There Is No Mecha Named Aldnoah In This Series

Recently watched the anime Aldnoah.Zero (yeah, that's a pretty quirky affectation of punctuation in the title), and while it's by no means perfect, it's the best mecha anime I've watched in a while, at least since Gundam Build Fighters* and possibly since Gargantia. (Here's the Gundam tag if you're curious about Build Fighters; I'm unlikely to blog about other Gundam stuff for the near future.)

Perhaps the best thing about the series as a whole is that it reverses the general mecha/super robot series trend of "hero->strong mecha, bad pilot/villain->weak mecha, good pilot" full stop. The first few episodes feature relatively realistic mecha going up against a machine protected by a barrier that instantly wipes anything that touches it-including light and basically every form of matter-into complete nonexistence. That goes just as badly for the realistic machines as it sounds, especially because of their predilection for trying to stab the enemy for some odd reason. The protagonist stops it by figuring out that there must be a hole somewhere for the sake of seeing out.

And that's only the start of his level-headed and methodical attacks.



The battles are often ridiculous in their own way, but have a veneer of plausibility to them despite the enemy mecha laughing at ordinary physics and regularly ripping said physics new orifices, and better yet, real physics phenomena are often name-dropped in ways that actually make sense, such as the steam explosion being a consequence of the super-high-temperature "plasma swords" that the enemy mecha used in the above scene**. (There's even an episode where the protagonist brings up the fact that using insulation to stop electricity-derived attacks is silly because air is itself already one of the best insulators.)

For the sake of contrast, a few screenshots frome Linebarrels of Iron, a frickin' awful mecha anime I tried watching recently***:

What do these demonstrate relative to the above video? Absolutely nothing, but they've been sitting on my hard drive for months and I've been meaning to do something with them. Really, I just thought of Linebarrels because I was trying to think of the best mecha anime I've watched recently, and for some reason thought of the worst instead.

Incidentally, another thing: I saw some reviewer call Aldnoah.Zero "Gundam minus what I like about Gundam." I watched Aldnoah.Zero and thought "Gundam minus a lot of what I don't like about Gundam."

Wow, I'm rambling. I should probably just hit Publish and get off for the night.

*I know I watched those back in the spring of this very year and so it doesn't sound like much of a compliment, but I've been watching a lot of mecha anime lately. Both Aldnoah.Zero and Gundam Build Fighters excel in some of the same areas, incidentally-really great mecha battles and absolutely fantastic soundtracks. Of course, they're incredibly different styles of series beyond that...

**For the sake of contrast, the anime Betterman screwed up bad when it tried the same thing.

***Note that I've seen plenty of people say the manga is lots better, but I've no familiarity with the manga at all.

-Signing off.

I Hope You Weren't Fishing For Compliments From the Submarine

One of the rather quirky things about Arpeggio of Blue Steel is that most of the character development is given to the ship girls rather than the human characters. Even the captain of I-401, ostensibly the protagonist, doesn't get a whole lot of character development comparatively.

And honestly, it's pretty generic character development he does get. (I've read that there's a lot of differences from the manga, to the point where manga fans are upset by the anime, but... eh.)

Take this scene:

I've slightly altered the context-I left out the part where context made it clear that this conversation was about his attempt to change the world-but it's pretty amusing nonetheless.

-Signing off.

(Almost) The Only Reason

While I'll acknowledge that we're talking about real-world versus in-universe reasons, it still feels a bit disingenuous when the characters discuss why all the living warships in Arpeggio of Blue Steel are personified as female.

While the given reason-that ships are given female pronouns, so they should be girls-is pretty logical, and is why many, many ships with personalities are personified as female in science fiction, the other obvious reason-because the series creator(s)* felt like occasional fanservice-is definitely a factor in this case, though the series is relatively tasteful most of the time.

(I still think it's a pretty decent series, overall... even if/partly because it's a series that uses the phrase "tsundere heavy cruiser.")

*Arpeggio of Blue Steel is both a manga and an anime adaptation. I know very little about the manga and it's possible it has very little fanservice (though I doubt it), but the anime, erm, flirts with fanservice a fair bit, especially in the intro sequence and a couple of random episodes.

-Signing off.

Don't Pick A Fight With A Living Submarine

Because a living submarine is bigger than you and has built-in weapons. (Screenshots are from the anime Arpeggio of Blue Steel, which is about a bunch of superpowered and essentially living ships showing up and imposing a global blockade on humanity so that sea trade can't happen. They also shoot down all the satellites and jam all forms of long-ranged communication.)

