Star Crossed Anime

One thing I love about watching anime is that you never know when you’ll run into a masterpiece. Taiyou no Ko Esteban, or The Mysterious Cities of Gold tells the story about three 12-year-old kids who travel from Spain to South America, as they face off against the Spanish soldiers in order to find the titular mysterious cities of gold. While it sounds cliché, I was hooked after only two episodes. This is EVERYTHING an adventure-series should be!

There are many good points of this series; I think it could be best described as a strange crossing between Mahou Shoujotai and Mobile Suit Gundam: the series is the antithesis of episodic: every single episode pushes the story forward, every single episode is fast-paced without any sign of a break and every single episode delivers. (Okay, apart from the one with the submarine I guess, but that still means 38 episodes of epic adventures). While at first this may seem a simple historical series about the Incas and the Mayas, as the series goes on a whole multi-layered science-fiction setting starts to surface. The show is more than 25 years old, and its setting can still be considered as truly original.

The “adventure”-part of this series is also rock-solid. Again, it’s an old series, and yet it can outclass so many modern adventure series. The key is that this series makes optimal use of its environment, whether this concerns large-scale battles between small armies, or just one-on-one fights, strategies take an important role. Think of destroying suspended bridges in order to stop the enemy from advancing, or going against a small army by destroying an artificial dam. One thing I also loved about this series is how it keeps track of its characters: when some of the important characters leave the screen for a while (because Esteban and the others are focusing on something else, for example), you can bet your hat that said characters aren’t going to sit still until the camera focuses on them again, and they’ll be carrying out their own agendas again

The characters are also a lot of fun to watch in this series, and especially Mendoza is an awesome character: he’s continuously scheming and using his head, instead of his muscles; he’s an excellent combination between a father-figure and a greedy and cunning Spaniard. The rest of the characters all have their own identities, roles and purposes. Esteban himself may not be the most memorable of them, but nonetheless he can carry the weight of this series as its main character, and he grows into a brave young boy, who is forced to make huge decisions, despite his very young age.

Regarding the production-values, the only really negative thing I can say about it is that the encoding-quality of the videos I watched was pretty bad. I also encourage people to view the English dubs, instead of the Japanese ones. The English sound-director was a very ambitious one, who didn’t just literally translate the lines from Japanese to English, but instead tried to add as much expressivity as possible. The result is that people speak very fast, but at the same time lots of subtle details are added to the dialogue, giving the characters a very genuine touch. The animation-quality adds to that, with a lot of expressivity in the drawings.

And of course, no review of The Mysterious Cities of Gold can be complete without a mention of the downright astounding soundtrack. Let me say here that I’m going to be very surprised if I were to run into a different soundtrack from the seventies, eighties and even the early nineties that’s able to outclass the different background tunes of this series. You need to listen to it to understand, but the synthesizers and futuristic sounds give this series a unique atmosphere.

In terms of flaws: you do need to suspend your disbelief once in a while. This mostly involves a few coincidences that sit a bit weird, like a building randomly getting destroyed, with the worst being the introduction of Tau. It’s nothing major, though, if you’re not the most critical viewer. While some scenes are a bit dodgy, others are surprisingly clever for a series that’s meant to be for children.

Overall, this series is an excellent watch for every age. Children will love the huge amounts of adventures and wonderful places that this series visits, it also teaches them a bit about making important decisions, and at the same time it’s never too childish for adults to feel ashamed of watching it. This series set the standard of what an adventure-series should be, and unfortunately there were only very few series (if any at all) that followed its example.

Storytelling:	10/10
Characters:	9/10
Production-Values:	8/10
Setting:	10/10

I really liked the original Area 88-OVA, so when I learned that there also was a 2004-remake of the anime, I just had to add that one to my to-watch-list. Unfortunately, I should have known: the OVA already was amazing, so what could an extra TV-series possibly add? Instead, it just went into its own direction. While it’s a capable series on its own, you don’t want to be watching this as a fan of the OVA.

With most of the background of Shin, Kanzaki and McCoy was gobbled up by a female pilot, a pilot who can’t seem to decide whether he’s male or female and a nosy photographer, you really can’t call this a realistic series about manly men who do the duty that’s being asked of them in a setting where only the strongest ones survive. Instead, what we have here is a compassionate war-drama in a setting where only the unimportant side-characters have a chance of dying.

The result is more of a heart-warming series. I can’t say that I’m exceptionally happy about the woman and the gender-confused pilot, but at least the two of them are well-fleshed out. The two of them are nice and like to socialize, and so the whole series gets a different tone from the very dark OVA. There’s also one thing I can be very positive of about the TV-series: the soundtrack. It was quite daring to come up with a selection of techno-songs for the fight scenes, and it really works along with the lighter tone of the rest of the series.

However, this series isn’t without its problems. As a fan of the original OVA, I was a bit disappointed that the series would turn out to be really different, but on the other hand, it would be quite boring to watch the same thing all over again. However, if you indeed diverge from your original source-material, do so consistently, and don’t chicken out at the last moment, like this series did. Through the entire series, Shin’s background was only a mere side-plot, which only popped up twice or trice, and instead the majority of the series focused on the bond between the major characters. In the final two episodes, however, Shin’s story suddenly became the main focus of the series. There’s just no way to get some proper development out of that, and it leaves the series with an overly cheesy ending that will leave a bad taste in your mouth. Because of that, the series completely ruined Ryoko’s character: she went from a headstrong woman to someone who’d just wait and do nothing. It’s good for a side-character, but you don’t want to turn her into a main character right at the last episode!

Along with that, I also have one big complaint against this series, as a fan of the original Area 88-OVA: Makoto, the photographer, was ruined even more by the series than Ryoko was. The guy was a really memorable character in the OVA, simply because he knew how to keep his distance, and yet wanted to get involved. The Makoto in the TV-series keeps sticking his nose into everything, annoys everyone with his overly cheesy morals, and his added background is downright ridiculous.

Overall, the TV-series just doesn’t have the potential to live up to the OVA, even when I remove my bias as a fan, there is just too little to impress. However, if you see it as a standard, unrelated series, then you’ve got yourself a decent war-drama that for once doesn’t have any mecha in it, but instead focuses on fighter-planes. Still, I’m going to keep recommending the OVA. So what if the drawings look old, it’s got an amazing and thought-provoking story.

Storytelling:	8/10
Characters:	8/10
Production-Values:	7/10
Setting:	7/10