(13 monthly 47min episodes)
What’s it about ?
A young girl moves to Hokkaido with her dad and nearly bores me to sleep before seeing an alien ship crash in the woods. The alien pilot is humanoid and probably a good guy ; a monstrous thing has hitch-hiked on his ride and he has trouble fighting it off. Our heroine merges with a sentient alien armor to dispatch the monster, but there’s a weird after-effect : the armor has taken human form, which means our girl’s now got a twin sister.
Characters
Tsubasa, a very boring 10-year-old girl. Quite asocial, which doesn’t exactly endear her to me.
Her dad is a bit more interesting : he moved to Hokkaido after his wife’s death (apparently from complications from Tsubasa’s birth ?), and is starting over as a baker’s apprentice.
The alien dude looks like your standard issue alien action hero, although he’s clearly overmatched by the beastie. He’s as surprised as anyone when Tsubasa merges and proceeds to kick tons of ass.
By the way, “Figure 17” is the name of the Tsubasa/armor merger.
Production Values
Perfectly okay for this sort of thing, I guess.
Overall Impression
There are series that benefit from the double-length format. This is not one of them, as the pacing is so relaxed it’s downright lethargic. We’re treated to half an hour of Tsubasa’s daily life before anything happens, and that’s so boring I nearly gave up halfway through.
Some of the underlying ideas are somewhat interesting, I guess, but I have no wish to wade through hours of navel-gazing before it gets to the point.
