Macross Frontier: Heart and Soul

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Words cannot express how pleased I am that Ozma’s favorite band in the Macross-verse is none other than Fire Bomber. Yes, that Fire Bomber. Yes, I loved Macross 7. No, you may not tell me to go to hell for this sin against humanity. Even if Gepelnitch doesn’t listen to Basara’s song, I will, and be moved by it.

I skipped the re-broadcast first episode of Macross Frontier since I’d already seen a version of it three months ago as the special, so this one’s about 2. Which was made of the very reason I loved the original Super Dimensional Fortress Macross: Valkyries. IT’s worth noting that Frontier actually takes advantage of the three modes for a Valkyrie: Battroid, Gerwalk, and Valkyrie (although we haven’t seen the Battroid form yet, we have seen Alto use Gerwalk to dodge an attack, which was awesime). I’m not much for mecha, but Valkyries are much more airplane than mecha, and airplanes always look cool, especailly the fighter jets that Valkyries are based on. And there’s also the Itano circus to consider.

And the CG, oh, the CG. It’s seamlessly integrated with the regular animation, so that it doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb like many, many other shows featuring CG mecha (including a certain unnamed series from this very season, you know who you are), but this is expected from Satelight, or so I’m told. I didn’t watch Aquarion past the first episode, as I wasn’t entirely sure whether Kawamori Shouji was in his right mind when he designed that series (I’m told the point of Aquarion was that it was Shouji being Shouji, except because it wasn’t Macross he didn’t have to bother to make any kind of sense whatsoever), but I do remember the brief moments I saw the mecha as being very well done. In Macross Frontier, they’re perfect, and it is a beauty to behold.

On the less mechanical side, the characters are already clearly developed this early on in the series, at least, as much as they can be. Ranka feels slightly more of an actual character than, say, Minmei felt in the early episodes of SDF Macross, especially given the first episode and the now-infamous jingle scene (I titled my Macross F special post after the jingle; I can only imagine that the hundreds of hits I’ve gotten as a result of that were expecting something more along the lines of a YouTube video of the scene and not, you know, as post as I usually do. Incidentally, the happy hardcore remix of the jingle is amazing). Alto is plently likable as well from just two episodes, and Sheryl is, well, Sheryl.

There’s not really that much else to say; this post probably sounds too much like “That was awesome!” repeated over and over again anyway, so I guess we’ll just have to check back in an episode or two and see how things are progressing. It’s more Macross–what more could you want?

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