Super Robot Wars Anime Marathon #9: Magic Knight Rayearth

Oh man, this one was a doozy. Unlike most of the other anime I’ve watched since starting this project, Magic Knight Rayearth is pretty long. I know that 50-episode anime are nothing unusual, but despite the amount of time I’ve spent watching these series recently, I have very little experience with them overall. I mentioned in my Code Geass entry that I can only recall one other anime of that length I’ve watched to completion. Well, now I can add another to the list, I suppose!

Magic Knight Rayearth is a really cute series about a trio of middle school girls who get whisked away from Tokyo Tower to the mystical world of Cephiro, summoned by Princess Emeraude. Ostensibly, they’ve been summoned there to save the world of Cephiro, though why it had to be them specifically is never really discussed. The framework seems really only to exist so that these three girls—Hikaru, Umi, and Fuu—can embark on an adventure where they will learn magic, acquire magical armor and weapons, and vanquish fearsome monsters. Honestly, that’s kind of fine with me. The three fish-out-of-water girls are suitably charming and have funny interactions with each other as they learn to harness the powers of fire, water, and wind, shepherded by the requisite mascot character, Makona.

Makona gives me strong moogle energy.

From the start, it’s very clear what kind of dynamic the girls have. Hikaru is small for her age and sensitive to that, but she’s as determined and energetic as someone twice her size. Umi comes from wealth and as a result, she’s accustomed to her privilege, meaning she’s quite unsettled when thrust into another world. She comes off as very rude and entitled in the beginning, but softens as she grows accustomed to the environment and to her new friends. Fuu is more the intellectual type (of course, she wears glasses) and is also allergic to contractions. I came to grow attached to her peculiar way of speaking over time. It sounded forced and inauthentic at first, but the more the voice actress committed to it, the more it seemed more intrinsic and natural to the character.

The entire first season is a set of concise adventures where the girls overcome trial after trial. They’re railing against the principal antagonist, High Priest Zagato, who employs a variety of minions who are willing to die to impress him. There is Alcyone, an ice sorceress who is quickly dispatched early on, only to return much later. There’s also Ascot, a mop-headed little brat who can summon giant monsters to do his bidding. Despite his stated affection for them, he puts them in considerable danger on a regular basis. Caldina is a pink-haired trickster who is voiced with a very bizarre Southern accent. I looked up her voice actor later and discovered she also did the voice of Rogue in the original X-Men cartoon, so that’s interesting. There’s Lafarga, who is a swordsman formerly in Emeraude’s service but now enthralled by Zagato. Finally, there’s Inouva, who is a man who is also a giant wolf demon.

High Priest Zagato

The bulk of the anime’s first half is concerned with meeting and subsequently conquering these various threats while the girls grow ever stronger. It’s not until near the end of this part of the series that the “mecha” aspect of the series even crystallizes. Evidently, part of what makes a Magic Knight a Magic Knight is a pact with a Rune God. Rune Gods are basically just dragons when you meet them, but after their worth is proven, they transform into what are basically giant robots. They don’t have cockpits or anything like a traditional mech. The girls are beamed into the Rune Gods’ cores, where they mostly just flail around and cast their spells in much the same way they would in normal combat, except now these spells are extraordinarily more powerful and being performed by mystical creatures of legend.

The Rune Gods

Zagato himself has a Rune God, as it turns out, which begs the question if he’s technically a Magic Knight, I guess. Either way, the Magic Knights and Zagato clash, at which point the entire premise of the anime is turned on its head. I won’t spoil that here, but it makes the series’ events remarkably less straightforward in retrospect. Even so, after the deed is done, the Magic Knights are permitted to return back to Tokyo and continue to live out their lives, only to be summoned right back for the next season, when new troubles arise.

