SSSS.Dynazenon

One day after school, first-year high school student Yomogi Asanaka comes across a starving man under a bridge. Introducing himself as Gauma, the strange drifter informs Yomogi that he is a "kaiju user," a person who deals with the "kaiju"—monsters who bring harm to the city and its citizens.

The following evening, Yomogi runs into Gauma and his classmate Yume Minami. Simultaneously, a kaiju appears in a populated area of the city. Due to Gauma's lack of experience controlling the kaiju, he brings out a mysterious object from a glowing pouch, summoning a giant robot known as Dynazenon. Requiring the cooperation of four people, the mecha drags Gauma, Yomogi, Minami, and Koyomi Yamanaka—an unemployed man who was wandering on the street—into its cockpit.

Their encounter with the kaiju marks the beginning of their entanglement with kaiju eugenicists—kaiju users who manipulate kaiju with ill intent—and their efforts toward bringing out the full potential of Dynazenon.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Background

SSSS.Dynazenon is a part of the 2018 Gridman Universe shared media project by Tsuburaya Productions. It was first announced in December 2019 during Tsuburaya Productions' Tsubucon convention.

Episode Videos

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Related Anime

Other:	SSSS.Gridman
Sequel:	Gridman Universe
Summary:	SSSS.Dynazenon Movie

Kamiya, Hiroshi
Japanese

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Staff

Cook, Justin

Producer

Oowada, Tomoyuki

Producer

Kamei, Hiroshi

Producer

Itou, Hirofumi

Producer

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Opening Theme

"Imperfect (インパーフェクト)" by Masayoshi Ooishi

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Ending Theme

"Strobe Memory (ストロボメモリー)" by Maaya Uchida (内田真礼)

Reviews

Jun 18, 2021

darkfeatherX

Recommended

Humans always use monsters to visualize their fears and anxieties. And yet overcoming such oddities is part of human existence. Thus it's fitting that in SSSS.Dynazenon these fears materialize into "Kaiju".

Both structurally and thematically, Dynazenon presents itself as beeing seemingly mundane. While unoriginal there is a new monster every week and the heroes overcome their weaknesses to beat the enemies. But there is nothing wrong such a with structure. For this is one show that takes it's structure to it's advantage. It takes care to develop it's characters, to imbue them with a sense of humanity. Character drama becomes the backbone of what is ...

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Dec 24, 2022

Ryuseishun

Mixed Feelings

The entirety of the time I watched the SSSS series, both Gridman and Dynazenon, one big question kept bugging me: what ever has happened to the likes of Studio Trigger and that sense of creative freedom?

SSSS Dynazenon is yet another tokusatsu edition via the courtesy of the tag team of Akira Amemiya and Keiichi Hasegawa, the latter of whom is well known for his work on the 1990s Gridman The Hyper Agent series from which the SSSS series is derived from. As one might suspect right away, Dynazenon is connected to the SSSS Gridman anime from 2018, unsurprisingly enough. Much like its predecessor, Dynazenon is ... essentially a reboot of the classic Gridman franchise, catering to a modernized audience with stylish art and more befitting themes, while still appealing with the sense of nostalgic tokusatsu entertainment.

However, in its endeavors to recreate and stay faithful to the original essence of Gridman, Ultraman, and other tokusatsu/kaijuu series in general, Dynazenon is still riddled by the very overbearing qualm that Gridman was also held back by: the ability to stand out for itself, like many previous Trigger anime did (or at least try to). I understand that it’s not absolutely necessary to live up to the reputation of Studio Trigger and its go-to style, but when the series is a whole is grounded as essentially modernized “adaptations” of a much older franchise, the ability to get creative is significantly compromised early on, if not completely.

The story starts out with a high school boy named Yomogi randomly running into a mysterious man by the name of Gauma, who claims to be a “Kaijuu User”. Not long after, the city is suddenly under attack by an enormous surreal monster, and the stranger summoned the giant mecha known as Dynazenon to fight. Yomogi, his classmate and love interest Yume, a local shut-in named Koyomi and his cousin Chise are sucked into the conflict and must team up, super sentai style, to fight against the kaijuu attacks and stop whatever (or whomever) is responsible for them. Truth being told, the story is extremely generic at heart, and I’m not sure there was enough weight to balance that out.

