January 15, 2005
Xenosaga Episode 1 - Awakening
OP - some overdramatic orchestral piece with lots of people going "aaaaaaaah" and thumping drums occasionally. It's all very pompous and pretentious. The OP itself is almost montage-esque but it'll do.
ED - in this serenity (Mayumi Gojo) - man, the cheese of the song is immense, but it's really rather "nice", alongside the usual still shots of all the important characters (Albedo has freaky nails). I've got used to the Nobuteru Yuuki character designs now as well, and they look pretty good here.
I don't think I could actually summarise everything that happened in this episode without going into major waffle, but I'll give it a try.
It's 4000 years since man first went into space. Shion Uzuki, our protagonist, is a researcher working for a company named Vector on the Woglinde, a large spaceship, where she's developing a battle android named KOS-MOS for use against the Gnosis, ethereal alien creatures that can phase in and out of corporeal existence. Over the course of the episode, we get some backstory on Shion, a strange artifact known as Zohar which causes people to disappear inside it and calls out to Shion, an encounter with the racist Virgil (who abhors Realians, artificially created humanoids) and an attack by a swarm of Gnosis that causes KOS-MOS to somehow bypass her restraints and awaken from her testing status.
Oh, and there's some mysterious man with a mole in Vector and a creepy guy with a giant robot adding to the general chaos (no pun intended, for those who've played the game).
Yes, I'm a huge fan of the Xenosaga series of computer games, with their incredibly pretentious and convoluted plotting being the main draw. I was quite surprised to find that this first episode didn't sacrifice a lot on that front, although instead it was extremely quick and disjointed in places (I'm not sure if I'd have liked it if I hadn't known what was going on from playing the game). The animation was also surprisingly good, even the low-budget CG Gnosis styling wasn't bad, and the music is suitably overblown and epic. So a vaguely surprised thumbs up for the first episode, although if the adaptation takes the route I think it might (not letting anyone except KOS-MOS beat things up) I may be a little disappointed.
Posted by BluWacky at January 15, 2005 05:56 PM | TrackBackI'm wondering if I even need to actually comment on this - I'm sure that fact that I rather liked this would be obvious from the simply fact that its Xenosaga related.
The biggest problem I can see this show having is, alas, a rapid downward spiral in animation budget. Episode 2 already has noticably poorer, occasionally off-model animation.