And yes, the white/blue-haired girl is a submarine. (Her "real" body is just offshore, which is about twelve feet away in this case.)

Bonus reason for not picking a fight with a living submarine: There's a chance they'll be good at hacking.

(Incidentally, the reason this post is in the "super robot junk" label is because I've been watching it for the same reasons I watch super robot and mecha series*, and "super robot junk" is definitely my most catch-all category for that sort of thing.)

*Stuff blowing up plus cool technology porn that doesn't feel the need to make perfect sense.

-Signing off.

Super Robot Junk: Planet Nessus

I've been watching the anime Heroic Age on Hulu, a space operatic series which just happens to involve some weird mythological stuff and the sides deploying ultra-powerful space werekaiju as weapons.

Sadly, it's not nearly as awesome as the premise sounds, mainly because... well, because it's not particularly well-written*, and the fights aren't nearly as impressive as many contemporary series, such as the far more popular Gurren Lagann (which apparently aired on the same dates, if Wikipedia is to be believed).

Which is a shame, because the series has a lot of design work and worldbuilding that's really neat.

Case in point: Planet Nessus**.

Now, so far as I know, this neat-looking apparently mechanical planet shows up in a grand total of one (1) episode. But this series casually throws out some really neat spaceship and space station designs that it doesn't use more than briefly, and this episode has a fair number of them. (See also: Bigheaded Robots. Ironically, the series those came from shares a character designer with this one, and so half the cast looks pretty similar.)

You might notice that there's a bunch of spacecraft lined up in these shots; this is because there was nearly a space battle between the protagonists' fleet and a neutral planet, because some of the guys in charge of the protagonists' fleet are stupid jerks who shouldn't be put in charge of operating toasters, much less commanding space fleets.

The really big things in the above and below screenshots are some manner of semi-mobile space forts; I imagine that there was a certain amount of inspiration from Legend of the Galactic Heroes, an anime/novel series which is also seen by many as one of the greatest space operas of all time, which featured conceptually somewhat similar ideas to this series and probably also inspired the general way that the fleet battles and space travel are depicted. (Fleet sizes are explicitly enormous and even among the larger ships, casualties are generally pretty high; there are distinct pathways in space that create FTL "choke points" and strongly affect fleets getting from one place to another. More on that second bit in a moment.)

We also see the planet's inhabitants; I presume that they're the natives, though aspects of the worldbuilding bring that somewhat into question. The following couple of screenshots are of a control room that's the only location on the planet we actually see.

What the screenshots don't quite show you is that that odd curving stuff in the background is continuously rotating, as if they were some kind of big clockwork. It's pretty neat, though it's hard to say why it exists.

What really got my attention here was the fact that Nessus appears to be inhabited entirely by robot people.

The thing about long-distance space travel in this setting, by the way, is that there's two ways to do it. One can go anywhere but is imprecise and unsafe (the main characters' ship is noted as being unusual for being able to use this method of travel much more effectively with the help of psychic navigation; this gets them respect with many who would otherwise be their enemies, including the inhabitants of Nessus), while the other, the "starways," are pathways that are limited in numbers and only connect some planets.

And while only a handful of species reached space under their own power, many were uplifted by the setting's villains and allowed to retain control of their own worlds, in many cases because these worlds are hubs where many starways intersect, and the villains feel the need to respect their neutrality. (The above-mentioned stupid jerks among the protagonists' allies are nearly the only people in the setting who don't respect this idea.) This is actually the only reason I wonder about how natural this planet is or isn't; were these people essentially put here to serve as a waystation on this hub?

That they happily serve with neutrality makes me wonder.

It's a little hard to parse what that sentence means, but it sounds essentially like they're saying "let us be and we'll let you through no matter who you are."

That's an interesting take on the limitations of travel in a setting like this, and it shows a degree of thought many more popular settings lack.

