the game it's technically adapted from is also a naked Sakura Wars ripoff, a PS1-era tactical RPG/dating sim combo set in an AU of 20th century Japan directed and written by long-time anime screenwriter/Studio GONZO co-founder Hiroshi Yamaguchi.  This man's writing credits are all over the place, encompassing everything from mecha classics such as Armor Trooper Mellowlink, Gurren Lagann, and Evangelion, otaku-pandering nonsense such as To Heart and Rosario + Vampire, and modern-day garbage like Nobunagun and Re: Monster.  While the man clearly has some talent, he clearly wasn't applying much of it to this particular tale.

The cast is shockingly flat.  The girls in particular are so one-note that as I read this, I tended to not refer to them by name but by attribute like a Smurf.  You've got Naggy (Ruriko, or "Fury-ko" as Shun often calls her), Sporty (Kaoru), Brainy (Misao), and Sickly (Reiko).  At most, the girls get one visual-novel style bit of drama each for development.  Keiko is spunky!...until she starts missing her absent siblings.  Misao reads all the time!...because she's too shy to make friends with the other girls.  It only gets worse with the introduction of Fei, the token Chinese girl/comic relief (because Sakura Wars had one too, and so they must have their own as well).  She's such a stereotype that not only does she speak in a Shampoo-esque pidgin but her gate literally summons a panda.  Notably, Yamaguchi got ahead of the Sakura Wars franchise by introducing both a token American girl and a token French girl years before that franchise managed the same.

Mind you, I can't blame Fury-ko Naggy Ruriko for ragging on Shun on the regular because he's also poorly written.  The most I can say for him is that he's just a lazy doofus and not a horny one in spite of being granted a harem almost straight away.  He has to be dragged (sometimes physically) into doing anything other than fighting aliens, and there is zero in-story reason for this numb-nut to be the captain of anything, much less an earth-saving force.  Unfortunately, he is the protagonist/player avatar of the game and thus he must be so because The Script Game Demands It.  

It should almost go without saying that the primary villain in this volume, the human traitor Reiji, is also very boring.  He's meant to be chilling in his sociopathy (considering he's introduced killing random American soldiers on a Vietnam battlefield), but mostly he needs to learn to stop monologuing and actually get to proper villain business.  It's telling that he's quickly upstaged at the end of the volume by the zombie cyborg of a WWII-era Japanese general with a bafflingly German name.

Yes, you read that last sentence right.  It's the only interesting thing that happens in the whole book, if simply because it's so ludicrous.

I have to wonder why Gate Keepers even bothers with the AU Showa-era setting when they do absolutely nothing with it.  Save for Reiji's introduction, there's nothing going on here that wouldn't work in a modern setting.  It's just an empty detail in a book full of so many of them.

ART:

Keiji Goto's art is frankly too good for this manga.  He's a long-time animator and director who is probably best known as the character designer for Martian Successor Nadesico, and all that experience shines on every page.  His character designs aren't particularly special, but he gives them a sense of (literal) dimension and there's something endearing about the perfectly round eyes that most of the cast is sporting.

He brings a lot of energy to the action thanks to his use of short, punchy panels and use speed-lines as a dramatic accent.  At times it almost verges upon pop art.  Yet he also handles the sentimental moments quite well too, using subtle body language to convey the emotion lacking from the story as written.  It's not quite enough to save this manga as a whole, but it's an absolutely valiant effort.

RATING:

Gate Keepers looks good, but it's not enough to save it from being a hallow knock-off from a forgotten franchise.  It's sad that I got more excited about finding an old Borders bookmark in this very volume than anything going on in its pages.

This manga was published by Tokyopop.  It is complete in Japan with 3 volumes.  All 3 were released and are currently out of print.