When I saw the widespread bashing this show was getting pretty much everywhere, I felt this Knight of the Lost Cause urge to pick it up and then come here to "defend" it, from a less "biased" point of view. I expected the bashing was the common overreaction from haughty otakus who, as soon as a sequel isn't on par with the original (which, face it, almost never happens), immediately brand it as total crap, mixed with the sometimes excessive hate GONZO has been target of in the past few years.
This just to point out I sat in front of it with all the best possible - if not actually even biased in favor - intentions. But man, was I a naive, conceited ass. All the bashing this... thing is getting is more than deserved, my head is all swollen from all the facepalms it has brought about.
I often begin my reviews with some pompous introduction tackling the show's theme from a non-anime perspective, to understand what is its universal value when you bring literature and the silver screen into the equation, but the only reference I can manage to pull in this case is Fahrenheit 451; as in: if this was a book, you should really nazi up a bit and burn it, burn it with fire.
So, no more chatting, and down to the specifics. Please just note that, as I will have to jump in and out of certain individual events to point out some of the most appalling plot holes, the story section will be spoiler intensive, and - considering the amount of them - tightrope walking in-between spoiler-tags would not be very functional and readable. So it's either all or nothing, you decide.
Art & Animation
You notice there's something wrong very early on. As, from the opening early on... After the first half of the OP - which is only traditional 2D clips - we are offered the first glance of what you know you should expect from GONZO especially in a Last Exile show, the CG rendered awesome skyships of pure awesomeness: we see the vanship of our heroines flying in the foreground with a capital ship in the background. And, well, the perspective is all wrong, it looks like something a kid would make after watching Art Attack, superimposing a bidimensional figurine attached to a stick onto a background, and then moving it around to childishly emulate actual "movement". Well, this is a feeling which carries over the whole series: there's cleary a HUGE issue in layer blending here.
Each layer is usually really pretty per se: the vanships, the battleships, the clouds in the sky, the canyons, are all crisp and detailed, and sometimes overall impressive. As such any screenshot you could take would probably look quite awesome. However as soon as things actually move it all goes down the drain. The perspective between layers is almost always wrong and looks skewed: it pretty much - to make myself clear - looks like some old Superman movie where it's evident how Christopher Reeve was cut and pasted onto the background (or, well, placed in front of a fake background) and then moved around artificially.
Layer issues don't end here though, as special effects too look quite ugly: explosions, fire, smoke, dust clouds look most of the times badly bidimensional, crudely glued onto the ship which is actually on fire/enveloped in smoke etc, and the final result is that everything looks amateurishly fake.
These issues are especially baffling as they happen between two or more CG layers: you can expect some jerkiness and overall inconsistencies when blending a traditional 2D drawing with a CG scene, it happens often in GONZO shows, but that they aren't able to get their CG together is new even for them. They kind of pioneered the heavy use of CG in anime, and even when they didn't pull off a satisfying blend between traditional and computer art you could usually see they knew their CG stuff. This time it looks they either had a generation renewal in their staff, with some really inexperienced people at work, or that people worked too separately at the various layers and there was no one able to blend them together for the final cut.
Honestly, the first Last Exile, almost 10 years ago, looked as a whole far better than this.
On the other hand we have the traditional art, and that at least is still very pretty. My beloved (fanboy mode on) RANGE Murata's chara designs are adorable, even though they lose much of their depth and expressiveness when simplified for animation, and the crispness, vividness with which they are drawn is quite satisfying. I'd personally prefer if the 10 years into the HD era were to bring upon more expressive straight-out-of-the-artbooks subtle details and shading rather than just more crisp outlines and the like, but oh well.
His designs for the machines, the clothes/uniforms et cetera are still very interesting and as such there's much to feast on for our eyes. There are some instances when characters drawn from mid-long distance are excessively simplified and roughed out, or when secondary characters are badly drawn altogether (derp eyes galore), but all in all the impression is extremely positive. Yes, the characters are pretty: we are given all the reasons to hate them from the bottom of our hearts, but they are pretty.
On the other side of the coin, however, unlike the original series there's no world stage worth talking of: while this is more of an issue when it comes to story/setting evaluation, there's no doubt that when there's no world to draw and everything happens in the same skyship cladded sky or random barren environment, there's also something that feels missing from the visual experience.
All in all, if compared with the prequel this show has to be labeled a letdown even in this category, but when compared with the average out there it's arguably pretty decent.
