Guin Saga – 06

Oh boy, this series is sure promising some great things. In the next episode, we’re going to see Guin along with an army of ape-men try to take on 15000 Mongols. I really can’t think of any fantasy series that correctly pulled off battles between entire armies a la Lord of the Rings, but if there’s any series that can do it, then it’s going to be this one.

And yeah, I’ve been trying to think of something to compare this series with, and this really has a lot in common with Lord of the Rings, the anime, especially when you look at the presentation of the movies: beautiful landscapes, different races, majestic architecture and battles on a very large scale. The big difference is that the enemies this time aren’t a bunch of dumb orcs, but human beings themselves. That’s one thing I dislike of a lot of western fantasy: its “humans good orcs bad” mentality. I mean come on, break the boundaries between good and evil a bit.

In any case, the next episode is probably going to be make or break for this series, and we’ll see if it can pull off such a huge battle (of which we probably will see much more in this series) correctly. I’m not asking for much, just as long as it doesn’t screw up as badly as Valkyria Chronicles did in its first episodes. But I’m confident: so far, the only flaw in the combat of Guin Saga was that at times the mood gets ruined by bad animation, which really stands out like no other in this series amidst the otherwise beautiful drawings.

As for the rest of this episode, it mostly built up for that next episode, but I’m glad to see that the graphics looked much better than the past episodes. The fact that Satelight ended up animating this series really has its good and bad sides: on one hand, the best shots look really good, but at the same time the lesser shots really visibly lack polish. It’s about the opposite of companies as Production IG and Kyoani, who hardly ever seem bothered corner-cutting.

Rating: * (Good)
Building up, but that battle in the beginning was pretty good.