Ga-Rei-Zero: The Complete Series (BLU-RAY)

Ga-Rei-Zero has one of the most interesting openingS to an anime I have ever seen. One minute you’re watching this awesome duo of motorcycle riding demon slayers cutting down zombies and giant monsters and the next, well, I’ll leave that for you to find out. In any case it sets up the story quite well.

As the story unfolds we get to know even more characters and see what they bring to the table as far as how they battle the demon horde. Then as quickly as we get into the thick of things the series takes a leap back in time to reveal the relationship of its two main characters. Usually I’d lose interest with a show that sets itself up with some awesome action and cool characters only to backtrack but it’s worth it. Both the opening episodes and the flashback episodes provide the main story with so much detail and sets up a tremendous amount of investment in the series main characters that I was stuck. I ended up watching the series in the span of a day because I had to know what was going to happen next and why.

The series is one of the best. It has emotional depth, great action, fantastic art, and a cool soundtrack. I did get a bit confused at the end, what with kind of a prologue involving all of the characters from the series. It felt a bit like a cop out that didn’t make sense but I still enjoyed it for what it was. So how did it look on Blu-Ray?

PICTURE QUALITY:
The series struggles a bit with its HD picture quality. The bigger monsters and the spirit creatures are CGI and look pretty awesome but the rest of the animation is mostly hand drawn and has trouble shining through, depending on its placement in the overall picture. Zombies look a bit soft as if, because there are so many of them, why bother creating a sharpness to the masses of soon to be slaughtered ghoulies. Some characters lack the HD sharpness as well as they jump from scene to scene. For example the Nabuu brothers, identical twins, look as if the series knows their pretty much disposable and fails to really offer much detail about them. 

The world in which the series lives is however given much more clarity. Lots of forest scenes, underground scenes, and city scenes. The life of the scenery looks pretty good, especially the forest scenes. Color pops, detail is present, and the outline of most of the inanimate world of Ga-Rei-Zero is very sharply outlined. All in all the quality of the series as a whole felt very 70-30.

BONUS FEATURES:
~DVD Version
~Location Specials: You get six which run between 18-20+ minutes. The crew of the series head to various locations in Japan in order to get a better perspective of each so that they can translate it into anime form within the series.
~Series Premiere.
~Promo Videos.
~Textless opening and closing songs.
~Trailers.

TV On DVD Images

Cover: 

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Pictures: 

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