Sound
OP and ED themes are so-so, neither shame nor glory. Regardless of tastes, the OP is probably a bit better with a couple of somewhat interesting movements and instrument crosses. The BGM stands out more (especially in the second half, even though the "battle theme" there is more than just accidentally reminiscent of the Pirates of the Caribbean one...), has more personality and can spark your attention. Again, nothing really memorable or really unique, but definitely quite good overall.
Voice acting is quite harder - at least in my case - to rate. There doesn't seem to be anyone acting inherently "bad" (apart from the Russian speaking characters, whose voice actors blatantly have a very hard time reading the lines for), but as the lines they have to speak are often so dumb, so clichéd, so forced, so utterly annoying, their voices tend to sound so too. But I guess it shouldn't be in this section this flaw has to be counted.
What really is disappointing concerning voices, is that they are hardly effected at all. To make a comparison, I recently watched the second season of Strike Witches (it hasn't GONZO involvement anymore, but the sound work is by the same company); it's a crappy anime made just as fapping material, as we all know, yet I was kind of impressed noticing how most of the times the characters' voices were very distinctly filtered depending on where they were: in an hangar they would have a metallic echo, while in a plane cargo bay they would sound muffled, and so on. Almost nothing of the sort happens here: the first instance of a voice getting the bare minimum of EAX effect for being in an hangar I spotted was in ep. 17. These goddamn girls fly at 200 nodes on fighter crafts without a windbreaker and their voices sound the same they do when they happily eat cake at home. Once in a while they remember someone is meant to be talking through a radio device and then they apply some distortion, but 2 minutes later they completely forget about it.
The lack of sound effects is actually quite wider than just this. As these dumb chicks fly at the aforementioned holyshithowmany nodes without a windbreaker/windshield, it's not only their voice what doesn't show it, it's everything; fascinating how a show where wind is both a catchphrase and a recurring theme almost treated as a godly embodiment has next to none wind sounds: as they merrily fly in the sky you pretty much hear only the sound of the engine.
The issue becomes even more blatant as the ships and the machines are very smartly designed (again, thanks to Murata) to manage how sound would bring both problems and opportunities in real life: the co-pilot in a windbreaker-less fighter craft has to speak to the pilot through a radio device, otherwise he would never be heard; communication between fighter crafts has often to be done by physically attaching an harpoon connected to a "communication tube" between the two hulls; longer range communications have to be done through light signals in morse code; the battleships themselves rely on a sort of submarine-like approach to navigate and spot one another. And yet you hear nothing that justifies this: the sky is mostly silent, the pilots in the fighter crafts often seem to scream just for the sake of it and to sound dramatic, when everything is so quiet it would seem they could hear each other fart. Even the visually imposing battleships themselves often seem to just "float" there magically, lacking the punch an equally heavy, imposing sound would give them.
As such, while as a whole the show doesn't sound bad, it surely sounds lacking... sounds.
Story
The story is terrible, from each and every perspective. It's terribly clichéd and dumb per se, it's terribly told, with a terrible pacing and terrible, gaping holes everywhere, from the smallest to the biggest things. As I warned before, it's impossible to tackle this flaws galore without getting down and dirty with spoilers, so everything in the spoiler tag and the hell with it.
So, the setting is just few years (two apparently) after the events in the original, now on planet Earth. However everything seems so detached you would think this is happening centuries in the future if it weren't for a couple of returning characters that have barely aged (physically; mentally they have become so dumb there must have been some pretty bad cerebral degeneration there). Still, even though you could wonder about things like how in hell Anatoray could have established a new nation on Earth in a couple years, this means the prequel isn't needed to understand the story presented here, if there was one.
The basic premise is that we have an evil space - pardon, terran - empire - pardon, federation - bent on conquering (actually exterminating would be more exact) the whole world to reclaim the land stolen by those who have come back to Earth with their super duper uber Exile ships after some sort of age of calamity brought upon by pollution. This Ades Federation, in fact, is made of those people who remained on Earth during the cataclysm and barely managed to survive. So, per se, this wouldn't be such a bad premise: it's clichéd, all right, but offers the basis for your decent run of the mill "their claim isn't inherently wrong, but they'll have to learn war doesn't solve shit and they should look at the future instead of at the past"; tell it to Israel and Palestine, one could say, but in this genre of adventure/sci-fi anime it sometimes works well enough.
