(25 episodes)
What’s it about ?
A new original mecha project, from the people who brought you Star Driver.
It’s slightly less excentric.
Characters
Daichi, our teenage protagonist. He’s got tons of backstory, provided by many fragmentary flashbacks. The gist of it : (1) Dad was an Astronaut, and died years ago. (2) As a kid, Daichi was lurking around the space base, and found that there were some weird kids his age living inside. They fraternized, but he eventually got caught, and he never saw them again. Then Dad died and he left the island. Now, as an angsty teenager at the crossroads of his life, he’s come back. Just in time for an alien attack !
More specifically, the aliens come from the other end of the Solar System, and warp in one at a time with their mechas. With tons of sexual subtext. Daichi is “guided” to the mecha’s cockpit by the less talkative of the weird kids from back then ; since he wants to do something, and has heard that his dad was a “Captain” (i.e. probably already fighting aliens at the time), he accepts to step into the cockpit.
Which leaves Teppei, the other kid from back then, and the official pilot for the mecha, completely dumbfounded. Why is it already gone ?
There’s a hacker girl who finds all this stuff very interesting. As you would.
Production Values
Studio Bones always deliver impeccable work, but they went the extra mile for this one. There’s some impressive detail to the body language and visual slapstick that gives tons of personality to the kids in flashbacks.
Overall Impression
Well, this is certainly a very busy first episode, dropping tons of hints of what’s going on, and trusting the audience to follow along. That’s fine by me : there’s obviously been tons of thought put into the small details of the setting, so I have no problem with giving most of the screentime to the character-building, and leaving plot explanations for later on.
Now, the key question here is whether all this self-confident and well-executed storytelling is in service of a theme more complex than “he’s Captain Earth and he fight aliens”. Surely there’s more to it ? But it’s hard to tell yet.
There’s so much talent at play here that I’m willing to give it some rope, though.
