Super Robot Wars Anime Marathon #5: Martian Successor Nadesico

Now, this is an anime I’d been planning to watch for several years, ever since I played Super Robot Wars J on the Game Boy Advance. I’ve always struggled with attention span when it comes to anime, so when I tried to get through this series in 2014, I didn’t manage to make it more than a few episodes. For posterity, my last entry about this series was made seven years ago.

Despite this, I found the characters and setting of Nadesico to be pretty charming, even filtered through a strategy RPG about crossover giant robot battles. As a result, I made sure to take advantage of the Nadesico squad in every game they appeared, despite always putting off watching the series. Every time I played a new SRW game, I’d think, “Hey, I should watch that series” but never did. Until recently, anyway.

My latest excuse for deciding to watch Nadesico is because, well, during this pandemic, I’ve had a lot more patience and time to watch lengthy anime series, as one might guess from the last few entries on this blog. Also, I’m planning on playing Super Robot Wars T soon, which features yet another appearance of Akito, albeit not the version from the main Nadesico series. I figured it might finally be time to dive in. 

Our hero.

Despite not having watched the series in several years, the first few episodes felt quite familiar. Our protagonist, Akito, is a citizen of Mars at the series outset, although his home is abruptly attacked and presumably destroyed by aliens. These mysterious foes are known as Jovian Lizards and they hail from Jupiter, although we won’t learn much more about them until much later. It seems like Akito and his friends and family are done for, but he somehow ends up on Earth with no memory of how he got there. Despite being a trained mech pilot, the trauma Akito holds onto regarding his past results in him diving into cooking as his new passion. Ironically, this is precisely how Akito inadvertently ends up on the crew of the Mobile Battleship Nadesico, where his role as the cook will be short-lived.

Yurika

You see, the captain of the Nadesico is the bubbly young woman, Yurika, who also used to live on Mars and remembers Akito from when they were children. Akito’s memories aren’t as fresh in his mind, though, and repeatedly finds himself fending off the captain’s romantic advances. Yurika is convinced she and Akito are soulmates because of their childhood friendship. She might be right. Even so, Akito isn’t willing to make that kind of commitment, especially once he gets suckered into being a member of the Nadesico’s contingent of mech pilots, which, in the beginning, consists of himself and Gai, an excitable man and self-professed #1 fan of in-universe anime, Gekiganger.

Gai, the man himself.

It’s worth noting that despite some tragic things happening right from the beginning, Nadesico’s tone is primarily comedic. Even so, I found myself not often knowing how to feel. I would ask questions like “is this supposed to be funny or serious?” For example, Akito’s backstory is quite sad, on paper, and so is what happens to an important crew member very early on. On the other hand, the anime briskly moves on and features light episodes about going to the beach and having singing competitions, all while a war with aliens rages on. Even this alien race is frequently played for comedy, while the anime humanizes their otherworldly customs and weaves their unusual origin into the worldbuilding of the Nadesico universe.

For me, Nadesico works best when it’s about the interaction between its characters. The overarching plot and mystery behind the aliens and the military conflict are not nearly as interesting. Although the dynamic between Akito, Yurika, and other crew members is framed more as a high school comedy than anything, it’s the part that I personally found most appealing. Like many anime protagonists, Akito finds himself in a position where he’s fending off romantic advances from all sides, whether it be Communications Officer Megumi, who stumbles her way into an unofficial girlfriend role very early on, Captain Yurika’s undying (and frequently unrequited) affections, or even ace pilot, Ryoko’s begrudging crush. It’s not clear why they’re so attracted to Akito, though, since he’s kind of an awkward dude. Sure, he’s great at piloting giant robots, but so is Akatsuki, who joins the crew a little later on. He’s even much more of a pretty boy! Even so, Akito seems to be the one the girls cling to.

Megumi

One important thing about Martian Successor Nadesico is that a good 90% of the crew is female, which is played almost entirely for comedy. There’s Ruri, for example, who is a pre-teen prodigy serving as the ship’s Science Officer. She’s basically a living encyclopedia of knowledge, perhaps because she spends a lot of time querying the ship’s built-in database of information. She’s also prone to dismissing the childish antics of other crew members as idiotic, which serves as something of a catchphrase for the character. And by “something of a catchphrase” I mean “most scenes involving Ruri end with her saying ‘baka’ in some context or another.

