It finally happened. I'm finally going to review what is probably the most beloved anime on all of MAL. An anime so sacred that even trolls on 4chan don't dare to insult it and sully its glorious name! I'm sure everyone reading this review is already quite aware how amazing this anime is, so I am going to talk about WHY it's so good, why you should watch it, and even discuss some minor imperfections (gasp). I'm finally on Summer break from medical school, so I can afford to write a long review! I picked the right series for this!
Legend of the Galactic Heroes is so grand scale and epic in terms of plot complexity and number of characters, that I feel it would overwhelm the reader if I actually tried during this review to summarize everything that happens in the plot and describe all the characters. This review would be at least 20 Microsoft Word pages long! Instead, I shall divide the review into strong points and minor imperfections.
WARNING! SPOILERS!!!!
Why is LOTGH so good?
1. The characters. It has an absolutely massive cast of characters that captures a wide range of personality types, morality, and world outlooks. I could write ALL DAY talking about the different characters, so instead I am just going to talk about the main 2 characters. The main character is the ambitious Reinhardt von Lohengramm, who wishes to overthrow the corrupt monarchy and conquer the galaxy to create a new age of prosperity with him leading it. Reinhardt seems to take personality traits and characteristics from several historical figures including Fredrick the Great, Julius Caesar, and Alexander the Great. For example, like Julius Caesar he sees a less than satisfactory government and believes that he is the man that can lead his nation to greatness, even if it means overturning the old order. Also like Julius Caesar, he dies immediately after establishing his empire and doesn't live to enjoy the fruit of his labor. This would also be true of Japan's Oda Nobunaga, who ended the Warring States period and unified Japan, only to get betrayed by one of his generals and forced to commit suicide. Reinhardt actually dies of natural causes unlike those 2, but the result is the same. Like Fredrick the Great, Reinhardt is absolutely brilliant, yet highly introverted and emotionally distant. Also like Fredrick, he is only truly close to one trusted male assistant, leading many to question his heterosexuality. Interestingly, Reinhardt shares this latter trait with Alexander as well. Reinhardt will sometimes resort to ruthless tactics to accomplish his goals, but he has a strong moral conscience and suffers whenever he does. This internal conflict gives depth to Reinhardt's character and makes him easily the most interesting character to watch. Note that I used the word interesting and not necessarily most likeable.
The most likeable character for most viewers is actually the series deuteragonist, named Yang Wenli. Although Yang is extremely likeable and I too love Yang, he is simply too perfect and lacks human flaws that the audience can identify with. He doesn't resemble any historical generals because no one that nice was ever a successful general. The only person Yang resembles is the tank commander from the video game Valkyria Chronicles. Like Valkyria's Welkin Gunther, Yang is a highly quirky, loveable goofball that also happens to be the world's greatest tactician. Despite his godlike gift for military tactics, he doesn't want to be in the military and wishes to be a teacher, but feels obligated to continue protecting the lives of his men once he starts serving. Perhaps Yang's closest link to several historical generals is his unabashed alcoholism and propensity to get sauced. However, Yang is known for never just throwing men at the obstacle, always having highly intricate strategies, and almost always winning the kill ratio. Ultimately, I feel Yang is simply too perfect for his own good, which effects his character depth and overall development. I still love him though!
2. The Politics and Themes. If you thought Game of Thrones had a complex tapestry of politics, then you haven't seen LOTGH. Not only is the sheer number of subplots that the show manages to perfectly tie together impressive, but the show deals with real world problems of governance. Like the epic novel "War and Peace" used war to examine philosophical problems and arguments ranging from agricultural reform to the "Great Man" theory of history, LOTGH uses war to examine the question of whether corrupt democracy is truly better than a well led monarchy. Instead of just spoon feeding the audience the answer that democracy is better and monarchy sucks, like Victor Hugo spent about 400 pages doing in his novel "Les Misrables", LOTGH actually examines the benefits and flaws of both systems and allows the viewer to make their own decision. Holy Shit! LOTGH arguably tackled a topic better than Hugo, one of the greatest novelists of all time. I'm not saying LOTGH is a better work of art obviously since Hugo wins the prose contest by...quite a bit. I'm saying that in terms of debating a key topic, LOTGH really did a better job and for that deserves some serious credit! In terms of literature, LOTGH reminds me quite a bit of Asimov's Foundation series, mixed with Star Wars so it isn't quite so boring and without the absolute obsession with math. Asimov had a jawdropping IQ of 175, which probably QUITE a bit higher than Tanaka's. However...I actually like LOTGH more than Foundation as a work of art! I'm serious! I'm not saying it is objectively better since valid arguments could be made in favor of Foundation , but I AM saying that I personally liked it a LOT more!