In the anime’s second half, things get quite a bit more complicated. The stakes are different, but at least this time the Magic Knights aren’t being misled on why they were summoned there to begin with. Due to the events of the first season, a power vacuum has been created and a new Pillar of Cephiro must be appointed. This has led three neighboring countries (which are interchangeably called planets and countries in somewhat confusing ways) to invade Cephiro, vying for power for their various reasons. Many of the initial episodes introduce characters from these countries as well as explore their motivations. These countries are the cyberpunk country of Autozam, led by the silver-haired Eagle Vision; the Chinese-themed Fahren, led by a child princess called Aska; and the Egyptian/Arabian-themed Chizeta, helmed by twin dancers Tatra and Tarta.

Tatra and Tarta. Which is which? Who knows!

On top of these three countries invading Cephiro, there’s also a mysterious and sinister threat lurking in the shadows, whose motivations are unclear for the majority of the anime’s second half. This is Lady Debonair, who is also linked to Nova, a girl that strongly resembles Hikaru and seems to exist primarily to bully her. Later, we’ll learn that she has all of Hikaru’s powers as well.

Nova

Even though the second half of the anime is longer than the first, the convoluted nature of the plot seems to hurdle along at a breakneck pace. So many different beats are established that very few of them have time to really develop or land the way they need to. The first season was very straightforward and ended with a solid twist. The second season has all the same characters from the first, but many of them have aged up due to some timestream shenanigans in Cephiro. Many are on the Magic Knights’ side now. Presea, who forged the Magic Knights’ weapons in the first season but died early on, has now returned, but it turns out it may not really be her. 

At one point, the anime starts pairing characters off in a seemingly random fashion with absolutely no foreshadowing that any of these matchups were coming. There was never any suggestion that Caldina and Lafarga would become romantically involved, nor that Ascot would harbor feelings for Umi. Fuu and Ferio’s relationship is established in the first season, but almost every other romance subplot comes completely out of left field. Most glaring of all is Hikaru’s feelings for a new character, Lantis. Lantis is Zagato’s brother. From what I can see, this is a character in his mid-20s at the very youngest. I would like to remind you that Hikaru and her friends are middle school girls, but it doesn’t stop the anime from treating Hikaru and Lantis’s relationship as a crucial plot point, one that Hikaru’s doppelganger, Nova, uses to taunt her. At the very least, this relationship never materializes, but it’s kind of gross the anime ever lingered on it.

Dude, you're 25, maybe shut that down.

I’ve never read the Magic Knight Rayearth manga and don’t have any particular urge to, but I have to wonder if some of the romance elements in the anime came from obligations from that manga. Maybe they made a bit more sense in that context? That’s the only thing I can think of because they come across as entirely nonsensical in the context of the anime. 

One thing that I really liked about the first season of the anime is that it struck me as having a very similar structure to a classic Japanese RPG. These characters start out fairly weak, but grow stronger over time as they take on harder and harder foes. They learn new spells and acquire new weapons and armor as they journey across Cephiro. There’s even an early episode that references this very fact where Fuu mentions that their journey reminds her a lot of a role-playing game. There’s even a really adorable mockup of the characters in a Dragon Quest style UI with HP and MP and everything. I think this is a big part of why the anime really resonated with me at first. (Side note: There are definitely some Magic Knight Rayearth video games out there that I absolutely would not mind playing.)

This scene really made me smile.

The second season doesn’t really feel that way. It’s much more concerned with the invasion plot, the motivations of the villains, and protracted struggles with the various competing forces. There’s not nearly as much movement or growth. Mage Knight Clef mentions very early in the second season that things will be different in their second jaunt through Cephiro, that they may even learn new spells and abilities. This got me excited because I was expecting to see more of the growth that I liked from that first season. It turns out Clef was really exaggerating, though, because the anime completely abandons the concept of their magical armor evolving as they grow stronger and none of them learn new spells until close to the very end of the series.