Ruri

There’s also the glamorous Minato, a former secretary who now serves as the Navigation Officer, Jun, Yurika’s right-hand man who absolutely has a crush on her and is a stickler for the rules, and the three female pilots who join a few episodes in. There’s the aforementioned tomboy, Ryoko, the eccentric Izumi, whose weird puns and jokes don’t translate that well into English, and Hikaru, whose interest in gadgets has her striking up an unlikely friendship with Uribatake, the engineer. One scene has Uribatake, who I read as being a man in his mid-30s, misunderstanding the friendship he has with Hikaru, who is basically a teenager. It was kind of creepy!

Ryoko, Izumi, and Hikaru, right before Izumi makes a nonsensical joke.

As much as I enjoy the characters and humor of Nadesico, I found getting through the series to be more of a slog than I expected. There are many filler episodes, only some of which are actually any fun, and the plot isn’t easy to get invested in. The weird tonal mismatch between the comedy and drama elements of the show also often left me cold. I almost would have preferred if the show was purely a comedy, because those elements were generally stronger, even though those parts didn’t always work. 

Now, there’s also a Nadesico movie that I decided to watch, not out of any particular interest, but because elements from the movie are represented in some SRW games I’ve already played and SRW T, the one I plan to play soon. Akito now pilots a mysterious black mech and the tone has taken a sharp turn toward the serious. The plot is also highly confusing because much of the intervening story elements that take place between the main Nadesico series and Prince of Darkness were from a video game on Sega Saturn called Martian Successor Nadesico: The Blank of 3 Years. As such, it’s not clear at all why young Ruri is now the captain of the Nadesico, where her new crew members came from, and why Akito and Yurika are nowhere to be seen.

This is still Akito, somehow.

Even by the end of that movie, I was still confused about what had actually happened. Akito is absolutely not the character I remember, nor does he even have a lot of screen time in the movie. Many of the anime’s characters show up again, but with only an hour and a half of runtime, none of them really get the chance to stand out. In fact, much of the movie is concerned with Ruri and the new characters, Saburouta and Hari. Saburouta showed up briefly in the main series but never had an important part. Since the game is not available in English, we’re only left to wonder how this former enemy ended up on the Nadesico and, perhaps less importantly, dyed his hair blond and red.

Saburouta

Hari is basically just a little kid who has essentially taken on Ruri’s former role as the resident child prodigy. Again, it’s unclear how he came to be in that position or why we should care. Even though I mostly watched this movie or context on these characters and how they ended up where they were, I didn’t really feel like I knew much more than I’d gleaned from simply playing SRW games in which these characters appeared.

Hari

Disappointingly, neither of these experiences ended up being as enjoyable as I hoped, which made me a little leery of tackling other anime from the 90s (or 80s), but as I’ll write about soon, you’ll see I wasn’t quite done with that era.

Martian Successor Nadesico in Super Robot Wars

I used the following units in Super Robot Wars J and Super Robot Wars A Portable

Nadesico - Yurika

Aestivalis Akito - Akito

Aestivalis Ryoko - Ryoko

Aestivalis Izumi - Izumi

Aestivalis Hikaru - Hikaru

I used the following units in Super Robot Wars J only

Aestivalis Gai - Gai

I used the following units in Super Robot Wars V

Nadesico - Ruri

Black Sarena - Akito

Aestivalis Custom - Ryoko

Super Robot Wars J was my first introduction to Nadesico and a big part of why I was interested in the series is because of how versatile they became as part of my squad. I was particularly a big fan of how they could recharge their energy by staying in range of the Nadesico. None of the units packed a big punch on their own, but their combo attacks were quite powerful and usable repeatedly due to how easily I could restore their energy. They didn’t serve me quite as well in A Portable because that game is really hard. In SRW V, Akito’s new mech is a powerhouse, but none of the rest of the squad is around anymore. It’s harder for Ryoko to compete on her own, even if she can call out her comrades to assist with her single mech combo attack.

November 2018 Catchup

November was an interesting month in video games for me because I played some pretty seminal mainstream releases I'd never played before followed by some extremely niche Japanese RPGs, perhaps in an effort to restore my "street cred."

Because, as we all know, one's credibility is determined almost entirely by the number of Japanese RPGs one has completed.

I'd purchased the Nathan Drake Collection in October on a whim because it was on sale and I wanted to try something different from the types of games I normally play. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I really ended up enjoying these games, and even when I came to Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception expecting to like it less due to feedback I'd heard over the years, I still loved it. Sure, it has its problems and weird pacing issues, but it's still a blast to play and features some really jaw-dropping set pieces. I mean, frantically scurrying through the ruins of a sinking ship alone was worth the price of admission for me, but that game has tons of sequences that are just as cool.

