Gall Force is a group of science fiction anime OAV series made starting in 1986 by the studio Artmic, with production by Youmex and AIC.
The original series concerns a Hopeless War between the One-Gender Race of Solnoids (humanoid females) and the Paranoids, who are an amorphous race that usually inhabits powered armor suits. The remaining crew of the Solnoid cruiser Star Leaf barely escape the destruction of their fleet in yet another hopeless battle, only to get caught up in a conspiracy that will have far reaching consequences for all concerned.
The original story has two direct sequels, in which Lufy is rescued ten years after being stranded in space during the original. She joins up with another replica of Catty and her team, first to prevent the ongoing war from claiming Earth and the Star Leaf's legacy, and later in a last desperate attempt to bring everything to an end other than the mutual annihilation both sides seem to be seeking.
Later, Rhea Gall Force and its sequels, the Earth Chapter revisit the story on a post-apocalyptic Earth, thousands of years after the original series. The Lost Technology of the Solnoids and Paranoids have given birth to the "NME", techno-organic weapons trying to Kill All Humans, and the Identical Spiritual Descendants of the original cast find themselves fighting for survival.
The more obscure final entry in the original continuity is New Era, which has humanity rebuild from the ashes of the Earth Chapter, only to fall into conflict with a race of Artificial Humans they created. But the legacy of the "NME" is still plotting to destroy everything, and the only hope of preserving any of humanity lies with Catty's newest incarnation.
The series saw a revival in 1996 with Gall Force:The Revolution — an attempted Continuity Reboot of the franchise that replaced the Paranoids with a perpetual civil war between factions of Solnoids, and a group of rebels trying to bring that war to an end. Despite an all-star cast of voice actresses, the series was quickly forgotten, and is the only part of the franchise not released in English.
Tropes:
- Ace Pilot: Lufy, an "Attacker" with over 150 confirmed kills and a medallion to prove it.
- Adam and Eve Plot: Though barely hinted at by the original film's ending, Rumy and the "new life form" become the progenitors of the Human Race.
- Amazon Brigade: The Solnoids are a species consisting entirely of female soldiers.
- Ancient Astronauts: Humans were seeded on Earth by the Solnoids and Paranoids. The Solnoids themselves have legends of having been seeded on their homeworld Marsus by a previous progenitor race.
- If you pay attention to the information on screens when Catty is talking about the Solnoids being seeded, you can see the ship that was used. It matches the ship used to escape to the Pleiades system in New Era. So it's implied that it's a cycle (hence the first part being subtitled Eternal Story.
- Animal Theme Naming: Most of the Solnoids: Rabby (Rabbit), Lufy (Wolf), Catty (Cat), etc.
- Artificial Human: The "new life form" from the originals; The "Yumans" from New Era.
- As Long as It Sounds Foreign: The text on the screens seems to have a lot of stylized Latin letters, some of which are written upside down.
- Auto-Doc: When Lufy is brought into the analysis station operated by Spea, they just move her into a chamber and press some buttons to restart her heart from a state of suspended animation. Spea mentions offhand that there are several injuries that may require organ replacement.
- Back from the Dead: Lufy was rescued to appear in the first two sequels.
- Better with Non-Human Company: Pony, the only crew member able to communicate with the OX-11 mainframe, but a Shrinking Violet with her cremates.
- Big Eater: Rumy; whenever she happens to be onscreen, she's usually eating something.
- Big Guy Fatality Syndrome: Norton near the end of Earth Chapter.
- Bizarre Alien Biology:
- The "new life form" grows to adulthood within maybe 20 minutes.
- The Paranoids themselves are an exceptionally bizarre race, essentially morphing slime that, aboard their own ships, shapes itself around a robotic frame to move around more easily. They enter their attack ships by being sluiced off the frame and through tubes, literally being piped into their mecha.
- Blood Knight: Lufy, who holds the title of Attacker with those 150 kills, and at least in the first movie she's the most eager to go into battle and had literally said the line "shoot first, ask questions later".
- Boisterous Bruiser: Lufy; despite the Blood Knight tendencies, she's generally the most gungho compared to all the other ladies.
- Bratty Half-Pint: Rumy; she's the youngest of the Star Leaf crew and it shows, she's always whining or complaining about something.
- The Constant: Catty. After another of her model appears in the original series, Earth Chapter introduces another duplicate rebuilt by Earth humanity millenia later; this duplicate also appears in New Era.
- Color-Coded Characters
- Eluza- Red/Pink
- Rabby- Orange
- Rumy- Yellow
- Lufy- Green
- Patty- Blue
- Pony- Purple/Indigo
- Catty- Violet/Pink
- Continuity Reboot: Gall Force: The Revolution, which replaces the Solnoid/Paranoid war with a Solnoid civil war, or at least that's what it seems like on the surface...