I also didn’t find the new villains particularly compelling, at least when it comes to the Big Bad. The explanation for Nova’s existence is ultimately kind of confusing and Debonair herself is just another diabolical villain with no depth. I realize that’s what an anime targeted towards teens and young girls kind of needs, but it’s just not something I found particularly engaging. I might have been fine with it if the second half of the anime was structured similarly to the first and the story it told wasn’t so disjointed. 

In summary, Magic Knight Rayearth is a cute anime with fun art and fun adventures, but it falls apart in the second half. Also, why is everyone so creeped out by those genies?

Nothing creepy here.

Super Robot Wars Anime Marathon #8: Gun X Sword

Actually, I have extremely vague memories of watching the first episode of this anime shortly after it was released. Back in those days, I was spending most of my free time on message boards, and on at least one of them, discussion of new anime was pretty common. I wasn’t a regular in that community, but it was how I was exposed to some of the very few anime series I’ve watched in the past. I think this was also when I watched The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and AIR, neither of which I remember that well.

When I watched it this time, absolutely nothing looked familiar, which I guess isn’t surprising considering this anime came out in 2005 when I was still in high school. On this belated second watch, I was tempted to classify Gun X Sword as mecha-adjacent, but the Armors become important pretty quickly in what is otherwise a pseudo-Western. Our hero is Van, a gangly cowboy type dressed in an ill-fitted tuxedo and large black hat with a ring dangling from the brim. Considering the dry, hot climate the anime’s setting suggests, I have to imagine Van is uncomfortable at literally all times.

He probably looks angry because he's too hot.

Van passes through the town of Evergreen at the story’s outset, where it just so happens that a pigtailed young girl named Wendy is being accosted by a group of thugs. Van might have left things well enough alone, but since he was in the area, he swiftly dispatches Wendy’s would-be attackers with superhuman agility and a large sword before collapsing from exhaustion. Grateful to her savior, the young Wendy offers to be Van’s bride, which is played for humor but mostly just grossed me out. When this offer is declined, Wendy offers Van paid work to defend the town from the brigands who have been terrorizing the area for some time. Van’s not interested, though. He has other things on his mind

Van’s origin story is told in bits and pieces throughout the anime, but it’s made clear very early on that he’s on the trail of The Claw, a mysterious villain who senselessly took his wife’s life. Although Van’s an obstinate loner, he nonetheless assembles a team of allies along the way, including Wendy, who follows him from the very beginning. Wendy has a goal of her own since her brother has gone missing. She feels she’ll have a better chance of finding him if she tags along.

Wendy

It’s worth noting that Van, reclusive anime hero as he is, is also a huge goofball. One recurring gag that frequently made me want to gag is Van’s relationship with food. It’s not clear why he finds food overwhelmingly bland, but because he does so, he drowns everything he eats in every condiment he can find. This means a steak becomes a river of mustard, ketchup, horseradish, mayonnaise, and whatever else he can find. It’s not that funny and it’s pretty gross, so it’s a trait I could have done without.

Van slathering his meal with mayo, probably.

Many of the episodes in the first half of the series feel like self-contained stories as Van travels from one town to the next. Inevitably, there will be a threat in the area that results in Van needing to summon Dann of Thursday, his glimmering white Armor, from space. It’s not clear for a long time why Van has a magic sword that morphs and sprouts holes when he uses it to summon his mech. It’s equally unclear why he always grips the ring on the brim of his hat and shifts it to the other side. In fact, I’m not sure that the second part was ever explained, so I can only fall back on the Rule of Cool.

There are two episodes from early in the anime that stood out for me. One is the episode in which Pricilla is introduced. She’s an Armor Rider who uses her hilariously designed pink mech in an arena against other competitors. In a genre where a lot of these mechs look very similar to each other, seeing an agile machine that looks a lot like a bipedal rabbit is a lot of fun. Pricilla is also a fun, energetic character who is portrayed as quite skilled and capable, even when she ends up battling Van himself.

