Series / GARO: Versus Road

Welcome to the World of Versus Road

GARO: Versus Road is the seventh season of the GARO franchise set in a new continuity.

A hundred people throughout Japan receive mysterious packages at their front doors. Each package contains two things: A set of Virtual Reality glasses and an invitation to "Versus Road," a Battle Royale Game that promises the winner any single wish they could desire. Enter university student Sena Kuon, who hears rumors of the new game from his close friend Shouri Hoshiai. Curious, the two put the glasses on and enter the game.

Little do they know that the game will lock them into a fight for their very lives...

Versus Road is an experimental installment for the Garo franchise. Themed after video-games, it downplays many of series' Henshin Hero and Magitek elements in favor of a more confined setting, larger core cast and heavier emphasis on martial arts and choreography.

Lasting for 12 episodes, Versus Road began airing on April 2, 2020 to commemorate the franchise's 15th anniversary.

This series includes examples of:

• Abusive Parents: Takane's mentally-unstable mother beat her son regularly, leading them to lash out and murder their teacher in cold blood. To avoid being found out, they dropped their male identity.
• Adaptational Villainy: Instead of being the Big Good like it is throughout the rest of GARO, the Makai Order of the VR-verse is little more than a cult that has teenagers kill each other in the hopes of inheriting of the Garo Armor, which is given the prostration of a deity. Only two members of the Order are shown sympathetic in the slightest and both of them die. Its no wonder Shousetsu fell as hard as he did.
• Alternate Continuity: Versus Road has yet to be linked to any of the other three universes.
• Amazing Technicolor Battlefield: The final battle between Garo and Veil takes place in a realm of computerized data.
• An Aesop: Your trauma does not have to define you, but you must make the choice to move forward with your own two feet.
• Antagonistic Offspring: Compared to the protectors the Original Garo and his wife were, Azami is an absolutely wicked child.
• Asshole Victim: Nagu's manager is an abusive, greedy tyrant. Nagusuke arranges to get him eaten by a Horror in the second round.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The timed-curse sword in the fourth round. A hard-to-deflect weapon sounds good, but the instant-elimination attached to it makes it a stupid thing to pick up, as Ren and Kanata both discover.
• Batter Up!: Kanata's modus operandi is simple: Baseball bat plus head equals solved problem. He even makes a bat out of the item-weapon he's given.
• Battle Royale Game:
  • The premise of the show. One hundred people fight to the last man for the prize of a single wish.
  • Also the method by which Makai Knights in this world are decided.
• Big Bad: The game's overseer Shousetsu.
• Bittersweet Ending: Kuon manages to use the GARO to its fullest extent to defeat Veil/Shoutetsu, but at the end he decides to abandon the sword and leave for parts unknown, being the Versus Road's Sole Survivor. Meanwhile Azami is still alive and armed with The Veil, plotting who knows what.
• Blood Knight: Amou and Kanata both enjoy a good scrap, but Kanata takes it to higher levels.
• Break the Cutie: Azami tries to get Hoshiai to exude Inga by hypnotically nudging Kuon against him. It doesn't take, so she tries to transform him into a Horror instead.
• Broken Masquerade: Invoked. Nagusuke attempts to induce this early on by filming his experiences playing Versus Road. The footage is rendered useless. When he makes a video about the topic, an anonymous commenter tells him to leave well enough alone.
• Central Theme: The inability to choose, the effects of trauma, redemption and Broken Pedestals.
• Corrupt Church: The Makai Order of this world is portrayed like one.
• Credits Montage: The end to Episode #6 gives the full story of how Kuon and Hoshiai met; bits of which were shown during Kuon's reactions to Azami's Mind Control.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Amou is absolutely trashed by the Horror he provokes.
  • Nagusuke is completely helpless against Azami when they tangle in the real world.
  • Shousetsu's knight-training allows him to completely brush Kuon off. Then the Garo armor has a reaction...
• Crush the Keepsake: The salaryman Takane is pitted against in the penultimate round sadistically rips apart the teddy bear they'd been clinging to the whole game. Takane...doesn't respond well.
• Cursed Item: The sword-weapon left on the throne during the fourth round. Anyone that holds it has 99.9 seconds to kill an opponent or the item will kill them and turn them into a Revenant Zombie.
• Deadly Graduation:
  • The Makai Order in this continuity is the darkest it has ever been. They worship the Garo Armor like a cult and put teens into an Involuntary Battle to the Death at the end of their training, then make the survivor attempt to claim Garo. Unsurprisingly, the noble Armor symbolically cries during the process with Inga spawned from senseless deaths, which is collected by Azami, and outright refuses to be wielded by such champion. The Order seems to fail to get the clue, as they just deem the candidate unworthy and start the Vicious Cycle again.
