天下制覇

At least nobody had amnesia… yet.

Impressions:

Well, let’s preface this by stating that I’m not a fan of mecha, war drama, or high fantasy. I expected the high fantasy to win out when I read about this, but this is Yet Another War Drama Mecha Show^tm through and through. So… take all this with a grain of salt. Admittedly, there haven’t been almost any of those lately, but you don’t see me complaining. I’m pretty sure that the magical side just has two points, they wanted to have the planet be a desert, and they needed some kind of excuse to let Rygart have his own special mech. Other than that, you can only take any kind of world so seriously when there are people roaming around on giant segways. There’s no actual magecraft at all, most people can use one kind of magical crystal to power stuff, while Rygart instead gets to ride around in an apparently different kind of mech.

That’s forgiveable on its own, but it devolves into a giant mass of stereotypes from there, most of which were ripped right out of Final Fantasy. Rygart hates war, which makes sense since he went to a military academy with every other character (antagonists included!), the queen dresses like a white mage and can’t keep her hands off him (and is the source of crowbarred-in T&A), and Zess is one trip off a cliffside away from putting on an opera mask and calling himself Zechs. Zess’ kingdom attacks the rest, so it’s up to the cast to shout his name meaningfully and talk to him about the follies of war. Seriously. Zess begins an assault on the capital, and Rygart’s desperate to hop into his mech, take to the battlefield, and talk. The mind boggles.

Production was pretty good. They did a great job making the mecha actually feel like mecha… the big, ugly, filthy, clumsy things that they are. That’s a double-edged sword though. The fights were… not the most interesting thing I’ve seen. I’ve never understood the appeal of people yelling from cockpits though. The music was also nice, although whoever was doing the sound balancing needs to be fired. The volume levels between certain scenes was… jarring at times. A little overly dramatic and theatrical for my tastes since they never actually said or did anything worthy of that much drama, but this was released originally in theaters, so forgiveable. I guess if you like mecha and all its assorted tropes, give it a try. It’s not going to win over any converts if you don’t though.

Preview:

DYNAMIC TALKING