Pricilla (on the left, of course)

Another standout for me is another set of early character introductions. Van runs into a group of loudmouthed old-timers in a bar who are boisterously congratulating him on taking out some renegade Armor Riders. In doing so, they reminisce about their own days as Armor Riders, perhaps embellishing some of their deeds. Most of the other bar patrons dismiss their stories as complete fabrications. Why not bring out the Armor now, some of them ask, as proof? Nero, the group’s grizzled de facto leader, dismisses this idea. There would be no need to pull their Armors out of retirement unless the need was grave. Of course, like clockwork, a giant tentacle Armor attacks the town, and the need suddenly becomes grave. A night of hard drinking has left Van out of commission, so the old-timers have no choice but to pilot the El-Dora V, an enormous Armor that very heavily resembles Super Robots from 1970s anime. I thought this was such a cool callback to anime of that era and also really enjoyed that these old guys are implied to have been a group of teens in just such an era. Equally interesting is that their fifth member, Chizuru, has long since passed. The four remaining members (or three, since Carlos is always asleep) prove they still have it, even hungover from a night of habitual drinking. 

The El-Dora V

Van also frequently crosses paths with the enigmatic Ray, an agile gunslinger with long, blond hair. It seems Ray’s path is similar to Van’s own since his wife was also inexplicably slain by The Claw. This doesn’t go very far in making them friendly with one another, however, as their meetings frequently amount to deadly duels. Even when Van runs into Ray’s little brother, there’s little that can be done to mend their relationship, at least at first. Like most important characters in this story, Ray also has an Armor called Volkein, a red monstrosity outfitted with some powerful cannons.

Ray

The narrative thrust of the anime amounts to Van traveling from town to town, trying to get information from various baddies about the Claw and his whereabouts. Along the way, we learn more about Van, his Armor, and more about the planet of Endless Illusion, the desert world that our characters inhabit. Once the villain’s motivations became clear, I can’t say I felt particularly invested in the story. The latter half of the anime is mostly a series of battles against minions of increasing power, as we have all seen many times before in other anime and in many video games. This is yet another example of a story in which the journey is far more important than the destination because I did enjoy Van’s interactions with the characters he met along the way.

Super Robot Wars Anime Marathon #7: Aim for the Top! Gunbuster

Another anime featured in Super Robot Wars T that was a no-brainer for me to watch is Aim for the Top! Gunbuster, a series that only features six episodes. If it had been longer, I might not have tried watching it, since it’s probably older than any other anime I’ve ever watched. I also would have really missed out on a thought-provoking series with an art style I find I extremely enjoyed.

I definitely jumped to conclusions about this series. I figured that because it was from the 80s, I would have trouble relating to it and that I wouldn’t care for the art. Neither of these things was true. In fact, I find I enjoy the art style more than a lot of more modern series I’ve watched. There’s something very expressive about the characters’ faces and I find I really enjoy the juxtaposition between vestiges of realism and large, expressive eyes. I also enjoy the fact that this is a late 80s series in which female characters feature prominently. The protagonist is a decidedly average teen girl who is just one among many being trained to pilot mass-produced, utilitarian mechs. 

Noriko

Noriko is not particularly skilled at piloting mechs, in fact, so when she gets chosen as one of two students to go into space for a mission, she’s ruthlessly bullied by her classmates. The brilliant Kazumi Amano, who Noriko idolizes, is considered among the best pilots in the world. She was always going to be the first choice for this opportunity to go into space, but Noriko was never in the running. Coach Ota sees Noriko’s potential, however, and is confident she has what it takes to be a skilled pilot. Noriko also has a personal stake in going to space, as it’s where her father died in a previous mission.