  • The current Big Bad is Shousetsu, one of the "graduates", who decided to slaughter the rest of the Order as well after Garo rejected him, then do the same thing they did to create the armor of his own. Garo finally waking up and choosing Kuon over him throws Shousetsu into Villainous Breakdown.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: All of Ren's opponents die this way, cut up by his dagger.
• Do Not Go Gentle: How Nagusuke goes out against Azami.
• Dragon with an Agenda: Azami simply wanted Veil to be built and cared nothing for Shousetsu's scheme to Take Over the World.
• Dying as Yourself:
  • Hoshiai destroys himself before he's able to fully become a Horror.
  • After his curse-induced resurrection, Kanata targets Amou specifically in the hopes that his rival be the one to put him down.
• Elite Mook: This world's Horrors obey the game's overseers (and the Makai Order of the past) thanks to cybernetic Restraining Bolts. Amou attempts to fight one in #6 to very predictable results.
• "Everybody Dies" Ending: Only Amou makes it to the finale, meanwhile, Azami continues to lurk in the shadows for some future plot.
• Evil Mentor: Implied with the Priests overseeing the Makai Knight trials in the past. They encourage the contestants to kill one another and respond coldly to Shousetsu's lamenting over the process.
• Expy: The Veil Armor's design evokes both the Bolg and Kiba Makai Armors.
• Face–Monster Turn: Azami tries turning Hoshiai into a Horror. He does away with himself before it can go through.
  • Subverted with Nagusuke when Azami possesses him near the end, as Nagusuke regains his sense of self right before he dies.
• Fetus Terrible: The Original Garo's tussle with his final enemy caused some of their dark energies to taint his wife's pregnancy, causing her daughter Azami to be born a Half-Human Hybrid that can control the Dark Metal Shousetsu is so fascinated by.
• Flat Character: Beyond serving as Versus Road's Mission Control, Shuka has little in terms of personality to speak of. Justified, since she's a Makai tool in human form. The moment she shows an emotional response to Kuon's disavowment of Garo, she's destroyed by Shousetsu.
• Freudian Excuse: The abuse Takane endured from their mother warped them into The Sociopath they are now.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: Subverted. Kuon and Amou are both bare-knuckle brawlers at their core, even though they swing swords too here-and-there. The final battle between Kuon and Amou even transitions from swordplay to an all out brawl.
• Greater-Scope Villain: This world's Makai Order can be traced back to everything that goes wrong this season.
• Groin Attack:Done on Ryousuke Amou by Dai Kanata at the beginning of the series.
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: Takane is approached by Kuon at their office before the final round in an attempt to warn them what the game's really about. Takane doesn't just not care, they express very clear intent to kill Kuon.
• He Who Fights Monsters: The Makai Order of the VR-Verse are shown to be just bad as the Horrors they usually fight, willingly subjecting children to killer battle royales under the hopes they might inherit an Armor that will let them fight. Between a general disconnect from the outside world and a Lack of Empathy toward the death they cause how successful they are at actually dealing with Horrors is up in the air.
• History Repeats:
  • The Versus Road Battle Royale Game is based on the one Shousetsu himself was forced to participate in.
  • Like Shousetsu before him, Kuon is the victor of the game but only has deaths to show for it.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: Amou tries his hand at fighting one of the Horrors in the game. It doesn't go well.
• How We Got Here: #9 is elaborates on how the Makai Order fell and how the current game organizers crafted Versus Road from its remains.
• Incompetence, Inc.: Implied. The Makai Order of this world never accounted for the Garo Armor itself denying a contestant, nor do they seem to be able to detect the flow of dark energies emanating from them and tainting it. Their only response to the armor's dormancy is to simply try again with a new batch of bodies. They're obliterated by Shousetsu before they can.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: The motive behind Versus Road. Shunned by the armor he sunk to his lowest for, Shousetsu lured 100 people into killing each other for it so he could farm the Power Of Hate and use it to make his own armor and retaliate. When Garo chooses Kuon, he barely restrains himself from outright breaking down.
• Internal Deconstruction: Of GARO as a franchise. The seedier aspects and implications behind how the GARO-verses work are out on full-display. In layman's terms, Versus Road is what GARO would probably look like from the average joe's point-of-view:
  • The usually kind if antisocial wizards are portrayed as a group of reclusive hermits whose physical/moral disconnect from regular society is taken to its logical conclusion; resulting in a cult with a seemingly non-existent crusade whose single-minded devotion to a hero-figure gets their acolytes killed on a regular basis and morally erodes the ones that survive, resulting in warped, dangerous people capable of causing events like Versus Road's.
  • The protagonists are just regular people roped into a mystical Lovecraftian conspiracy while the main villain isn't an Omnicidal Maniac Eldritch Abomination from hell but someone deeply traumatized and lashing out. Even the presence of the actual Eldritch Abomination is downplayed and only tangentially connected to the show's events.
