Category: Science Fiction

Legend of the Galactic Heroes Part 1: Ambition

9 Comments

Random warning: Never watch the previews, NEVER, they are full of spoilers. And so are the episode titles, so never look at them, NEVER.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes can be one of the most intimidating series to start in all of anime with 110 episodes in the main OVA series, several movies,  and 52 OVA side story episodes it can seem like madness. But this is the definitive space opera inside or outside of anime.

There are dozen of reasons to watch Legend of the Galactic Heroes: the complex politics, the epic space battles, and just the overall maturity of the the whole production. But the only reason any of that matters is because the characters are so compelling that they make you care about everything that happens. This is why I never cared for Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series despite how good it might be it never connected me to the characters.

I had considered starting Legend of the Galactic Heroes on my own several times but thankfully Narutaki and my roommate decided to join me in watching this series once a week otherwise I would be watching this at a much slower pace. Even if you have to brave it alone know that it few series will reward for your effort and dedication. This review is for the first arc of the series with 26 episodes.

So perhaps you don’t know anything about Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Well, let me tell you, it’s infamously epic and quite long. And no we didn’t write that wrong, it is a 110 episode OVA.

You might be saying to yourself, well 110 episodes sounds long but compared to many a shonen fighting show it’s not too crazy. But this isn’t a shonen fighting show, these 110 episodes are a dramatic, political, and strategic running narrative with a cast that swells with significant characters.

But don’t worry, as the title implies, you can quite easily break the show into parts. You can even take a break between parts, but I promise you won’t want to. That is what makes it so amazing! Space opera has never been done better than Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

Continue reading →

Secret Santa Project Review: Texhnolyze, What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.

10 Comments

The roulette wheel of fortune is a fickle beast. It can choose to see you go home a winner or it can clean you out without remorse. We had to choose between Tsukuyomi: Moon Phase, Millennium Actress, and Texhnolyze. There was no force on Earth that was going to make Narutaki casually watch Moon Phase; Millennium Actress was a solid choice but we had seen enough Satoshi Kon to easily assume we’d like it so it would have been against the spirit of the project. We gambled on the generally unknown: Texhnolyze. I myself had avoided it because I had heard it was relentlessly grim and obtuse by design which are two things I generally do not care for. We would both learn that my guesses on what this show would be like was all too correct.

To fully embrace the project, I felt Texhnolyze was the only option. I had literally never even heard of the show before and thus I went in with no expectations, no prejudice, and no idea what was going on. This actually became a running theme of the series, the “not knowing what was going on” part that is. Most of Texhnolyze in fact remains an enigma to me even after watching the whole thing and writing this now. But then again, I have no real desire to discover its secrets after all this. In fact, the only thing I can say for sure that was good about this show was that a Gackt song was used for the ending theme!

In the city of Lux, Ichise is a prize fighter until one day he angers someone enough to have them cut of one of his arms and one of his legs off leaving him to die in the street. When he is found struggling to live by a woman name Doc he is given cybernetic limbs. He does not accept his new limbs at first but as tensions in Lux grow to a frenzied pitch he soon finds himself involved in a apocalyptic prophecy only truly known to a young girl named Ran who he seems linked with. I think that is what it is about but I would hardly bet money on that fact. I don’t mind being dropped into a strange world and then slowly learning about it but Texhnolyze takes it too far by not giving me enough pieces of the puzzle. Shows like Haibane Renmei and Xam’d:Lost Memories do similar things but they give you enough information about the main story that you feel you understand what happened but still leave the impression the world still has many secrets it never revealed.

He was a prize fighter!? I just thought he was some schmuck they threw in the ring to get beat on. The first episode has almost no talking so you are left to interpret what is going on, and though the talking increases in further episodes, the requirement to figure out what was going on with little explanation stays the same. I believe in storytelling that “shows not tells” but this was too extreme. Heck, it’s not even clear the city is underground till episode 20. But despite that, the setting is where I would give the most praise for Texhnolyze. It was fully realized and quickly established as a city full of people vying for power and survival, an overall quite unhappy place.

Continue reading →

Time of Eve, All About Eve

5 Comments

Narutaki and I found this series when we were doing our overview of Crunchyroll. We decided to check it out on a whim and were impressed how well it was done for something that was otherwise completely off our radar. It is fascinating series for a number of reasons. It is a sci-fi series in a time when sci-fi series seem so rare. It is also an ONA not based on an established property. I am hardly the most informed anime fan but I usually have a decent idea of what is out there. So when any modern title comes out that I do know about it is always intriguing.

I stumbled across Time of Eve and I don’t even recall how beyond the fact that it was on Crunchyroll while I was testing the site out. Though I am always interested in short series to check out in between other longer shows. Time of Eve fit into this doubly so because the episodes came out rather infrequently and minus the final episode run only 15 minutes long. However, don’t let that fool you into thinking this show doesn’t do anything, it uses its minutes very wisely.

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

In a deliberately unspecified time in the near future robotics has advanced to the point where androids are nearly indistinguishable from humans. They are so hard to tell apart that androids have halos over their heads to identify them. One day Rikuo notices that the android his family owns, Sammy, keeps disappearing from time to time. After some investigation he discovers that she has been going to a cafe named the Time of Eve. In this cafe no halos can been seen in hopes of promoting everyone treating each other as equals no matter who they are. Rikuo and his friend Masaki soon start coming to the cafe and slowly learn more about complexities of the dynamics between humans and robots.

Continue reading →