YMMV / Strider (2014)

• Complete Monster: Grandmaster Meio is the tyrannical ruler of the Earth. A Galactic Conqueror from another world, Meio arrived on Earth and took it over in the span of a few years, establishing Kazakh City as his seat of power. However, his lust for power and control was not sated. He viewed the people of Earth as imperfect and longed to create a "perfect race". To that end, he ordered his scientists to develop an anti-gravity device called the Gravitron, under the pretense that it would provide limitless energy to the people of Earth. In reality, Meio planned to use the Gravitron to pull his space station, the Third Moon, into Earth's orbit, which would cause worldwide natural disasters, killing off all of Earth's population and allowing Meio to create his perfect race. Any scientist who learned the truth was hunted down and killed, or, in the case of The Prisoner, tortured into insanity. Meio kills subordinates who fail to meet his expectations, such as Professor Schlange. Eleven Striders before Hiryu tried and failed to kill Meio, one of them being Hien, whom Meio personally murdered. A being of pure evil and relentless ambition, Meio would stop at nothing to achieve his twisted version of perfection.
• Funny Moments:
  • After you defeat General Mikiel, he laughs and says that Hiryu stands no chance because he has a gun and Hiryu only has a sword—despite how he just took down a giant tank using just that sword. Hiryu reflects the General's single bullet and kills him.
  • After Hiryu destroys Mecha Pon, Professor Schlange starts ranting about it, but Meio shows up behind him and nonchalantly fries the scientist to a crisp. Hiryu then confronts Meio, but gets knocked into a pit with the mechanical gorilla's remains. After that massive fall, Hiryu is seen fine and well, coolly standing with crossed arms over the robot, as if to make up for that brief moment of Cutscene Incompetence.
• Nightmare Fuel: The background information reveals plenty of horrible things happening off-screen: Citizens live in a heavily monitored society where the smallest infraction is punished severely in public, and serious crimes merit incarceration in a facility where they are used to test the various Mecha-Mooks, Gladiator-style. Those who try to escape the city are hunted down and either killed or sent to the Research Facility to serve as guinea pigs on Professor Schlange's experiments. One such experiment, the Brainwalker, uses the brains of said citizens as their motor, and they wear them down so fast they need to be replaced on a daily basis. And if anyone manages to escape capture, they have no other place to go but the underground refugee camps, surrounded by highly toxic sewers where giant mutated monsters constantly prey on them and malnutrition is at the order of the day.
• The Woobie: The unnamed Prisoner was once a serious but friendly leading researcher of Grandmaster Meio and a creator of the Gravitron's technology, which was supposedly intended as a renewable energy resource. During development of the machine, however, he realized Meio's real plans for the machine were to wipe out the world's population and attempted to convince his colleagues to stop development. Unfortunately, all the other researchers ignored his warnings, and Meio's Army arrested him under charges of "heresy", sending him to the Military Prison where he was tortured and lobotomized. As a result, he became raving mad and started suffering psychotic breakdowns where he destroys everything on his proximity. By the time Hiryu runs into him, the prisoner has become a rambling madman that spews nonsense most of the time, although he retains portions of his old self, as he is able to direct Hiryu into the Underground to seek the help of the Black Marketer, a former researcher just like him.