- Cyborg: Norton from Rhea/Earth Chapter, who was rebuilt after suffering major injuries shortly before the Robot War started.
- Detonation Moon: Downplayed at the climax of Eternal Story, which the once-terraformed Moon of Earth scorched into the wasteland we know now as a side-effect of the climactic battle.
- Dramatic Space Drifting: Gall Force had many scenes, particularly a corpse of an unlucky crew in a space suit in the vacuum of a sealed-off area, but the most iconic being the aftermath of Luffy's Heroic Sacrifice where she was left drifting in space, cradled in the arm of the last Bronz-D. At least before she was revived thanks to being in stasis inside her own suit.
- Dream Sequence: In the escape ship sequence of the first film, showing exactly how the "third race" plan works.
- Dub-Induced Plot Hole:
- It's relatively minor, just a bit of a characterization goof: in the dub, Lufy is nicer to Pony before the spacewalk, saying "You'll live. Promise." This line doesn't exist in the sub, and it's Rabby who encourages the tech to go across the zipline.
- A major one in the Greek dub of the first OVA, as the Solnoids' lines after the creation of the new life form imply they are fully aware of the human pregnancy process and outright call the new organism a baby.
- Fanservice: Via Innocent Fanservice Girls and Shower Scenes.
- Earth All Along: The planet Chaos is in orbit around another world, dubbed 'Terra' by the Solnoids. The stinger at the end of Eternal Story underlines where they actually were, eons ago.
- Earth-Shattering Kaboom: The events of Destruction cause the creation of the Sol System's asteroid belt by blowing up the planet that used to stand in that orbit. Yes, you heard right.
- Earth Is a Battlefield: Related to the above; the final battle of Eternal Story happens on Chaos, which is actually Earth's moon.
- Eternal Recurrence: If the subtitle of the first movie wasn't a clue, then the lookalikes in Rhea and beyond should be a better one. New Era just makes it
Anvilicious. - Everybody's Dead, Dave: The seven crewwomen of the original OVA are the sole survivors of the Star Leaf (plus one guest).
- Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: Eluza and Patty were candidates for the Paranoids' "contact point". To receive it they were jumped by what was essentially a giant slime monster which teleported said contact point into their wombs.
- Faster-Than-Light Travel: Via a jump drive that was fairly touchy about getting damaged. One of these drives overloading was the ultimate end of the Star Leaf.
- Fire-Forged Friends: By the end of their battle together defending the Star Leaf, Rabby and Lufy are virtually the Fan-Preferred Couple.
- Fling a Light into the Future:
- At the end of Eternal Story, Rabby and Patty know they can't possibly hold off both the Paranoid fleet and the Solnoid special forces for long, so they put Rumy and the new lifeform/Patty's son into the Blossom's escape pod, and have it shoot off to Terra while they overload Chaos' planetary terraforming network. Their enemies all perish in the resulting volcanic backlash, while Rumy and the new lifeform live on to start the human race.
- At the end of Stardust War, Admiral Catty Nebulart launches a probe holding all of the Solnoids' knowledge as the apocalyptic final Blast Out is occurring.
- Gelatinous Encasement: Patty and Eluza end up with a Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong when an alien slime monster captures them and zaps them with energy.
- Government Conspiracy: Between the Solnoid and Paranoid leadership. The "Species Unification Plan".
- Half-Human Hybrid: The "new lifeform" in Eternal Story was an attempt to combine the two warring races to have a third to stand between them. Too bad it only resulted in what looked like a human male...
- Happy Ending Override: New Era, where the Eternal Recurrence that seemed to have finally ended simply started back up from the beginning.
- Hope Spot: Stardust War, the finale of the original series. Captain Nebulart reveals a newly terraformed planet Embryo to the remnants of the Solnoid and Paranoid fleets meeting for an apocalyptic battle, and broadcasts a final plea for both sides to put the meaningless battle behind them. The battle stops as both sides listen to the message. Then someone gets an itchy trigger finger, and an omnicidal Blast Out ensues.
- Human Aliens: The Solnoids, which are basically standard human females, just not from Earth.
- Humongous Mecha: The Paranoids' giantic turtle-like "dynamech" that is sent to cause a Kaiju-style rampage at the climax of Eternal Story, among others.
- Identical Grandson: The Rhea/Earth Chapter and New Era series have counterparts of the original cast, that are Hand Waved by this trope.
- It's All Junk: Lufy throws her "Attacker" medal to the floor when Rabby accuses her of not caring about her fellow pilots who died while she earned it.
- Kill Sat: The "System Destroyer" that appears in Destruction is the BFG of Kill Sats, it orbits a sun. The sun it's supposed to kill. The development of this weapon scares both sides of the Solnoid-Paranoid war into trying to Take a Third Option.