  • The mystical elements of GARO step aside to more straightforward and visceral fighting not from trained combatants but from civilians forced to improvise. While magic and mysticism are still there, they're subtle and function more to justify the presentation style than anything else.
  • The hope and persistence GARO expects out of its heroes in the face of insurmountable karmic odds is flipped and hoisted onto common people without the training and incentive to battle. There is no hope of stopping the game and all attempts to are quashed by an Invincible Villain. Thus, Instead of hope to "save the day," Versus Road highlights the "persistence" aspect: The will to survive and move on after tragedy has already struck. After all, Makai Knights can't be around all the time.
• Last Request: Hoshiai urges Kuon to destroy him before he can turn into a Horror. Kuon is too shell-shocked to do the deed; something Amou chastises him for later.
  • Nagusuke begs Kuon to win the game on his behalf when Kuon is forced to eliminate him to remove Azami's influence.
• MacGuffin:
  • Hoshiai's charm is left behind after his suicide. The charm has some sort of hidden power that allowed Kuon to save himself from a fatal blow near the end of the following round.
  • Also the Garo Armor itself, being the prize of the game.
• MacGuffin Blindness: Subverted. While Hoshiai's charm remains cinematically significant, the magical power it's implied to hold completely falls out of the plot after it protects Kuon once.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Implied. How Takane is able to establish an entire fashion-brand despite evidence linking them to an infamous murder is anyone's guess.
• Mind Control: Azami implants dark suggestions into Kuon's head in an attempt to sow infighting between him and Hoshiai so the latter can generate Inga. It doesn't take, but she accounted for that.
  • To train potential Knights, the Order has various Horrors under magical Restraining Bolts.
  • Azami possesses Nagusuke when he tries to rebel directly against her in the real world.
• My Greatest Failure: Takane does not remember the murder they committed fondly.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: Azami isn't simply sitting and watching the spectacle; she actively responds to any attempts by the Knights to interfere with the game. She had a back-up plan in case her attempts to Mind Control Kuon failed, actively blackmailed Takane to keep them in the game even after they inherited the modeling firm and targeted Nagusuke the moment he started looking into the Order.
• Oddball in the Series: Versus Road takes GARO in a more martial arts-oriented direction and downplays many of the Tokusatsu elements it's known for. There are no MOTWs, There's minimal CGI, all the fighting is between people and the Makai Armors the series are known for aren't used until the finale. It bears way more resemblance to Battle Royale or Kamen Rider Ryuki than it does to GARO.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Anyone killed by the curse of the special Ma-Ken in the fourth round is turned into a Revenant Zombie tied to the sword. The zombified Ren is reduced to a mindless savage while Kanata gets to keep his personality and faculties.
• Peer Pressure Makes You Evil: Shousetsu's scheme is primarily a response to the trauma he suffered from being goaded into winning the first murder-game.
• Power Of Hate: The energy from peoples' dark feelings and actions can be harnessed and converted into Dark Metal. Versus Road was made as a People Farm to harness this hateful energy from.
• Pyrrhic Victory:
  • Episode #9 reveals that Versus Road was not the first murder game. A young Shousetsu was the victor of the previous game...Only for the prize itself to reject him. All he had was a troupe of dead friends and mentors that just wanted to start the whole thing over again.
  • The ending to the show. Kuon manages to bring Shousetsu down and survive the murder-game, but his survival came at the cost of everyone else's death and Azami got the completed Dark Metal she wanted with no consequences.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Kuon's ability to box comes from his actor Matsudai Koya's own boxing training.
• Restraining Bolt: Whatever the devices are that enslave Horrors into service.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Young Shousetsu goes ballistic when the Garo Armor he'd lost himself to murder for rejected him. Using the Dark Metal being unknowingly generated by his Priest overseers, he obliterates them wholesale.
• Rousing Speech: Amou tells Kuon that the only way to honor Hoshiai's memory is to survive.
• Secret Test of Character: Implied. The Garo Armor didn't choose Shousetsu (Who lost himself to outside goading and hate to murder his fellow contestants) but instead chose Kuon ( Someone who actively questioned and fought the system to the best of his ability and retained his hope despite being in a losing position) a decade later.
• Serial Killer: Hyouga Ren. He's on a news-bulletin right before the first round starts. He brutally chops all of his opponents to death, too.
• Spanner in the Works: After Hoshiai's death, Kuon tries to be one once enough of the game's nature is made clear.
• Take Over the World: Shousetsu implies he plans to use the Veil Armor for this purpose.

