Well, since the poll was a failure anyway, I decided to experiment a bit. For the past five hours there was this cryptic link to a poll with four options. What I basically did was pick out four series that were recommended, which fit the criteria and seemed the most interesting, and labelled them as Contemporary Fantasy (Windy Tales), Mecha (Innocent Venus), Comedy (The Great Horror Family) and Science Fiction (this one). It was an interesting experiment, to see what people would vote for when they had no idea what they voted for. Especially how almost nobody voted for mecha or comedy.
In any case, I’ll be blogging this series for the coming season, even though it aired more than a decade ago. The rest of this season is just too dry to find 12 bloggable series, especially after blogging Kimi ni Todoke turned out to be a failure.
In any case, I’m impressed. This episode on paper would have been nothing special: there’s this big galactic empire that invades planets and Earth (or Martine in this case) happens to be one of them. Oh, and democracy seems to be abolished and the monarchy is back, so that the lead character can call himself the next in line for the throne at such a young age.
But the way that this episode described the take-over from the galactic empire was what impressed me. It offered a detailed back-story. It’s not just a simple case of “they were too strong, we couldn’t stop them!”, but the humans themselves, especially their president also screwed up big-time, and they could have actually won if it wasn’t for his actions. The betrayal of this guy will probably come as an interesting backstory, later in the series.
I really needed to see some parts of this episode twice in order to fully understand what happened. Certain characters appear before they’re introduced properly, which made following the first half of this episode quite difficult. For example, at the beginning of the episode there was this woman who was searching for Jinto, the lead character. Why was he running away?
Sunrise really was an excellent production-company around the times that this series was produced. It came with tons of creative and interesting premises, and I just can’t help but think that they dulled in for the past five years, perhaps with the exception of Gintama and Bakumatsu
Rating: ** (Excellent)