Here it doesn't. First and foremost there's no actual world to speak of: we are never shown it, apart from some random city supposed to be somewhere (who knows where) and sometimes seeming to comprise a whole "nation" sometimes not. The bad baddy baddies of the Federation sometimes plan their bad bad invasions watching a random world map that utterly fails at creating any sort of ordered geographic setting, it's just there to say "this time we are conquering the north, buhahahah!". Even worse, the whole "invasion" thing is completely inconsistent: one episode they supposedly completely exterminated a nation by blowing up their capital (and seemingly only settlement), with the lone survivor of that nation crying dramatic tears for being alone in the world, two episodes later we are told there still are thousands of refugees around (though we are never shown them, as we are never shown... well pretty much anything apart cool ships and underage girls). So, how the hell is this world populated? Self-sufficient, enclosed City-States as we are told half the time, or spread out as we are told the other half?
Hard to say, when even when we happen to stumble upon a pirate city which was bombed to the ground by the Federation some days before, we are shown ruins but not a single corpse or any trace of former human life whatsoever: they all disappeared in thin air. So, btw, why should we feel sorry for them if, apparently, no freaking-one was actually living there?
Later on we are offered something that would like to add some more depth to the Federation reasons; the previous empress tried to make world peace, but she was killed by terrorists (ah, the endless chain of vengeance) and her bodyguards decided to continue her mission for peace taking the shortest path: peace through total annichilation. This would explain why the now prime minister is committing widespread genocide, but NOPE! This isn't his real goal, his real goal all along was to obtain the secret Super Exile and force everyone - Ades and the various Exiled nations - to stand down and relinquish all their weapons. Urrrr, right, why did you have to wipe out entire nations then, when you just needed to bring the 10 years old magical girl to open the door to the Doomy Ship of Doom? I know, I know, he had to first weaken the various armies to ensure his Exile would really be overwhelming, right? Well, this still wouldn't explain complete genocide, and is anyway rendered moot by the fact even though the various fleets keep being destroyed they are magically back in the hundreds of ships at the end to do just that, attack the Death Star - pardon, the Exile - send in the cavalry and save the day.
During this "epic" we are a couple of times offered some supposed personal crisis for some of the secondary characters from the Ades Federation, precisely two admirals and a... dunno, minister or something? The whole political apparatus is never explained (again). This minister/caretaker for the kid empress is originally from an Exile tribe, long ago annexed by Ades. She lets Ades do whatever they please and she actually endorses it and is very proud to be a part of it, 'till when the "provincial army" from her formerly independent state is used as a diversion on the battlefield and 100% destroyed. Then she gets all bitchy since she now is the last of her race (because, of course, the whole population from her nation was enlisted in the provincial fleet, men, women, children, grannies... that's how it works, right?), explains to the holy empress that the prime minister is evil, and with her as a unifying flag organizes the Rebel Alliance to bring down him and then live happily ever after with Obi Wan's spirit. Or well, sort of.
The two aforementioned admirals, who are friends, are sent to crush this alliance and take the empress back, but thanks to a 10 seconds long "genocide is bad, 'mmmkay" conversation, end up firing at each other as one decides to join the alliance out of loyalty for the kid empress. The other one is then overwhelmed and his fleet sunk, but fret not, he is of course going to be resurrected in a while to magically come back (fleet and everything) during the last showdown. Not that there was any reason for him to be resurrected (he has maybe 5 minutes of total screentime during the whole show), it's just like that, out of spite for your intelligence.
Of course, I'd like to add, in all this supposedly thought provoking (not!)... urr... stuff, there's not a single simple crewman who wonders about what the hell is happening; an admiral, or a ruler, always embodies in real time the sentiments and opinions of a whole fleet/nation.
The underlying theme behind all this random warring is how to build - through morally acceptable means - a long lasting peace. Force, though somewhat effective, isn't morally acceptable, but pure passive hippie spirit seems to not work that well either (which is to an extent probably the only slightly redeeming point of the whole mess), so how will they pull it off? Simple: they won't. They'll manage to thwart the pitiable villain's plans and find themselves all fuzzy inside after having cooperated to defuse the big crisis (with your run of the mill conceited speech "I know we're still immature and shit may happen again, but that's no reason to stop trying" which obviously will convert the suicidal villain, who's anyway satisfied seeing how he brought everyone together by being, basically, a dick just for the fun of it), so they'll live happily ever after. Until the next guy decides he has to take revenge for the loss of his whole family. But maybe it won't happen: even though supposedly thousands (if not millions) have died during the series, at least on paper, they seem to all be invisible (or shifting in and out of existence as need be, who knows), so there might be no one really angry left around.
Is there really any need for me to openly say how much sense this meatloaf makes, or how much depth it has? Thought so.
The Ades Federation isn't however the starring of the show, the story is about the dumb chicks I mentioned before, so maybe even though the wider scenario is lacking, the individual stories will be poignant, engrossing, emotionally involving. Yeah, right.
