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Title Info
- seen: 1-7 of 26?
- type: TV
- grade: flawed
- source: commercial
- form: sub
- made: unknown
- Review created: Tue Sep 18 16:03:13 EST 2001
- mod: none
This modern anime is set in the same world as the series "Outlaw Star". That said, the two series are very different in how they play out. For one thing Outlaw Star was interesting.
Synopsis
Meifon Li has everything an anime girl could want. Although she's only 16 she's got a huge bust, which her outfits generally put on prominent display, a cute appearance, her own huge corporation and a space battleship bristling with weapons and full of tough anime characters. She's even got a tragic past, it seems her grand-father was gunned down under rather suspicious circumstances. And in his will he not only left her the company but instructed her to form a free anti-pirate force.
And, despite a couple of hiccups along the way, that's what she spends her time doing. Escorting merchant ships on the frontiers of space and shooting it out with the seemingly endless pirates. Of course there's a little bit more than this, since her `free' protection service has made her no shortage of enemies amongst the other protection firms. Add in that she also has a character mystery to resolve, a possible romantic entanglement with a rather mysterious bishounen, and a burning desire to seek revenge for her grandfather and she's a rather busy woman.
Review
The real question though is whether it has to be quite this dull. For an anime that has everything, and a reasonable budget, I was really surprised at just how tedious the episodes I have seen were. It just failed to work in so many ways I was almost impressed by the achievement.
Where to begin...well, to start with the idea of a 16 year old with enormous breasts and a tendency to revealing outfits has been done to death. How about having either an older woman or allowing the young woman to have a realistic build and life. It just reeks of `saleability'. Not to mention that no one comments that she has a pet cat with a devilman head (who lives in her bust) and can transform into a sword. And the fact that she has a headstone next to her grandfathers? someone's idea of a joke, she says. She's such a mixture of anime stereotypes it's almost painful.
Her personality is even worse. For one thing she spends every single one of the first 7 episodes screwing up. It's a good thing she's got a really advanced ship because in each case she does something stupid and gets out-maneuvered by the enemy. In some ways this is necessary, to make the fight challenging when she has the best starship, but in practice it makes her look incompetent. Meanwhile her personality wanders all over the place. Sometimes super-girlish, other times incredibly obsessive and sometimes charmingly psychotic. She's got so many anime personalities not even she can keep them under control.
The core problem, however, is that starship combat can be really, really, dull. For one thing the show expects you to regularly sit through the launch and `big gun' firing animations which aren't nearly interesting enough to warrant it. And then we are confronted with beams of energy flying back and forth since the battleship isn't too maneuverable. And, when the episode runs out of time, she uses the big gun to kill all the enemy at once. Meanwhile her crew, who are meant to be interesting characters, spend their time polishing their weapons or doing their nails. Things look up whenever they are forced into a more interesting environment, such as some hand-to-hand, or some gunfighting, or small fighter craft but this doesn't solve the problem that the `normal' activity of the show is dull.
This is accentuated because Meifon, despite being 16 (shouldn't you be in school young lady?), is an expert at everything. She can pilot a fighter, captain a battleship, shoot a gun and take out a horde with her magic sword. This might not be a problem if she was a more likeable character, but in practice all it means is that every other character is automatically relegated to a `support' role. Which means the large cast the show has is wasted. Give me the small, tight, team of Outlaw Star any day. Then again, it is the average writing that helps amplify this effect.
The production is generally pretty and quite acceptable. It feels a touch charmless, and it's a very familiar style, but it works well enough. The characters look quite cute and move well. There's some nice atmosphere work and the tech is quite detailed, although it never feels terribly logical. It also lacks a certain style, with the battleship basically being a flying wedge with a screw propeller at the back. They do their best to make the action interesting and there are some quite nice atmosphere and ambient effects. The voices are decent, although as mentioned badly under-utilised by the poor writing and confused character focus. The music is reasonable but forgettable.
Other Links
THEM have seen one episode, but it hardly counts as a review (especially because I disagree with them :) I would expect more reviews to appear some time in the future.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:14 WST 2009