Get Backers Volume 4

Since entering the Limitless Fortress, Get Backers has enjoyed an exciting new lease of life. The story is exploding with intrigue as our heroes make an unwelcome return to their past stomping grounds (the Limitless Fortress), treating the viewer to juicy revelations of their long since broken friendships and allowing the extravagant action to take on a new level of intensity and drama.

I suspect your enjoyment of this fourth volume will partly hinge on your tolerance of the strong homoerotic undercurrents that now run through Get Backers with all the subtly of a sledge hammer. Despite being no more than a mere distraction from an otherwise fast moving story, this ambiguous sexual tone could be more than the casual action junkies amongst us bargained for.

After being separated in the subterranean maze that is the Limitless Fortress during the previous volume, our favourite recovery team are soon reunited either by luck or strange coincidence. They meet in a room with six mysterious doors, and assuming only one will lead to the tech-head Makubex and the dangerous nuclear device he protects, Ginji produces a dice and each fearless member of the team roles it, letting fate decide whichever door they will open, and whatever danger may lurk behind it!

What follows is an orgy of elaborate combat and somewhat disappointing melodrama. Amongst others, the anticipated face-off between Threadmaster Kazuki and the cool looking, needle throwing Juubei felt empty and anti-climatic, despite being built up as emotional wrench of a fight between two life long friends.
Their fighting styles naturally suggest long range combat and true to form, the battle soon becomes tiresome as the combatants expend most of their energy throwing sharp things at each other and exchanging evil glares. It’s a battle devoid of any visual invention but full of cringe inducing emotional conclusions.

I’m still really into the whole idea behind the Limitless Fortress though and the more that’s revealed about this towering place and Ginji’s impressively brutal history inside it, the more I’m intrigued.
It’s a great setting for the story and a very interesting concept; a mammoth post-apocalyptic skyscraper with each level up indicating an increase in physical strength – it is Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” illustrated in such a wonderfully modern and creative way.
All of the hints made about the superior higher ups in the “Babylon” section still have my imagination doing loops with all the possibilities.

The idea of manipulated fate is also touched on and it is suggested that the technologically advanced “Babylon” people are somehow controlling everyone below them in the Limitless Fortress. To this end, Makubex makes a rather interesting adversary for the Get Backers; he is someone struggling against his invisible oppressors, searching for true freedom in his life – hardly an evil villain.
I have no idea what Ginji and Ban will find in the mysterious Babylon section, but I really hope we find out.

In Summary

Despite falling into pre-emptive melodrama on occasion, Get Backers #4 proved to be an exciting and fun volume. The ideas and concepts behind this science fiction-lite story arc are never less than interesting and with much of the climatic fighting still yet to start, I find myself looking forward to the next instalment with real enthusiasm.