September 23rd, 2007
Screw you, Tow Ubakata. Where is my Space Tarzan? This show is NOT Space Tarzan.
This morning I woke up and thought about watching some more Heroic Age. I then had a massive allergy attack and didn’t stop sneezing for 5 hours.
Coincidence? You’d think so, wouldn’t you. After spending vast sums of money on industrial grade antihistamines I then ventured to watch another episode, and sheer physical revulsion made me stop after five minutes.
To be fair, I don’t think all of Heroic Age is bad. I actually think the villains - the Silver Tribe with their incomprehensible and immemorable names and strange ranking that means I have no idea who is who - are fascinating and well written characters. Deianeira, too, is a strangely interesting female lead in that she doesn’t quite fall into any of the normal anime stereotypes. The animation is usually okay, although never as wonderful as the first episode, and I can’t complain too much about the voice acting (although I hate Age’s voice actor, I really do…)
Everything else about the storyline of the series is just bloody awful, though. Halfway through the series and I have no interest in anything that is happening - without wishing to spoil anyone, there’s a war on, woo! How is this war supposed to make me care about the completely underutilised secondary characters? Iolaus and Aneesha are relegated to a couple of scenes an episode where they don’t do anything, Mayl and Tayl are annoying squeaky moe brats who mostly don’t do anything, Iolaus’ father exists solely to spout technobabble crap that no-one cares about… and Age spends most of his time as a giant blue monster with a bad overbite that doesn’t say anything, which is a blessing given that I want to rip his larynx out the rest of the time.
We all know that the show will end with peace in the galaxy, because that’s the way a story arc like this has to work. The writing up to the halfway mark, however, hasn’t introduced anything of any major interest aside from the villains, such as Yuti’s crush on Kalkinos and… that Silver Tribe guy that Deianeira mind-raped whose name I can’t remember. The Iron Tribe are just completely uninteresting, and the show gives us no reason to care about what’s going to happen to them - you could take the whole crew of the Argonaut except Age and Deianeira out of the show and it would make virtually no difference. Is this why the show spends Dragonball-esque lengths of time on CG spaceships firing big shiny lights at each other whilst endless stalemate monster fights play out concurrently - because the writers have nothing to say about their own characters?
So yeah, I’m dropping Heroic Age with a heavy sigh. I really liked Soukyuu no Fafner and hoped that Tow Ubakata would recreate some of the same character work in amongst all the fighting here. Even the Space Tarzan premise sounded like fun. Instead, we mostly got Battlestar Generica with Godzilla attached; if I wanted to watch a vacuous space opera anime I’d watch Glass no Kantai instead, at least that was unintentionally hilarious…
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June 3rd, 2007
With the Argonaut’s new status as a humanity-wide pariah ship, our valiant heroes are cast adrift in the universe with nothing to do but blindly follow Princess Deianeira, which they are all perfectly happy to do because EVERYONE loves her. It’s the most benevolent dictatorship ever! That said, as the other Nodoss (Nodoi?) grow uneasy about their fight with Age, the Argonaut heads into an asteroid belt and yet another conflict with Carcinos…
Heroic Age is slightly frustrating at this point; the repetitive nature of Age’s battles with the Silver Tribe is quite grating, but the hierarchy of the villains and the details behind the mythos of the Tribes are intriguing enough that I’m still interested in seeing more. I do hope that the show doesn’t go down the seemingly obvious part of having the crew mutiny against Deianeira now, though; given how they’ve been set up to totally adore her, it’s almost too obvious that she’ll do something that pisses them off later, but I guess I’ll have to wait and see.
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May 13th, 2007
Age and Carcinos’ battle ends in a stalemate (well, sort of; Age kicks Carcinos’ ass but he gets away nonetheless).
That’s… pretty much it. Nothing else to see here really.
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May 13th, 2007
The Argonaut docks at the planet Titaros (not a Greek word, just one they’ve made up that sounds Greek) to refuel etc., but the Silver Tribe sends a Nodoss, Carcinos (which means “crab”! Hee!), to test Age’s strength. Vehicular leaping and slightly ropey animation ensue.
What happened to the beautiful look of the first episode? Presumably they couldn’t keep it up everywhere. Shots still look good (the moody green lighting used for every time Deianeira sits in her psychic pod, for instance) but most of Age and Carcinos’ chase and fight in the streets looked a bit dodge. It doesn’t help that Carcinos has one of the ugliest faces I’ve ever seen on an anime character that’s not designed to be specifically disgusting…
Anyway, one thing the show is doing very nicely is revealing dribs and drabs about the other Nodoss (Nodoi?). Unlike Chevalier D’Eon (same chief writing dude) Heroic Age doesn’t have an overly original or intriguing plot (I’m not sure if Chevailer does any more…) but aside from the slightly dull Age himself and the Cutesy Twins HA is doing quite nicely on the character front. It would be nice if we could have both an awesome plot and awesome characters, though, but this is only the fourth episode after all.
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April 26th, 2007
Age gets spookily artistic and Iolaus gets his arms chopped off.
Well, his mecha’s arms, anyway.
I can’t really say that there’s an awful lot wrong with this episode in that I didn’t mind it when I watched it, and the re-appearance of our first Big Bad in the form of the Silver Age bishounen was relatively entertaining, but to be honest the best thing about the episode was the prologue as it continued to reveal more of the underlying mythos behind Heroic Age. I don’t really care for a lot of scifi technobabble (which kills the Seikai series for me, for instance) so all the stuff here about Starways etc. made me lose interest, and I guess I’m just hoping that something more interesting is going to happen to the Argonaut than just the Bronze Tribe attacking as Belcross is so overpowered. I’m sure it’ll come, but I’m just an impatient sort I suppose.
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