The narrative structure of Dynazenon is very similar to that of Gridman for the most part, for nearly every single episode. It’s essentially rinse-repeat: first half of mundane dabbling through the main cast’s daily lives and activities; second half comes with a monster-of-the-week being summoned by the likes of Team Kaijuu Eugenicists and launching its assault, with the last several minutes involving Team Dynazenon taking down said entity. There’s probably no need for that much specifications, but the fact still remains: even with some variations in between, nearly every episode’s pattern is quite repetitive and predictable. “Show don’t tell” scenes are flaunted like decorations. Randomy tossed terms and cheesy names are dangled around to put on a facade of uniqueness in personality. Fabricated sensations of dread and tension in otherwise silent awkward segments are used to justify the extended drainage of airing time. Typical philosophical mumble jumble like “these monsters feel emotions, too” and “you desire to fight them more than protecting” are tossed in to make the narrative seem more deep and complex than it really is. Perhaps much of this wasn’t intentional, but it seemed to me that the plot felt too structurally simplistic to properly bear the weight of whatever subtlety or nuances the story may have attempted to utilize. There’s no genuine hooks, no explorative themes or topics, not a single concept or idea utilized in an interesting way to make the buildup and payoffs worthwhile.

Every episode we are given some exploration into the recurring characters’ livelihoods, as well as some of their backgrounds, aka Dynazenon’s “slice of life” segments. The minimalist method of attempting to flesh out the cast members is commendable and the subtleties in the supposedly “organic” interactions between them is nice by itself. However, the characters themselves aren’t quite particularly complex, profound, or remarkable by any means; much like the plot itself, the cast is quite facile for the most part. It wouldn’t have been a necessarily bad thing, but the lack of overall depth of the cast doesn’t help or balance much when the rinse-repeat format itself becomes tiresome until the last couple of episodes, where the show then decides to shovel in an “eleventh-hour” run-of-the-mill plot twist to make the excuse for an obligatory heart-pumping “final boss” battle and evocative wrap-up of sorts. This would be cool for the most novice of viewers, but after one has seen the same sort of theatrics over and over in other similar shows (albeit usually without the same visual flashiness), it gets quite tedious. It’s even more conspicuous when one is aware of many of the plot holes not being properly addressed or even set up properly for foreshadowing. Like that of its predecessor, Dynazenon’s plot problems really stem from its overbearing reliance on being faithful to the original source material, thus causing them to lack the strong sense of innovation and novelty that would’ve otherwise be more appealing to the masses. Not even the sense of self-awareness was close to enough to fill in the gaps.

Amidst the number of fundamental misgivings, Dynazenon undeniably has fared very well in terms of animation and sound directing. The animation scenes look really smooth and brilliant, and the sound design is nice and intricate. The shot framing and dynamic camera work help to make the fight scenes more exciting and immersive. The sound design gives off a raw and authentic vibe, from the crumbling of the ground beneath the massive kaijuu to the mechanical sounds of the transformations to the visceral trading of blows between giant hero and giant monster. Not every part is filled with action, of course, but even the audio details are still there, like the clamoring of the public masses to even the minute sounds like someone randomly tapping on their handheld devices. Every now and then, the show tosses in classic soundtracks from the original Ultraman franchise to further hamfist the sense of nostalgia. The voice acting switches between mundane and expressive, the latter instance being rather amusing. The numerous jump/smash cuts are intentionally used to scroll through the non-action portions of the episodes to depict the angsty of youth. Often at times, though, they can feel jarring and disconnecting especially if one wants to be given more reason to care about the cast. The art design is nice but quite average in comparison to most of Trigger’s previous works. At the very least, the impressive aesthetic composition has made the series quite watchable and visually appealing in spite of the lackluster storyboarding.

