The Warehouse Where It All Starts

Read Time:8 Minute, 8 Second

TV SERIES REVIEW
Ultraman Omega: Complete Series
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Genre: Science Fiction, Action, Adventure, Tokusatsu
Year Released: 2025–2026
Runtime: 10h 25m (25 episodes)
Director(s): Masayoshi Takesue (lead), Tomonobu Koshi, Ryuichi Ichino, Takafumi Suzuki, Kiyotaka Taguchi, Takanori Tsujimoto
Writer(s): Toshizo Nemoto, Junichiro Ashiki (head writers), Masaya Honda, Akio Miyoshi, Yukinobu Tsuruta, Takao Nakano, Norikatsu Kodama, Ryo Yoshigami, Hirotaka Adachi
Cast: Shori Kondo, Haruto Yoshida, Ayano Kudo, Mirai Yamamoto, Seiya Osada, Shunichi Maki, Megumi Han
Where to Watch: available now; order your copy here: www.moviesunlimited.com or www.amazon.com

RAVING REVIEW: Sorato can turn into a giant and fight a monster downtown. He can also catch a cold and wind up needing someone to take care of him. That second problem gives Haruto Yoshida's Kosei something to do that couldn't be handed off to a defense team. He's got a sick roommate, and the fact that his roommate happens to be from space makes that responsibility a little stranger without making it any less ordinary. ULTRAMAN OMEGA understands how funny it is to put the guy with the red boomerang out of commission with a cold. Most of the city gets to see Omega when he's strong enough to come to its rescue. Here, he gets to feel lousy for an afternoon and count on somebody else to handle it.

The premiere starts far from the warehouse where these two end up living. Omega fights a swarm of insect-like creatures in space, a sequence that gives the audience a look at the hero in action before he shows up on Earth with his memory gone. Kosei meets him over stolen yakisoba. That cut in scale gives the two leads an immediate difference in priorities. For the audience, the mystery is how the guy from the opening fight ended up like this. Kosei has to start with the simpler question. What is this stranger doing with his lunch? Shori Kondo gets to play someone who can recognize a kaiju sooner than he can explain himself to a man standing a few feet away.

Kosei has his own life to figure out. His job as a live-in warehouse caretaker gives him somewhere to stay while he works out what he wants to do next. Once the monsters show up, Kosei gets an actual job in the fights. The Meteokaiju, beginning with Rekiness, are allies he can call on to support Omega. He has a creature to work with and decisions to make while Sorato is fighting. There's a pleasing reversal in watching the man who originally had to ask Sorato what a kaiju was become the person who can bring one into a fight to help.

The Omega Slugger gives the action a recognizable shape early on. The red boomerang is simple enough that a kid could draw it from memory, and it gives Omega a weapon that reads at a glance when he's up against a creature bigger than he is. The Meteokaiju complicate that design in a fun way. Rekiness can become armor and a sword, so an ally with a recognizable shape of its own can change how Omega looks and fights. There's an obvious toy appeal in that, right down to the idea of having pieces that fit together. The good thing about giving the transformations their own visual logic is that a fight can change shape in a few seconds. It helps a half-hour show make a new ability understood without stopping to walk everybody through it.

Ayano Kudo's Ayumu changes the kinds of questions the group can ask. She already studies endangered species when the first kaiju appear, so her expertise has a use the world couldn't have anticipated. Sorato can recognize a creature without remembering how he knows it. Ayumu can look for evidence that means something to the people who didn't fall out of the sky. Her presence gives the story a way to take the creatures seriously as animals with habits. It also makes room for cases where getting a better look at one is a worthwhile outcome in itself. A world with no history of kaiju attacks can have people curious about what just turned up in their backyard.

“Miko and Mikoto” puts that curiosity to good use by sending Sorato on a delivery to a rural town. A girl has made a place in her life for a giant serpent that eats steel. The episode spends time with the kid who knows the creature by name before anyone can decide what ought to happen to it. The clever part of making Mikoto a steel eater is that a small town can see a problem in the same appetite Miko sees as something worth looking after. Sorato spends much of the early run encountering creatures when they've already caused trouble. Here, he arrives as a delivery guy and meets someone who has a history with the creature he's just met.

The public has other ways of making sense of Omega. “Caught a Cold” gives Kosei a livestreamer making a buck on fake Omega footage while the real guy is sick. Wolfie has already figured out there's an audience for a giant that most people barely understand. That gives the series a funny little sideline in how fast a public emergency turns into something somebody can use to build a following. Later, “Chasing the Starlight” gives a boy who wants to make tokusatsu a reason to point a camera at a kaiju. For a show that spends so much time on people looking up at monsters, there's something sweet about giving one of those people the urge to make a show of his own.

The introduction of the Kaiju Special Countermeasure Team changes the scale of the second half. Mirai Yamamoto's Sayuki brings Ayumu into a larger response to a problem people have been piecing together. By then, there's a reason to want someone to keep track of the sightings and coordinate what happens next. “Beyond Time” makes good use of the investigative side of the job by sending the team into an abandoned factory after an unusual signal. The crew goes in with a specific job and ends up dealing with a creature that can move through time. By this point, the series has found a use for the defense-team structure. Some people's work takes them to the site of a strange event, so an episode can start with an investigation and take its time getting to the giant.

The season takes its time exploring Sorato's past. That leaves room for weekly cases to matter on their own terms, which is important in a show that can go from a rural folktale to an abandoned factory in the space of a season. When the backstory finally comes into focus, it makes Sorato's idea of his duty more complicated. The closing episodes need a larger threat to put that complication to work, and they give the people on the ground their own decisions to make. Kosei in particular has spent enough time trying to work out where he belongs that his actions in the finale tell us something about his future. The series gives him an answer of his own while it fills in the part of Sorato's life he couldn't remember.

Mill Creek's four-disc Blu-ray brings the 25-episode run together, with Japanese audio and English subtitles among the listed specifications. There's value in having the original performances together in one edition, especially for a series with as much conversation between fights as this one. You can go back for a single episode like “Miko and Mikoto” or let the later cases run into one another as the season gets more serialized. The standalone stories give the set some replay value beyond finding the big fight you remember from the finale.

The series gets a lot of mileage out of the distance between how the world meets Omega and how Kosei meets Sorato. The first giant anybody can remember turns up with a weapon and a fight on his hands. The guy Kosei meets is hungry and has nowhere to go. Kosei could have written off the missing noodles and gone back to work. The good stuff in ULTRAMAN OMEGA starts when he decides the stranger can stay.

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[photo courtesy of MOVIES UNLIMITED, ALLIANCE HOME ENTERTAINMENT, MILL CREEK]

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