It's been a while and I'm bored. Let's do another mini review of an anime I just finished!
This past weekend I finished Kidou Senkan Nadesico aka Martian Successor Nadesico (they really had the best engrish titles back in the day, huh?). This one had been in my backlog for several years and I finally sucked it up and started it.
I gave it a
7/10.
Nadesico revolves around a rag-tag group assigned to an experimental spacecraft named, you guessed it, the Nadesico. They dive right into gathering the crew and never really explain why they choose who they did, but that really doesn't matter, what matters is hijinks and clashing personalities! This is what I would consider a relatively early entry into the "Space Harem" genre (see above image
), the main character is a reluctant fighter (shinji) and all of the girls in the crew fall for him one by one because he has principles and stuff. All the expected tropes are here: a male and female otaku character, blushing from holding hands, overly dramatic lectures mid-battle, a dress-up/karaoke episode, all your favorites. I'm sure many of the tropes were new or just plain less tired back when this aired originally though, so I give it a lot of leeway on that. There is a little bit of politics but nothing like the level of a Gundam series would. Eventually the crew finds out they were thrown together to be expendable and the meat of the final arc develops from that.
Since this is a Xebec show from the 90's; there are mechs and mech battles, and they are all fairly dynamic and entertaining, I can't really fault the action elements in this show. I must give this show props for one other thing, they kill off a number of characters and they pretty much stay dead. I kept expecting people to come back but they never did against all expectations. I found that refreshing.
The show looks pretty amazing considering it aired in 1996. When I started watching it I kept thinking this looked like a show ca. 1999-2002 and was just plain shocked to see I was off by 5 years. The character designs are very much in the likeness of its contemporaries like Escaflowne or Saber Marionette J (they have noses and triangular chins), but they are softened a bit from the norm in '96, making them look like what would come later in the decade. That being said, the show's animation falls off pretty hard around episode 11,
a lot of off-model issues creep up and you get many bg characters with derpy goo-faces. Nothing new, that's just TV anime: same now, same as it ever was.
All in all, this was an enjoyable series to marathon. I would rate it higher than Outlaw Star which also had a fairly similar premise and feel. The humor in Nadesico was much more up my alley than Outlaw's. If you're in the mood for cel-painted 90's mecha, maybe give this one a shot!