Because I liked the first three games so much, I didn't hesitate in picking up Uncharted 4: A Thief's End particularly since it had dropped in price quite a bit since release. Although it's hard to top the total package of Uncharted 2, the final entry in the series is a fantastic sendoff. It's much longer and more involved than previous entries but is always really exciting and engaging. I don't love the plot surrounding Nathan's erstwhile brother, but I do like the characterization surrounding him and that he's voiced by the inimitable Troy Baker.

A big chunk of that game involves exploring the ruins of this secret ancient pirate utopia and that's where the game worked best for me. The mystery and the spectacle of it was really exciting, and I tend to love that kind of exploratory gameplay. It reminded me a lot of something like Horizon Zero Dawn, where so much of the game was just gawking at these gorgeous visuals and just looking around for cool stuff and speculating on where it came from and how things broke down over time. It's a big part of why I enjoyed both of these games, even though they're very different in most other ways.

I'm the kind of person that tends to make a lot of connections in things that I do. If I listen to an album, I tend to like having context. If I really enjoy something, I want to go back and learn about its history. I might listen through other albums from the same artist that came before to see how their sound evolved over time. I apply that same philosophy to movies, books, and video games too. Because I'd just played through four different Naughty Dog games, I thought it was finally time to try The Last of Us, which is a tremendously well-regarded game that people have lots of Opinions about.

My opinion about The Last of Us is that it is good. I don't think it's a perfect game, though, and I think a lot of why I feel that way is colored not only by the ridiculous levels of acclaim it receives but also by my feelings about the game's genre. I feel invested in Joel and Ellie as characters and the plot is interesting, but is structured in a way that is well-worn. It's post-apocalyptic, it has zombies (of a sort), and is a Dad Simulator. I can see why that's very appealing but at the end of the day, it's not my favorite setting. I also don't particularly like the stealth gameplay. It's serviceable, but never as satisfying as I feel like it should be. The story alone carries the game and it's more than worth playing because of it, but even that is not beyond reproach. That's all I will say about it.

I finished out the month by finishing two Japanese games, one of which is significantly more Japanese than the other. The first and more Japanese of the two was Super Robot Wars A Portable, yet another in the list of games in this series that I've now finished. It's pretty clear that I love giant robots and I just hadn't had enough of them after finishing Moon Dwellers a couple months back. Of course, this particular title is a bit different in that it's older and was never officially translated to English. Fortunately, as with Alpha Gaiden and Super Robot Wars J, a fan translation of this game exists and is done extremely well by the fine folks at the Steel Soul team.

Unlike Moon Dwellers, A Portable is another entry "main" entry in the series in that it mashes up various different mecha anime series instead of original characters. The list of series in this one is even less familiar to me than others I've played and seems to skew towards older series overall. It's also dramatically more difficult than other games I've played, which started out very frustrating but ended up being pretty rewarding in the end once I had a better grasp of how to effectively strategize. It's definitely a game that taught me a lot about that series. It also made me want to check out a few of the anime series involved but I didn't actually follow through on that this time. Maybe when I play SRW V that'll actually happen.

The last game I finished in November was the PS4 remake/port of Romancing SaGa 2, an oddball RPG that was originally released for the Super Famicom and to my knowledge was never officially localized until this release. Although I've played a few SaGa games briefly, this was the first I've invested a lot of time into and although it's an undeniably flawed game, it's also an extremely fun and interesting one that I'm really glad I played.

In broad strokes, it's an RPG in which you play the king or queen and recruit a series of subjects to assist you in completing quests and various objectives. There are different classes and races that you have the opportunity to recruit. As you progress through the game and complete events, time passes until eventually the perspective switches to an heir that will inherit stats and abilities. This also happens if your entire party is wiped out in combat. You're always given the opportunity to choose from a list of different unlocked characters to choose as an heir, which is really interesting.

There's also a huge variety of different skills and abilities you have the capability of unlocking throughout the game. Each different class has different aptitudes with different weapons and because of this, the likelihood of learning these skills varies depending on the classes you have. Unlocking abilities is done through a process called "sparking," which is essentially just a random chance to learn a new ability when using certain weapons and skills. It seems very haphazard at times but it's always exciting when someone learns something new and it was fun to unravel exactly what methods worked best to spark new skills.

It's definitely not a perfect game. The difficulty is incredibly unbalanced, the combat is sometimes repetitive, and the plot itself is thin--but it has a couple of really cool ideas that make it more than worth playing, at least for me. One of these days I might play more entries in the SaGa series because there seems to be a recurring theme of oddball ideas in those games.

Well, we're almost caught up. Only one more month to go.