Kazumi

It’s not long until Noriko and Kazumi venture into space, where they get the opportunity to witness the circumstances of Noriko’s father’s death firsthand. It becomes apparent that Earth is the victim of a prolonged siege by an army of insectoid aliens. Here’s where the anime becomes some mix of fascinating and confusing. In the world of Gunbuster, humanity relies heavily on faster-than-light travel to navigate the far reaches of space. Due to the way this travel works, significant time dilation occurs. As a result, when Noriko reaches the ruins of the ship on which her father died, only two days have passed since it occurred, even though it’s been far longer since he’d actually been missing. She also takes about an hour to explore the ruins, which results in 6 months passing on Earth. These discrepancies in time become far more important later on.

Exploring the space ruins

What also becomes important is the lopsided relationship dynamic between Kazumi and Noriko. Noriko looks up to Kazumi and sees her as something of a mentor and hopes that Kazumi sees her as a bright young student. However, Kazumi feels resentful of Noriko and feels her inexperience will endanger herself and others. 

As it turns out, this space mission is pretty important. The crew is being trained to pilot Gunbuster, a revolutionary giant mecha that requires two pilots to function. It may well be their only hope against the Space Monsters, who threaten to engulf the Earth if not destroyed. Meanwhile, the proposed pilots aren’t getting along and Noriko finds herself gravitating to another member of the team, the handsome Toren Smith. There’s a cute scene where they both take a sip from a drink with the same straw, and Noriko breathlessly considers whether she’s experienced a secondhand kiss.

A secondhand kiss

The wistfulness of that scene is dashed by the brutal reality of the following scene, however, when Noriko finds she’s too petrified to work together with Toren when a group of the Space Monsters attacks him. This incident only worsens Noriko’s deeply entrenched fear of space combat and does little to improve her reputation among the crew.

Noriko does manage to redeem herself later by defending the Exelion (their ship) from a horde of Space Monsters with the incomplete Gunbuster, but by this point, humanity has suffered heavy losses. It is a Pyrrhic victory at best. They decide to retreat for now and return to Earth, where 10 years have passed. Old friends from the academy are now fully-formed adults. The brash prospective pilot who challenged Noriko to a duel in the first episode is now 27 with a small child of her own. How odd it must feel to be defending humanity from an alien menace while everyone you know rapidly ages past you. I wondered, at the time, how sustainable this process would be. Surely they would have to continue to go back into space to fight more battles?

The unfinished Gunbuster

The fifth and sixth episodes of Gunbuster are its best and also the ones I find myself repeatedly thinking about. Time dilation again comes to the fore as an important element of the series’ conceit, but in ways that send my imagination sprawling. There is giant mech combat, of course, and the titular Gunbuster finally gets its moment to shine, but I found myself thinking much more about the friendship between Kazumi and Noriko, about their selfless journey to save humanity, what they sacrifice, and the unanswered questions posed by the story’s finale. The final episode, animated entirely in black-and-white, might be dismissed as a cost-cutting measure, but it was actually the most expensive episode to produce. This highlights how deliberate and how appropriate a tool it is to underpin the sober reality of the conclusion. It is heartbreakingly tragic, but ultimately extremely satisfying and, perhaps more importantly, hopeful. At the end of the day, it would have been very easy to end this series in a way that was expected, but the twist at the end is what will make me always remember it.

No caption required

Super Robot Wars Anime Marathon #6: Expelled from Paradise

After making my way through a big chunk of Super Robot Wars X, I was already making plans to watch some of the series represented in Super Robot Wars T. It felt like it made a lot of sense to start with Expelled from Paradise because it’s a movie! Unlike something like the gargantuan 50-episode Code Geass, a movie would be much less of a time investment. 

Expelled from Paradise is a sci-fi story that is only tangentially mecha-related. Sure, our hero, Angela Balzac, starts out in a giant mech, but she quickly loses access to it until the film’s finale. Most of the meat of the movie is Angela and Dingo (voiced by Steve Blum) traveling the desert surface of the Earth, carrying out her orders. In the far-flung future, society has progressed to a point where physical forms are no longer considered necessary. The elite exist only as data, living out virtual lives in servers suspended in space, far above the surface of Earth. Our hero is established as a bikini babe/secret agent/super spy lounging on a virtual beach, shortly before a rift in reality brings an urgent matter to her attention. Then, for gratuitous fanservice reasons, Angela dives through cyberspace to her next destination, completely nude. She’s quickly given orders to go down to the surface, where she must address the issue of their unknown attacker. Someone known as Frontier Setter has made hundreds of hacking attempts on them, which is bad news for the utopian society of Deva that they’ve built.

