Review: GhostForce “Bananice/Pharaok” ; “Trashotic/Mikroo” ; “Mizuo/Sharkoak”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Mike, Andy, and Liv are three high school kids who turn into ghost themed superheroes who stop the supernatural with powers given to them by their half ghost science teacher Miss Smith as ghosts interfere with life in New York.

OUR TAKE

From France and South Korea comes the next big toy commercial of 2016! Seriously, this thing has apparently been delayed every year for the past five and is only now coming out. Aaaaand it’s not very good. I dunno, maybe it’s because I’m in my late 20’s and clearly not the target demographic for this, but even if I was a kid who might want to buy toys of these characters, I feel like I would be a bit bored by it. This show comes from ZAG, probably best known for Miraculous Ladybug and Cat Noir, and like that show, the animation is pretty stiff with unnervingly clean looking character models and action. I guess it looks better than early episodes of Ladybug did, but at least that had more stand out designs. The main Ghostforce costumes look a bit too similar to each other, separated mainly by color, body type, and odd ab design on the torsos. In terms of powers, Mike as Fury seems to primarily use melee attacks with weapons, Andy uses ice powers as Crush, and Liv makes use of portals and intangibility as Myst, so kind of like if some of Danny Phantom’s powers were split amongst a few people.

I wish that this show had character writing like Danny Phantom too, but sadly this doesn’t seem to be the case. Mike is cocky, Andy is a nerd who likes to eat, and Liv is…girl. These first six episodes do all give them a shot in the spotlight, though we don’t really learn a whole lot about them aside from miscellaneous character details and who the boys have crushes on, though that may change. Also unclear is how exactly they got these abilities and who their Zordon, Miss Smith, is. I had to check a wikia to find out she was half-ghost, which I’m assuming does not mean she’s just half dead but rather she also has some sort of powers. Ghosts here are just monsters who can possess stuff and grow bigger, thus necessitating the superpowers that come with a transformation sequence (that seems to give them capes they only sometimes use?). Perhaps we’ll get some better explanation over time that tells us about how all this came about, though I doubt that’s a priority at the moment. We’ll be covering this series for at least the next week, so I guess if there’s any spike in quality, you’ll hear it here first.