The main characters are Fam Fan Fan (the only thing about her dumber than her name is... well, her), her passive-masochist-lesbo-slave-please-die-useless-bitch best childhood friend and while she's at it co-pilot Giselle, and Millia, the crybaby princess that will be saved from the downfall of her nation to grow big and strong and determined by facing a catharsis and end up... being as useless and pointless as she was in ep1.
Fam is an orphan, brought up by Giselle's father as a sky pirate, which obviously means she really is of noble offspring, orphans from a peasant family are killed on sight by any anime producer who knows his stuff, as we all agree genetically poor people can't become heroes. She is your classic dumb 15 years old anime girl who thinks love and friendship trample and solve all, and her bright and cheerful personality make even the russian frigid top-guns (who by the way are of course hot no matter how frigid) melt with sweetness and blush from cheeks to buttcheeks. You see, even though on balance she does absolutely nothing that matters to the world scenario until the very end, she is a badass. She is an extremely skilled vanship pilot, the vanships being these awesome fighter-crafts everyone but Ades uses (they do have a couple of them, they just don't use 'em: why spend 10 on a small ship that can sink 10 capital ships when you can spend 10000 on a capital ship and earn your pay as dumb anime villain empire?). With her unarmed vanship she manages to capture dozens of battleships with just a couple of harpoons, and be back in time for cake. You might ask how - even admitting with a couple of harpoons fired from a fighter craft it is possible to immobilize a hundred times bigger flying battleship - they actually capture the ship itself when it's supposed to have a crew of hundreds of soldiers armed to the teeth, but you would be naive. There's of course an obvious explanation for this. Oh you silly, it's so obvious, blatantly obvious, that you are never shown it...
Sigh. Anyway, Fam and her slave Giselle end up in the middle of an Ades attack towards Turan, a random, generic kingdom which exists only as an excuse to make princess Millia fall into their laps. Millia is really sad her people have been exterminated, her sister kidnapped, and so on, and she shows all her emotional drama dressing up as a sexy maid to convince the crew of the ship she is kept on to give her a couple rooms to found a "government in exile". Fam is of course so moved by this tragedy she instantly, at the first glance of tears, decides to become Millia's devoted lackey and save the world for her sake. Giselle the slave, of course, follows (she actually has a brief moment of jealousy seeing her master so in love with another chick, but a couple of yummy pancakes will sweep away every strife).
They end up on the super battleship Yamato (also known as the Sylvius, but it's the Yamato, really, the only difference is that it has no purpose at all apart from floating around looking cool) when they try to steal it and fail, but of course they are so cute they are soon to become full fledged crew members. From there they will steal some Ades' ships, avert a couple of crisis, and then end up lost somewhere else so the Yamato could make an awesome reappearance at the most critical time later on, in the middle of the winning enemy fleet, just to jump one cut later to being docked while the enemy fleet is still there, unscated, and has seemingly just decided to let the Yamato dock out of respect for how cool it looks.
Yes, let's be less sarcastic for a while to point out another flaw of the series: the pacing of the cuts. A cut, be it a middle one or an end of episode one, often ends on a cliffhanger, but the next one jumps in the future several hours, if not days, later, once everything has happened. And sometimes, nothing has actually happened at all, as the previous example of the reappearance of the Sylvius points out. One episode ends with our heroines being chased by 3 enemy vanships (the only time Ades manages to actually - ohmygosh ohmygosh ohmygosh - launch a couple of them), and the next begins with them being stranded in unknown territory and taken care of by a Glacia (the Russians) officer. And mind me, there's no flashback of sort: all we are offered is the line "well, I still can't believe we managed to escape from that pinch!". You have been gonzoed!
This kind of thing happens a lot during the show (the super uber Exile descends from orbit to blow shit up -----> shit has been blown up off screen and people are sad), and is a blatant example of cutting corners. High production values my arse.
Fact is, incoherent cuts or not, everything evolves randomly, without any clear reason or motivation. Cameos from the previous series are there just to be that, cameos, they have no purpose, Fam's reasons to dedicate herself to Millia are non existent (it would have needed very little effort, you see: let them be clichéd, but show them; a desperate Millia, then cut to Fam in bed thinking about and being moved by it, maybe talking about it with that baggage of a best friend she is carrying around... just that would have been enough to be at least barely passable as storytelling), the villains and the neutrals reasons and goals keep changing out of the blue, even the battles themselves serve no purpose at all and evolve randomly. There are no tactics to speak of: two fleets facing one another, open fire, BAM BAM BAM BOOM, "ahh they have a new weapon! But we do too!", KABOOM, battle ended, the winner is - peeks at script - team A! Strategy is missing as well: they battle for ownership of a supposedly strategically relevant and almost impregnable fortress, even though we are shown from ep1 it would just take an Exile to blow it up to smithereens, and there's no mention as to why that fortress actually should be strategically relevant. After all, what could possibly be strategically relevant when the world itself isn't clearly laid out, nobody knows who lives where and why, and anyway anything can be suddenly destroyed by an unstoppable Deus Ex Machina superweapon?
