In my personal headcanon, Guyver: Dark Hero takes place parallel to the manga

[Maze247365]

First of all, let's look at the issues with Guyver: Dark Hero being canon:

 

- We have to ignore the first American movie entirely. It copies and Americanizes too many events that happened in Japan, and basically replaced the manga.

Solution: Not hard, just don't watch it.

 

- Then, If we omitted the scenes with adult Asian American Mizuki, the story of Sean Barker is actually different enough that it isn't copying too much in the manga, like the first movie did.

Solution: Skip the opening scenes until Sean is already in Utah and meets Corey. IMO, It's more mysterious that way, not knowing Sean is the Guyver yet. Ignore the part where Mizuki Segawa is mentioned by the government agent later.

 

- Sean's Guyver unit is not nearly as strong as Sho's

1. The Mega smasher is nowhere as destructive

2. The elbow blades don't vibrate at all,

3. The armor comes from inside the host and not from another dimension

No real solution to these, but despite these differences, it's similar enough to say "Hey, that's a Guyver Unit!"

 

- I guess humans walking in the spaceship raises some questions, was Sean able to disable all of the defense mechanisms that try to melt whoever goes inside? If I remember correctly, in the manga, the humans like Mizuki, Tetsuro, and the scientists did board the spaceship when they were escaping, so Sho had made it safe for them somehow.

 

I think this movie could easily take place at the same time as what is going on in Japan. I would even go so far to say it could be a prequel. It definitely takes place before X Day, or when Chronos is in the public eye. Also, I like to think that the part where the manga mentions the dead advent ship, that it could have been near the same cave as in Utah in Dark Hero, but they found an unusable ship with no Guyver units instead.

 

An added bonus:

If you have friends that are curious about getting into Guyver but they don't like older anime or don't want to read the manga right away, show them this movie. Yeah it spoils a few things, the biggest being the spaceships and the advents, but I don't think it's a bad intro to these things either. Then when your friends say "that was awesome", You say "wait till you get to the OVA and the manga!". Your thoughts?

Edited March 11, 2019 by Maze247365

[Azaar]

Interestingly enough, Guyver (Mutronics) and Guyver 2: Dark Hero are prequels, at least in the Warrior Guyver universe.  Sean bonded with his unit a year or more before Chronos discovered the "original" three units in Japan.

As for the rest of the post -- there's no denying that Mutronics is bad, I won't even try to defend that.  Sully, however, has said before that he wants to rewrite the first movie because of all the wacky crap that went on for the WG universe.  So at least there's that.  And, speaking for myself, there's actually one character from Mutronics that I have planned on using for my Stellar Warrior Guyver stuff that I'm (slowly) writing for the site.

Regarding Guyver: Dark Hero specifically -- I think the main reason why Sean's Guyver unit doesn't look to be as powerful as Sho is demonstrated to be over the course of the anime/manga is budgetary consideration.  Mutronics had a paltry $3,000,000 budget; Dark Hero was under a third of that, at $900,000.  Between that and the state of special effects from the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, it's little wonder that it looks less than extraordinary.  Terminator 2 in 1992 was an outlier in many respects, not the least of which is because James Cameron knew how to push the envelope.

I will say, however, that I really wish that whoever has the movie rights to The Guyver will open it up to give someone another shot at it.