Garo: Vanishing Line is the third animated series installment of the Garo: The Animation franchise (there’s an animated movie and like a billion live action series). The series was directed by Seong Ho Park and written by Kiyoko Yoshimura. It’s an original anime TV series and is licensed by Funimation.
This series was an unexpected diamond in the rough for me. I have never seen the live-action Garo shows, but I really liked Garo: The Animation and while Garo: Crimson Moon wasn’t as strong, it was still entertaining. So of course I was going to give Garo: Vanishing Line a chance.
To be honest, the first episode had me questioning it. I wasn’t sure that I could get on board. It seemed over-the-top and silly and a little too focused on female attributes. That all changed though. I mean, it still possessed those qualities, but it found a way to balance them and make them work to create an awesome series.
Garo: Vanishing Line like all of the other Garo shows, is focused on the Makai Knights/Alchemists and the ever present threat of Horrors on humanity. Makai is like the spirit realm and Horrors essentially qualify as demons, they are what we would call demons if we saw them, but that’s because regular people aren’t allowed to know about the existence of Makai and the things that come out of it; good or bad.
Horrors feed off of people’s negative emotions and consume them, then use this new body to devour other humans – which is where Makai Knights and Alchemists come in. These are the chosen guardians of the human realm. Makai Alchemists use, you guessed it, alchemy to fight Horrors, but Knights are different. They are blessed with armor and weapons and while there are a fair amount of Alchemists, there are only a handful of Knights (generally the focus is on Golden, Silver, and sometimes one or two other colors), and none are as powerful and feared as the Golden Knight.
For this series, we have our Golden Knight, Sword, two Alchemists, Gina and Luke, and a normal girl with a mysteriously missing brother, Sophie. When we first meet Sophie, she is trying to meet with a fortune teller and hopes he can help her find her brother. However, the fortune teller is a Horror, something she has never seen or heard of before, and while she can’t exactly hurt or defeat him, she does show that she is just going to sit and be scared and useless. Had he been a normal human, she totally would have gotten away. But he wasn’t and so she is saved by Sword and decides she is going to travel with him to El Dorado, the place where she believes her brother to be.
There is something strange about El Dorado though, there are rumors of Horros, one in particular who calls himself, “King”, who is plotting something unlike anything any Makai Knight or Alchemist has seen before. While this is the main over-acring plot, there are many other mini plots in every episode – different towns, different Horrors, and different types of people who turn in to them (even good people can become a Horror).
The fight scenes are really awesome, especially when Sword has his armor, but even the fights between Luke and Gina against Horrors are super cool. The way they fight is totally different from a Knight, they don’t go head on, but they have a lot of alchemy weapons and traps. Even though he isn’t a Knight, Luke quickly became my favorite character. He has the coolest magic guns and he’s clever. Alchemists don’t get protective armor so they always have to be analyzing and thinking ahead. Sword and Sophie definitely get the most screen time, but Luke and Gina’s solo missions make for exciting scenes and developments as well.
Luke, in particular, has his own sub plot that is really important and relevant to the main plot, something I can’t give away because it’s a huge spoiler but damn. The reveal is so good and it just makes Luke even cooler. Sophie is a nice touch too because she’s a human and, as I stated before, not utterly useless, and she becomes the heart of the plot as well, in a way that I won’t spoil. But yeah, she’s actually really important. And no, its not some kind of lame “I actually have powers better than the Golden Knight” type of important. Because that would be stereotypical and lame. Still, the women of this show kick some serious butt.
The show is packed with action, horror, and sadness, but there are is still enough happiness and comedy (mostly due to Sword) that don’t make it utterly depressing to watch. Still, this isn’t a show where everything gets resolved and everyone gets a happy ending. Every side story/character we meet, no matter how hard it already seems for them, that doesn’t mean they will get a happy ending. A human that becomes a Horror cannot go back to being a human. Even the ones who don’t realize they have become a Horror.
OVERALL SCORE: 8.5 / 10
This show is one I highly recommend if you like horror and the supernatural. However, it does have it slow episodes where virtually nothing happens and then 24 minutes goes by and you wonder why any of it even happened because it didn’t matter. Still, those episodes are few and the rest are well worth watching and entertaining.