This kind of sets the tone for how Angela will be portrayed, right from the beginning.

Angela doesn’t have a physical form, though, so it becomes necessary to build her an organic body. In yet another contrived twist, she impatiently cuts off the creation of her body before it’s done, meaning the body that is created for her isn’t fully formed. In other words, her new body is that of a 16-year-old girl, which had me asking uncomfortable questions about why the story’s creators found it necessary to jump through hoops to transform the protagonist into a buxom teenager. The questions themselves might have been uncomfortable, but the answers are sadly all too clear.

It is at this initial stage of the film where Angela finds herself piloting an admittedly cool giant mech, although I would have preferred to see it rendered in hand-drawn animation instead of the slick CGI that’s become more and more common. The mech’s only real purpose is to get her safely to the surface of the Earth, until of course she’s waylaid by a series of giant sandworms who seem to be having a bad day. She’s able to fend them off with the assistance of Dingo, who turns out to be her contact. What follows is a series of scenes between the two as they try to track down Deva’s supposed attacker. 

Dingo meeting Teen Angela

Of course, the topic of physical forms and their necessity comes up, and it’s only in these scenes where I felt the movie really retained my interest. The premise of advancing beyond physical forms is an interesting one, despite the story’s hackneyed approach to it. Even so, I found Blum’s genuine performance as Dingo engaging as he extolled the virtues of simply being alive. There’s a scene where Angela gets sick and she laments the terrible fortune of having a body. Dingo can’t disagree, but at the same time, it’s hard to experience joy without the contrast of pain.

Inevitably, the duo track down Frontier Setter, but instead of being a dashing super hacker, it turns out he’s just an AI inhabiting a small, friendly-looking robot. Its attempts to hack Deva weren’t malicious, after all. It was all a misunderstanding. In fact, his entire goal was to establish contact to share the news about his goal—to establish a new society for humankind away from the ravaged Earth. Frontier Setter has existed for hundreds of years, gathering information and intelligence. At this point, he’s become remarkably human. Even Angela is taken aback by his humanity. After all, she normally exists only as data, so does she even have any more of a claim to humankind, herself? Despite her misgivings, she understands and plans to relay the misunderstanding to the shadowy Council of Deva.

I forgot there's a scene where Frontier Setter and Dingo bond over Dad Rock.

Leaving her organic body behind, Angela relays the news, only to be punished for failing to carry out her orders. Intent matters little, the Council decrees, and for her impertinence, she will be imprisoned indefinitely. For the deathless citizens of Deva, this is a harsh punishment indeed. They have little interest in Frontier Setter’s intent to proselytize. After all, what better existence could there be than in Deva? Of course, it’s worth noting that one’s existence in Deva is based entirely upon a caste system in which only the most privileged can afford fully realized simulations, but that’s neither here nor there.

Suffice to say, Frontier Setter and Deva hatch a scheme to bust Angela out, and we finally see the triumphant return of mech combat for the film’s closing, except this time she’s battling her former comrades, all of which are gifted with conventionally attractive female bodies. 

Overall, this film has some interesting things to say, but nothing that the sci-fi genre hasn’t explored before. It also doesn’t approach it in as sophisticated a way as I would prefer and also highlights some pretty uncomfortable fanservice. I’m glad I watched it just so I could have some context for when I play Super Robot Wars T, but it’s not a film I can award a lot of accolades.

I haven’t played Super Robot Wars T yet so I can’t comment on how this anime is implemented in that game, but I’ll get there! More on that in… some time, I’d say.

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.