Aand today we've got Heroic Age! A crappy 2007 sci-fi action anime I snatched on a whim offa my old ratio site. Angling itself as a an action-comedy/space opera loosely based off of Hellenic myth (specifically the Twelve Labors of Heracles), it's really just an incoherent and pointless mishmash of halfhearted ideas laid atop one of the worst stories I have ever seen. Seriously, I'd rather watch Akame ga Kill! than this shit again. No joke, the whole thing culminates in our protagonists giving our villains a portal to another dimension, which convinces them to stop trying to exterminate humanity (which they'd been doing for reasons unclear) and leave the universe in pursuit of the beings which created it. Legend of the Galactic Heroes, this shit ain't!
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What really struck me is just how formulaic it got within the first couple episodes. Apparently, despite all the futuristic technologies and elite pilots at its disposal, the Argonaut's fuckin' useless; y'know why? Every single action scene for the first half of the series (which was as long as I stuck with it), can be summarized by the sequence of, "Argonaut and crew puts up a good fight against alien bugs -> Oh no, they're about to be overrun! -> No worries, that half-dressed kid with the power to transform into a giant biomechanical dragon just kicked everyone's ass!"; rinse and repeat, ad nauseum. And the music? Oh, don't even get me started on the fuckin' music. It's not so bad for quiet scenes, but during battles there seems to be a single score that plays in one particular order, and it just so happens to be that curious sort of piece that's both utterly forgettable yet incredibly irritating-to-listen-to all at once. It's like a tuba being played through a cheese-grater. Augh.
From a writing standpoint, I honestly think the biggest failing of this series was making the protagonist's primary adversaries giant alien bugs. Now don't get me wrong, I love a good bug-war, but it has to be executed with nuance. In Starship Troopers, if I recall, the use of inhuman bugs furthered the work's goal as a satire by serving as a metaphor for how imperialist propaganda paints its enemies as scary and incomprehensible. Here, it's just used willy-nilly to give the protagonists someone to fight that audiences won't feel sympathy for. It's a XEBEC series, so my expectations are somewhat tempered, but I was really expecting more from one of their sci-fi outings.
Saving graces? Well, the commander-chick they introduced halfway through the series has a nice rack, and and the show certainly has no shortage of slender babes in skintight outfits. This is nice. I like that, even though they look like they're about to be spaghettified by a supermassive black hole. Too bad it's such a slog to watch, or I mighta stomached it till the end.
Post Scriptum: As you can probably tell, I found myself in somewhat of a foul mood whilst recalling this show. Don't know why, but it felt good. Kinda felt like I was channeling the spirit of one of my favorite old game reviewers from the '06-'09 era of YouTube. Those were wonderful days. ^^
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