The Retrospective Review: Looking Back at Ultraman Decker Episodes 1-3

While Ultraman Blazar holds down the fort in 2023, lets take a look back at the Ultraman of 2022 and see if Ultraman Decker holds up a year on!

Ultraman Decker aired in 2022 and is the third season Tsuburaya Productions decided to release fully subtitled on YouTube, following Ultraman Z and Ultraman Trigger. Set seven years after the events of the Trigger movie, Ultraman Trigger: Episode Z, the series follows Kanata Asumi (Hiroki Matsumoto) as he, along with Ichika Kirino (Yuka Murayama) and Soma Ryumon (Nobunaga Daichi), fight to protect Earth from the invading Spheres, under the watchful guidance of the captain and vice captain Taiji Murahoshi (Masaya Kikawada) and Sawa Kaizaki (Sae Miyazawa). During this Retrospective Review we will be looking at the first three episodes of Ultraman Decker and seeing how good a start this series has.

Episode 1: The Day of the Attack

The whole episode is great and is a wonderful start to the series. To exemplify this, let’s take a closer look at the opening moments of the episode.

The episode opens with a portal opening over the Mars settlement from the first episode of Trigger and emerging from it a flood of Sphere ships beginning their attack. We then cut to our main character, Kanata Asumi, working in his Grandpa’s store and offering to give a new customer a lift to the spaceport – since he has a delivery there – before looking to the camera and introducing himself to both us and the customer, taking us into the title sequence.  

This opening two minutes shows us the peaceful, calm life of our main character, which is what we need for the chaos of future battles to be juxtaposed against, giving it all much more weight. Additionally, this sequence showcases Kanata as a kind, energetic, helpful person while also having him literally introduce himself to the audience. All of this has an underlying scene of tension because we know the Spheres are coming.

We then get our first scene of our three man team interacting for the first time. It leaves a number of breadcrumbs that will be picked up on in future episodes, like Kanata’s parents going on a holiday to Mars and Ichika’s quiet promise to go to space, as she watches the shuttle leave earth. Moments like these leave an impression that there’s a lot more to these characters, which is great for a first episode as it leaves the audience wanting to get to know them better. 

The action in this episode was also a spectacle, from guys on the ground shooting at the spheres hoping to do something, to the Spheresaurus dropping in and the now remote control aircrafts that were used by the cast of Trigger. Speaking of Spheresaurus, I love its design, with its powerful looking forearms and clearly Sphere in nature back spikes.  

Ultraman Decker appearing to Kanata and his subsequent first transformation are exciting, appearing before Kanata as a large other worldly being of light. Speaking in words we the audience don’t hear does a wonderful job of making the Ultra seeing mysterious, larger than life and almost God like. Kanata exploding out of the Sphere in an burst of colour is just beautiful to see and his fight against the Spheresaurus is so engaging. He swats away Sphere’s like flies as he runs up to punch the episode’s main kaiju. This leads to the tense moment in which he’s taking off into space to try and stop the Spheres from forming a barrier around earth, all while his timer is in the red, not knowing that he’s running low on time and ultimately failing to stop them. This leads to to the end of the episode and the reveal that Kanata has joined Ichika and Ryumon in the training academy to help deal with the Sphere threat. I love how this subverts the expectation of the main characters already being on the earth defense team and really adds to the feeling that none of them were planning on this being the direction they wanted their lives to go. They will have to adapt to this new life. All in all a very strong opening episode. 

Episode 2: Kanata’s Resolve

This episode jumps a year into the future and sees our main trio taking part in their last marching drill before the new members of GUTS-Select will be chosen. During the exercise, Ryumon and Kanata start to argue after Kanata trips and hurts his leg. Eventually, Ichika steps in and settles things down. Just then, a Deathdrago bursts out of a nearby mountainside and begins to rampage, until it’s taken down by Ultraman Decker aided by Miclas. The episode ends with the trio officially becoming the newest members of GUTS-Select and being introduced to the pilot of the GUTS-Hawk, H.A.N.E.2, nicknamed Hanejiro (Hiroshi Tsuchida), the AI robot pilot that will be helping the team this season. 

While I have less overall to say about this episode compared to the first, this was still really good and builds on the established characters really well. Ryumon and Kanata’s conflict this episode serves as a good lead into exploring Ryumon’s perfectionism in a future episode. Kanata’s argument that just because they had one issue doesn’t mean they should quit shows off that Ultraman ‘can do’ spirit really well. 

Interestingly the fight in this episode establishes that any injury Kanata takes untransformed persists while transformed. The homage to Ultra Seven was also a highlight, with Kanata gaining three new cards of monsters he can now summon – all three of which were summonable by Ultra Seven during his series. Ultimately, the core of this episode was demonstrating all three’s compassion and readiness to be in the line of fire, so long as it means they can save people, and it does that very well. 

Episode 3: Move Out, GUTS-Select!

The third episode sees the team training in simulations with Hanejiro to see who’s the best person to work with them to form the GUTS-Gryphon, which combines the GUTS-Hawk and the GUTS-Falcon. During this, Gomora attacks, rampaging through the city and Kanata is chosen to pilot the GUTS-Falcon. During the battle, the Spheres fuse with Gomora. In order to bring forth the strength needed to push back Sphere-Gomora, Kanata unlocks a new Decker Form, Strong Type. The episode ends with Kanata officially giving Hanejiro their nickname and everyone laughing before going out for a meal to celebrate their first big win. 

This episode also saw the introduction of TPU scientist Yuichiro Asakage (Yu Koyanagi), whom I look forward to finding out more about as the series goes on. For the time being, though, she does not get much focus. Overall, the episode was pretty good, showing the team bonding with Hanejiro and discussing why they signed up. Of note, I particularly liked Ryumon’s reason for joining being that he was saved when he was younger. It’s nice when the show remembers it’s set after other series of Ultraman. Sphere Gomora is super cool. I love the idea that any normal monster battle could suddenly become a lot more interesting because the Spheres have fused with the monster of the week. We’re likely to seewhole new yet somehow familiar foes for Ultraman Decker to face. 

Conclusion

Bringing this review to a close, Ultraman Decker has a very strong start. It characterises its main cast well, there’s plenty of engaging action, very cool suit designs and a number of character beats that could make for interesting focus episodes featuring this already fairly fleshed out cast. I cannot wait to watch more!

If you would like to watch long with me, the next review will be covering episodes 4-6. You can find the series ad free over on Ultraman Connection or with ads on YouTube. Until next time, this has been Ethan, writer and reviewer for The Toku Source, and I’ll see you for the next batch of Decker here with The Retrospective Review.

Image Source: Ultraman Official YouTube