*There's characters I like and episodes that are pretty entertaining, but it takes a while for things to pick up and the series burns a lot of time on interaction that feels kinda pointless. Also, arguably the two main characters are a bit too perfect. I gauge this based entirely on the fact that the only people who dislike and/or disagree with them are very obviously supposed to be severely hated, or are their actual enemies. Despite that, I still like the main characters, because Age, the main space werekaiju, manages to be surprisingly adorable for a guy who turns into a thing that fairly casually punches out planets and other celestial bodies, and the other, Dhianeila (...ugh, that's no fun to type out), entertains me because I learned early on that she has the same Japanese voice actress as the character Mikasa Ackerman from Attack on Titan (in fact, it was apparently the actress's debut role), and the two are roughly as different in personality as two characters can be. Heroic Age is significantly more entertaining when one imagines Mikasa's probable reactions to any given situation that Dhianeila responds to with angst and diplomacy. ("Ugh, Meleagros and Atalantes have been causing trouble again? Give me a minute and I'll stab them until they quit.") ...I should mention that Mikasa is one of my favorite anime characters from recent years because she's a really odd sort of deadpan funny***.

**I'm not sure why they named this particular planet after a centaur from Greek Mythology (who were, let's say, all horrible people). It gets really weird/kinda creepy when you think about the fact that one of the anime's major characters was named after Hercules' wife that Nessus assaulted, and said character worked to calm a conflict between Planet Nessus and her allies.

***Considering that Attack on Titan is such a dramatic anime, it's pretty amusing that a fair amount of its fandom is screwy-silly and that one of the first things I think of when I think of Mikasa (who is a character who was brutally orphaned when some kidnappers abducted her with the intent of selling her to aristocrats because she was considered exotic) is what a great comedy duo she makes with fellow cast member Sasha (whose obsession with food is played for laughs despite the fact that it was induced by her village suffering from a severe famine-and this desire to acquire food drove her to join a military organization with an incredibly high casualty rate).

-Signing off.

Context Doesn't Help Much

For various reasons (e.g. bad weather that makes me fear for my computer), here's a sort of clearing house of Gundam Build Fighters screenshots which I found particularly amusing:

(The only one of these to come from the first series, incidentally, is the above.)

(This is a hilarious yet awful reference to Ramba Ral's [the character upon whom this character, Mr. Ral, is based] death scene; he says at one point that while he was in the middle of a fight, he forgot to fight. This is not the only reference to this line that Mr. Ral has. Also, frankly Ramba Ral's death scene is kinda narmy.)

(She was going to jump out and have a shouting match over a guy she was interested in, but somebody else beat her to it, and she got so distracted by the shouting match she forgot to actually do anything herself.)

(Because he wants to win all the contests, you see. SPOILERS: He does.)

(That point when you realize that you probably should just talk this out.)

-Signing off.

Nope, Never Heard of It

I mentioned the other day (in a title text picture caption) that an actual plot point in the Gundam Build Fighters anime was that the writers had a hard time imagining someone had never heard of Gundam unless he was from another planet. The loose sequel series, Build Fighters Try, turns around and pokes fun at this very same idea:

And no, this character isn't from another planet (though he resembles the character who is from another planet to a substantial degree).

Having completed both series at this point, I have to say that I rather enjoyed the second one more, partly because it was deliberately more ridiculous (it was much more of a super robot show than the first series, though the first series had pretty substantial super robot elements, being basically a Gundam series with a nonexistent body count, plus it heartily embraced the same oddball goofy sense of humor that the first series had) and partly because there was a substantially more interesting and well-written team dynamic*, and they also made certain game rules much less ambiguous**.

Plus the Meijin Kawaguchi, that goofball I posted about on Friday, got a lot more awesome in the intervening years between the two series, as evidenced by the fact that the beginning of this video is the scene that reintroduced him:



Yes, his entrance caused a flower (albeit a simulated flower, this series' mecha combat being a semi-virtual simulation of some sort) to come back to life. Magnificent.

*You know how in a lot of shonen anime/manga, there'll be one to three protagonists who are remotely competent, and then there's also no question that this one person in that group is the strongest of that lot? In this series, the three main characters each have different strengths, and while one of them is considered the strongest, he's also regarded as something of a blunt instrument and each of them usually contributes to the victory in a real way, and on at least one occasion said strongest team member went down hard and barely contributed to the fight at all. Which just goes to show that you shouldn't bring martial arts to a Tryon 3 fight.

**Like, there was an episode of the first series where a guy used G-bits, which are remote-controlled full-sized mecha, during a tournament, and if I recall correctly had somebody independently piloting each of them. That struck me as very odd to permit in a supposedly fair tournament (even if it had turned out to be completely ineffective), and would have been distinctly Not Allowed under the Build Fighters Try tourney rules.

-Signing off.