I'm glad I saved this series until after I watched all three Saejima series. Had I watched them in release order instead of chronologically, I would have found Makai no Hana to be a letdown and may not have made it through the entire series. WARNING: I'm going to spoil some of this series here, but I've put big stuff in spoiler tags.
I'll say, I'm not ashamed: I
loved this series. I liked the three Saejima series, but after this series, they seem really thin in comparison. When I think of Season 1, what comes to mind is how the series was broken into distinct halves, with the first half having little advancement in the story, the Zaruba recap show, then story episodes. Makai Senki and Hana broke it a little bit, but the first halves were clearly less story-powered than the second halves. So going into YwTM, I expected the same. I was surprised to find the first 10-12 episodes containing some very foundation-like story elements, and these laid a groundwork for a story that was eventually overturned. The small details early on that were strange, weird, and possibly even production errors turned out to be major clues as to what was really going on.
I liked this series because of how believable it was in comparison to Kouga and Raiga's adventures. Those were a little more supernatural, there was never anything that really drove home that the Horrors were a widespread problem. Here, the horrors were every day people. One was a news caster, one was a police officer, and the true ringleader of it all? He
simply ran a steakhouse
. There was a clear area where this was happening, too, which hasn't been addressed in the other series. Kouga, Rei, Raiga, and Crow simply patrol what could be considered their jurisdiction, and there was little given to how they interacted with their jurisdiction. Kouga would simply get orders, stab the monster, then go home and stare at a wall. There was no telling what would happen to the YwTM trio when they left their hidey-hole. The only thing missing from the setting was a time. It was clear that it took place long after Kouga, and we can only be led to assume that it happened long after Raiga as well, but it was rather vague. Still, that allowed a very interesting plot line to take place, which was having a very inexperienced Garo. True, the mysticism and grandeur of the Makai Knights/Priests is lost, Garo clearly didn't have the clout in this series that it had when it was a Saejima thing, but I liked that. We weren't presented with someone and told, "This man is the savior", and expected to believe it. We were given someone who was a bit of a punk, clearly sloppy in his job (the bride), but we knew he was Garo, the Golden Knight. How does he re-establish that title?
I also liked the choice of actors. From what I can tell, Wataru Kuruyama had almost no roles before Ryuga, which makes sense when Takeru's actor is considered. Everyone knows him as Gai, and I personally had trouble seeing him as thuggish at all. I constantly saw the excitable idiot, and it broke the character in some situations. Had the actor for Ryuga carried an image into the show, then it could have ruined the character. On the other hand, I have seen both Aguri and Tousei's actors before (Gaim and Ryuki/Shinkenger/555/KR The First/Red Requiem), and they both had a pre-set image to me. Aguri was the twisted Sengoku Ryoma, however I never pictured Aguri as the same guy, which is a testament to the actor. Tousei's image played into his favor, because
as a "good" guy in all other roles, I never suspected for a minute that he was the baddie.
Furthermore, the actors were believable as human beings. They weren't the talking statue that is Kouga, or the wild maniac that they sometimes portray Rei as. They all made mistakes, they all did things that normal people do, and it made the series much more believable because of it.
Now, the series was not without fault. There were multiple times where the swords were quite clearly rubber or plastic. Episode 23's car chase had about 400 GoPro cameras visible on the cars. Some of the scenes in the final episodes, especially the ones in the ruins, had a clear reverb/echo that tells of a rather large set. And there was even that time in Episode 9 where Ryuga climbs out of the truck window and appears to put a foot down on whatever the truck was sitting on. Whoops! Also, how did he get stabbed in the face and was perfectly healed one episode later?
A lot of the remarks in the episode forum topics centered around the CGI of the suits, and I can see why they went that route with the series. With the tarnished Garo constantly shining and going back and forth between gold and black during fights, it has to go one of three ways: 1) You make both suits, swap out pieces when needed, 2) You make the gold suit, overlay black for the majority of fights, or 3) Re-use Kouga's suit, CGI for everything else. Option #1 is expensive and time consuming, especially when the gold suit appeared for less than a second in some scenes. Option #2 would be difficult to make it look good, since if the tracking is off by just a tiny bit, a gold suit would peek out from behind the overlays. Option #3 worked the best, I think in a lot of ways. There's only one scene where actors interacted with the Garo armor for a meaningful amount of time, and it was when the gold suit showed up, and that was clearly Kouga's armor with the eyes recolored. What sucked about the CGI was that the speed of the action was sped up. It was obvious that they used Motion Capture to film a "suit actor" (I'm guessing Makoto Ito did all three suits), but it looked like the final playback was 1.25x or so. They were human movements, but just a little too fast to be realistic. That said, the CGI allowed for some more extravagant fights to take place, fights that were typically reserved for the final boss in Kouga's world.
I'm not sure what to make of the future Garo series after this. I'll get into Gold Storm tonight, and continue along in a universe that I really enjoyed. However, with the 2016 series bringing back "old characters", it's probably safe to assume that it will take place in the Saejima world and I don't know if I want to go back to that right now. Sure, Raiga and Mayuri's story was left a little open for more, but it needs more to be able to match this universe in my eyes. That, plus Crow needs to get off his ass and do something.