• The Farmer and the Viper: The Makai Order took Azami in despite her Inga-tainted birth and Lack of Empathy in the hopes of putting her on a positive path. As thanks, she harvested the Power Of Hate from them before using a disgruntled apprentice to obliterate her caretakers.
• The Most Dangerous Video Game: The premise. Anyone that dies in Versus Road dies in the real world. Eventually subverted upon the reveal that Versus Road is a gateway to the Makai Realm rather than an actual video game.
• The Rival: Amou ends up this to Kuon, albeit not by choice.
• Token Evil Teammate: Downplayed. Kanata (alongside Amou) is more-than-willing to hear out Kuon and Nagusuke as they investigate the conspiracy surrounding the murder-game, but also doesn't mind playing. Neither does Amou, though for less Blood Knight-y reasons.
• Token Good Teammate: Subverted. Azami's adoptive Priestess mother and the survivor of the first game are the only two Makai operatives not shown in an inherently evil light; though both were involved in the events of the past. Both are dead at the girl's hands by the end of the show.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Hoshiai has no aggressive bone in his body whatsoever and laments that people are forced to kill each other. He's also the first of the main characters to die.
• Tragic Keepsake: After Hoshiai activates his self-destruct collar, Kuon keeps the charm he left behind. It saves his life in the following round.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Kanata and Amou bicker constantly, but they're never seen without each other.
• Void Between the Worlds: During Azami and Shousetsu's backstories, the former's adopted mother takes her to a fountain in the city that acts as a border between this world and the Monastery.
• We Can Rule Together: Shousetsu offers for Kuon to help him in "changing the world." Kuon only responds with a failed punch to the face.
• What You Are in the Dark: Nagusuke and Takane, to varying degrees.
  • Nagusuke's online persona is a friendly vlogger. While he's nearly as nice off-camera, he's also a pragmatist who isn't above doing some very shady things. Like feeding his manager to a Horror, for example.
  • Takane's social persona is a gentle model who wants to redeem for an old misdeed. Privately, they're a troubled sociopath with a Lack of Empathy.
• Would Hurt a Child: It's heavily implied the son of the first game's survivor is also murdered by Azami off-screen.
• Writing Around Trademarks: Nagusuke is basically a Youtuber.
• Yakuza: Kanata's got enough of the tattoos, thuggish persona and stereotypical weapon-types to qualify. Bonus points for his ambition being to become a crime boss.
  • One of the first turning points in the game is a clan of Yakuza Amou's in debt to going postal on the other contestants.
• You Know Too Much: Azami does away with Nagusuke when his digging allows him to re-connect with the other survivor of the first murder-game and learn what made Versus Road happen.