Flow of time is messed up too: while a fleet battle goes on (and even though they seem to take few minutes to resolve, let's imagine they actually take hours), a character has all the time to reach the north pole, take over the Super Exile whatever, and interrupt that same battle with a shot from the super duper cannon.
All this, believe me, is just the tip of the iceberg. Examples such as these are countless throughout the series, incoherent from the foundations (how come the exiled tribes, as they've for long been the only ones with the super Exile weapons, didn't just, you know, wipe out Ades - which itself still is a single city-state, and even a pretty poor one at that - from the very beginning instead of letting it become a frigging superpower? They had more than a whole century to do it, and they could do it with just a snap of the fingers) up to the most marginal details.
It's a shame, really, that a story taking place in what could have been a really fascinating setting, as the one in the prequel was, was so lazily lumped together. We aren't just facing a plot that can't live up to the standard set by the pretty awesome original series, we are facing a plot that is actually even inferior to the plot of many fanservice driven watch-and-forget comedies.
Characters
Many of the reasons why they are poor come from the inconsistency of the plot, its utter randomness. Their interactions are thus fake, lack motivation, and as such even their development, when there's one, feels forced, fake, and aimless. The story is also the reason why you'll probably grow to hate how many characters are clichéd: these are the very same clichés used in countless other anime of this genre, sometimes even with very good result (they ain't after all that different from the stereotypes used in the original Last Exile itself). Point is, if the cheerful, airheaded love-trumples-all main character can become even likable in a well thought-out story, when the story isn't working it just appears annoying and stupid. This is what Fam is, annoying and utterly stupid. There's as well no real reason why Giselle should be that loyal to her, and there's even less of a reason why the two of them should get involved at all with Millia and the war as they are supposed to be freakin' anarchic pirates (but pacifist, as long as death happens off screen our hands are clean).
In this department, even though it'd be just as much of a cliché, it would probably have worked better if there was a male lead thrown in or replacing one of the three. Some romantic innuendo, even never really worked upon, could have covered up a bit better the lack of motivation to actually stay together this team has.
Millia herself, who is supposed to be the one sporting the biggest development throughout the story, has the only real worth of a plot device. Not to mention you can't really call "development" a character who one episode is a crybaby pampered princess oblivious to the real world, and the next is in charge of a fleet of warships and magically knows what technical orders to give when a ship has taken damage or is under fire. More so when she suddenly looks the most tech savvy of all the commanders, who usually are at their best when, under fire, they manage to order "take evasive manoeuvres!"... you don't say?
She is supposed to grow into a reliable leader for her people (even though it's never really clear if the Turan people is still alive or not) but she still is just a passive character dragged around by the completely random events, on which even through her best efforts she - as everyone else - effectively ends up having no effect whatsoever.
Secondary characters are many, as this kind of setting usually implies, but all disappointing. From the cameo ones (who are here just to be that, cameos) to the unique ones who just happen to move around, do things, blow up other things, for no apparent clear reason. They are all puppets controlled by an incompetent puppeteer. They could not have been there at all and things would have been the same; as such how can they be interesting in the least?
The only redeeming factor characters have is that... well, it's that they look nice, as already stated. If them looking nice is a factor your brain takes into consideration when deciding if it has to make you suffer bouts of sickness or not when seeing them, then maybe you'll be spared.
Value & Enjoyment
Value? Uhmm, well, it has Murata's designs, that's some value right there. It looks really nice at times, usually when things ain't moving, you could came up with a couple of nice desktop backgrounds from screenshots... seriously though, it's a quite bad show that has very little value, and I'm giving it a 5 (which still means failing to get a passing grade) just because, well, it probably still has more "objective" value than some random harem anime clone with zero personality. But that's just about it. If you sit in front of it expecting it to be Last Exile you are in for a huge disappointment; if you sit in front of it expecting it to be just another time filler waiting for when a good series is ready to be downloaded, well, then you can live through it. But there are much better ways to invest your time unless you are a compulsive completist, really. Like re-watching the original and pretend a sequel has never been made. 'Cause there's no doubt Last Exile should have as the name implies stayed the first and the last.
