2016 mecha science fiction, 12 episodes:
AniDB.
In a very changed world, Kazuki Azuma leaves an island in the sky to
return to Japan, and gets involved with power struggles and giant
robots.
There's some really interesting background to this world… but
it's all hidden away until the last couple of episodes, so most of the
time the viewer knows vastly less about what's going on than any of
the characters do. There's a red-headed girl who seems to be mad and
in charge of the only other buranki ("titan", more or less; magical
giant fighting machines, anyway); sometimes they need a five-person
team to activate them, sometimes they don't; there seem to be a bunch
of foreign teams coming after the only unclaimed one.
There's a lot of reference to other mecha shows, most obviously in
the five-man band (here explicitly left and right legs, left and right
arms, and "heart", the traditionally useless centre role that this
show tries to rehabilitate). There's a vicious parody of the
over-familiar American fanboy which I rather enjoyed; but I'm sure
there was much more I was missing.
The show's main positive point is that there's a great deal of
well-realised and highly kinetic mecha fighting: CGI animators are
finally getting speeds and accelerations right (a trick Ray
Harryhausen had worked out by the 1950s) so that giant creatures seem
to be moving plausibly, and the various battles are shot such that
it's clear where the combatants are and how their positions relate to
each other.
On the other hand it does feel as though the characters and fighting
styles were designed first and the story wrapped round them later. The
middle episodes in particular degenerate into a series of arbitrary
Pokemon-style one-on-one battles over possession of the "bubuki"
(animate weapons that are necessary to be part of a five-man band).
Some people can fly, other people who might be considered to have the
same set of powers can't. There's a sort of psychic power called rinzu
which seems to be heritable (in fact it transfers immediately when
your child is born) but nobody seems to know or care what it can
actually do.
The ending is abrupt and inconclusive, and a second season has been
broadcast. I'll give it a chance but I think this series takes in
media res to new and pointless extremes.
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