- Loser Daughter of Loser Mad Scientist: Sandy Newman of the Rhea/Earth Chapter series (Rabby's reincarnation), the daughter of the scientist who discovered the ruins from Eternal Story and created the NME.
- Martyr Without a Cause: Arguably Lufy's motivation for her You Shall Not Pass! Heroic Sacrifice in Eternal Story.
- Mecha-Mook: The Solnoid "cyborg soldiers" who appear starting in the second installment of the original series.
- One-Gender Race: The Solnoids, a race composed entirely of humanoid females. Their enemies, the Paranoids, could be considered an all male race at least judging by their voices.
- One-Man Army: Lufy. To showcase, she manages a tremendous amount of Paranoid casualties on the first film while wearing a Powered Armor that is essentially her star-fighter's Ejector Seat.
- Opposite-Sex Clone: The "new life form". This is actually a subversion: the plan wasn't to make an Opposite-Sex Clone, but to convert a Solnoid into a totally different species by fusing "contact point" into one. The point was removed before it could fuse with Patty.
- OVA: The entire series, though in the US they tended to be released as one long movie rather than in episodes.
- Powered Armor: Used by Lufy, when her fighter is too damaged to continue fighting, she simply climbs into one of these that also serves as something of an escape pod.
- The Real Remington Steele: Throughout the whole series, we meet several identical girls all named Catty. In Stardust War we meet the woman they're all based on, Admiral Catty Nebulart.
- The Remake: Gall Force: The Revolution, a 1996 Revival OVA.
- Retool: Rhea Gall Force/Earth Chapter, New Era, which shifts the conflict to humans versus machines or humans versus artificial humans respectively.
- Ridiculously Human Robots: Catty, who really can't be told apart from normal Solnoids, until she shows off the super strength that goes with being an android.
- Robot Buddy: TOIL and AIL, a pair of small boxy servicebots on the Star Leaf that serve mostly as comic relief, though they're surprisingly human in their distress over the thought of losing Pony.
- Roboteching: While one translation refers to what the ships are firing as missiles, and they're drawn that way at least once, the majority of the time the bendy-path weapons look and act more like lasers.
- Senseless Sacrifice: Pony essentially dies just to satisfy her curiosity.
- Shout-Out: The second act of Eternal Story draws very heavily from Alien. As well, Score (Lufy's Identical Grandson/reincarnation) in Rhea borrows a tremendous amount from Jeanette Vasquez.
- Sole Survivor: Seven people survived on the Star Leaf. Only one of them made it to the end.
- Space Is Noisy: Lots and lots and lots of laser fire sounds and loud explosions in this series' space battles.
- Star Killing: The System Destroyer, which causes the star it's fired at to go supernova, wiping the surrounding star system from existence.
- Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Shildy, who replaced Rabby as Lufy's foil in the sequels to Eternal Story.
- Ten Little Murder Victims: Most prominent in Eternal Story, we're introduced to a small pool of survivors which slowly gets whittled down over the course of the movie. (This is lampshaded by the title of the Super-Deformed parody version of Eternal Story, Ten Little Gall Force.)
- Theme Naming: After the Animal Theme Naming of Eternal Story, later installments of the franchise use different themes — Arms and Armor Theme Naming (Shildy and Spea) in Destruction, Musical Theme Naming (Melody, Score, Fortin and Soundy) in Rhea, and Rock Theme Naming (Crys, Marble, Garnet, etc.) in New Era.
- Token Mini-Moe: Rumy; she's the youngest and the most cutesy of the Star Leaf crew.
- Transforming Mecha: The hoverbikes that turn into humanoid robots.
- Vasquez Always Dies: Zig-Zagged Trope: Rabby is a very sensitive woman who is panicking or enraged about something every time she's in combat throughout Eternal Story (until the final battle, that is), while Lufy is a veteran warrior and Boisterous Bruiser and buys it in the first major battle of the film... only to be found cryogenically frozen at the beginning of the second film and serve as the protagonist for the remainder of the trilogy (and when she buys it is because all of the Solnoid race buys it).
- Villain Has a Point: While Rabby is horrified that thousands of Solnoids were killed in order to create a New Life Form, it's pointed out that both sides had been fighting for centuries and were on the verge of wiping each other out.
- War Is Hell: The horrors and pointlessness of war aren't downplayed in this anime, where many characters began to doubt on the conflict as their friends and comrades were included in the death tolls. In fact, Rabby decided to blow up the planet fought by both sides the end of Eternal Story due to these reasons.
- World of Action Girls: In the first OVAs this is justified by the Solnoids being a One-Gender Race. Later entries just end up with the survivors in focus being mostly female.
- Wrench Wench: Pony is the lone surviving engineer on the Star Leaf, and gets along with the two robots and the ship AI better than she does the other Solnoids.
- You Are in Command Now: Eluza ends up in command of the Star Leaf, when the actual captain was killed in battle.