The characters of Dynazenon, as mentioned before, are quite unremarkable, and don’t have a whole lot to really stand out for themselves. The entirety cast are a walking bunch of archetypes that don’t have many notable traits for themselves. Yomogi is your typical high school age male protagonist; his mentality is pure and righteous, he wavers every now and then but always manage to pull the most amusing of shounen-like sequences. Literally in one episode he pulls something akin to Simon The Digger and manages to break everyone out of an genjutsu rather easily. Gauma is that enigmatic loud and brash figure, established as an eventual plot device put on strings to connect to the underlying mystery and/or conflict. Koyomi is that awkward nerdy shut-in adult, though remotely relatable to a degree, with obvious social issues and is often blatantly displayed as pathetic and almost always getting the short end of the stick with his daily life. The aforementioned’s cousin Chise is that happy-go-lucky girl with a random and briefly inserted background of solitude that was never really touched upon more than one. She only gets more highlighted upon randomly befriending a friendly kaijuu, but the narrative misses out on the chance to even slightly flesh her out. Yume is also quite an archetype, but she at least gets more of a decent background check involving her past. Her inner conflict involving her deceased older sister gave a sense of genuine value to her complexity to where I was actually able to care for a character more than the rest. Additionally, her usually quiet stoic nature was complementary to the added background context, and while her little character arc wasn’t as substantial as I’d like it to be, it amounted to somewhat enough at the end to have her development be the most acknowledged, if not the only one. I admittedly wasn’t particularly a fan of her romantic relationship with Yomogi, though, on the other hand, as I felt it may have somewhat adulterated much of that progression. The group Team Eugenicists are practically akin to a spinoff of Team Rocket from the Pokemon series, albeit with no consistent intentions or schemes. They amounted to being bombastic anarchistic figures want to use kaijuu to “free” the world, yet they themselves are chill people who seemed fine with the current society as it is. Their motives are straightforward and blatant; they advocate the whole “take over the world” idea, but it amounted to minimal value at the end of the day. They only exist for the sake of the SSS series always needing some obligatory half-baked villainous group. If the story itself wasn’t so fundamentally weak, perhaps this level of characterization would’ve been forgivable due to the former balancing things out.

I wouldn’t say I didn’t enjoy Dynazenon at all, but it was a very inconsistent experience. The first impressions for me weren’t so bad, but I didn’t find myself particularly hyped at any point in time while watching. Due to the repetitive tone shifts of Dynazenon, it was such an unsettling feeling of moving back and forth. Sitting through the first halves of each episode wasn’t all that easy, and often at times my attention drifted. Even the action-filled portions, as eye catching and raw as they were, don’t feel consistently enticing and exciting, especially for a very seasoned viewer like myself. Some segments had me chuckling a bit, and others had me rolling my eyes. Being dealt with such a mixed experience, I found the value of enjoyment hard to put enough account for in the hindsight of things. I couldn’t find myself getting behind any of the characters or their motives and/or backstories, with the exception of Yume for reasons stated earlier.

Dynazenon may play a huge part of what is now Studio Trigger’s prized ongoing cashcow in the SSSS franchise, but aside from the flashy aesthetics and clumsy attempts to look like something profound and organic, it never really went anywhere in the end. It simply meandered around pointlessly and never tries to make a name for itself. Riddled by jarring plot problems and an inability to address or set them up for later, it ended up as just another sakuga-filled display full of heart and spirit, but not much tact or ingenuity, created specifically for the tokusatsu nostalgia, very much like how Gridman was.

Hopefully, one day….one day….Studio Trigger can truly “save anime” again.

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Jun 23, 2021

NekoAkiraLee

Not Recommended

This anime is over-rated, my score is only 4 out of 10, after watched 12 episodes

Story is poor:
1) Story of Minami's sister takes a lot of time, but quite boring
2) Story and power of Chise is unclear
3) Story of Gauma and kaiju users has not been planned well
4) Story between Yomogi and Minami looks awkward
5) Power of Yomogi unexplained
6) Destruction of city has been ignored every episodes
7) Kaiju users' reason to battle is illogical
...

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Poll: SSSS.Dynazenon Episode 10 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) Stark700 - Jun 4, 2021	103 replies	by nwssx »» Sep 9, 3:24 PM
Poll: SSSS.Dynazenon Episode 12 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) Stark700 - Jun 18, 2021	115 replies	by festivale »» May 27, 4:05 AM
Poll: SSSS.Dynazenon Episode 9 Discussion ( 1 2 ) Stark700 - May 28, 2021	60 replies	by StateofOhayo »» May 7, 12:30 AM
Poll: SSSS.Dynazenon Episode 8 Discussion ( 1 2 ) Stark700 - May 21, 2021	55 replies	by StateofOhayo »» May 6, 11:59 PM
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