3. The Music. If you love classical music than THIS is your anime. Fuck Shigatsu! This has a HUGE selection of great composers and classical works including Mahler, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Schubert, and of course Wagner in keeping with the extreme length of this series. All music is performed by top rated orchestras, so it sounds fantastic! Although Bebop or Rurouni Kenshin probably have the best ORIGINAL soundtracks, LOTGH probably has the best non-original and best overall soundtrack in all of anime!
Now is the part of the review that may anger some people. If you are such a raging LOTGH fanboy that any criticism makes you angry, you may wish to stop reading here.
Why might people NOT like LOTGH?
1. The plot. Didn't I just get done explaining how awesome the plot was? Yes I did, but that doesn't mean it is perfect. It still does do some things that might annoy picky viewers, as I will explain. The entire series involves massive space battles and intricate battlefield tactics that the author Tanaka learned from reading military history. The problem is that he uses REAL battlefield tactics like semi-circle formation, phalanx, the oblique echelon formation used at the Battle of Leuctra in Ancient Greece. So what is the problem with this? Those tactics were designed for fighting on a 2 dimensional plane where your opponents can move side to side and back and forward, but NOT up and down...like if you were FIGHTING IN OUTER SPACE! The 2 BRILLIANT tacticians Yang Weng Li and Fuhrer Reinhardt play 3-D chess using exclusively 2-D strategies. Another problem is that LOTGH makes the HIGHLY unlikely assumption that space warfare will closely resemble land warfare in the 1700s where winning is determined by raw infantry numbers and field position. Each army has about 50,000 mini-star destroyers, which basically replace individual soldiers. The battles are then based off classical battles that Tanaka read about. Space warfare in my opinion would much more likely resemble naval warfare, where navies are ranked by "tonnage" NOT total numbers. A fleet of 11 Nimitz class Aircraft carriers would annihilate an armada of 50,000 speed boats. Naval wars are won and lost not by numbers, but rather by a smaller number of big, important boats. The Empire is revealed to have a giant fortress ripoff of the Death Star that was able to devastate the entire Alliance fleet on 5 occasions with its Death beam. Yet despite the existence of this technology, the empire makes 1 immobile Death Star and 50,000 Star Destroyers. If they had used the same resources to make about 20 mobile Death Stars, they would have slaughtered the Alliance with ease. I guess Tanaka never played Masters of Orion 2?
LOTGH also puts WAY too much emphasis on brilliant generals being the factor that wins and loses wars using the "Great Man" theory of history that no historian has taken seriously since Napoleon lost 200 years ago. Wars are won and lost by logistics, which speaking of logistics brings me to another problem: The logistics, world building, and timeline of this series! Firstly, I will defend Tanaka by saying that some authors, like my personal favorite Dostoevsky, care a LOT more about their themes, messages, and characters, than they do about the plot element. This would actually describe the majority of esteemed classical authors, so Tanaka is in good company by not caring as much about the plot. However, that doesn't actually excuse the author from being completely sloppy with the plot and creating plotholes and continuity errors out the ass!
Tanaka doesn't give a FUCK about the plot, and I will absolutely prove it to you! If you look at the timeline, you will notice that in 150 years a group of 400,000 refugees were able to increase their population to 400 million by the time of the first encounter between the Alliance and Empire. This was BEFORE, immigration from the Empire bolstered the Alliance population. An isolated population was able to increase by 1,000 times in 8 generations. Also keep in mind that this was without MASSIVE cloning, because the Alliance citizens are very diverse and clearly they aren't all clones produced on a conveyor belt like the Clone Troopers in Star Wars. Maybe they were mass produced test tube babies with lots of egg and semen samples to make a diverse crop with artificial insemination? It never states this, so I think it is more likely that Tanaka simply wasn't thinking about the logistics of his timeline. This becomes more likely when you consider the following fuck up. We learn that Earth had a population of 20 billion before a nuclear war reduced it to 1 billion around 2050 AD. The vast majority of the remaining 1 billion people leave Earth and colonize space, leaving just a few million people on highly irradiated and inhospitable Earth. Yet 200 years later, the colonies fight a war with Earth and slaughter 5 billion people by nuking Earth from orbit. Why the FUCK were 5 billion people living on a post nuclear war Earth when we had colonized dozens of planets by that time? Unless the 5 million or so stragglers fucked their brains out and increased 1,000 times in 200 years, which once again is impossible (Nigeria tried HARD and only managed 17X growth in 200 years), or a shitload of people migrated back to a nuclear wasteland out of sheer idiocy. It gets worse. We hear again and again how Earth was rendered completely uninhabitable after the 2nd nuking, yet at the end of the series...there are motherfuckers shown living on Earth again less than a thousand years later! The series went on so long that Tanaka just completely forgot what he wrote! These are the kind of mistakes and highly questionable logistics that plague the timeline. This is a plot that is best examined from a distance, because the closer you look, the more you notice shit like this.
2. the art. Since this is an older series, the art and animation is fairly dated. This didn't bother me, but it might bother some viewers.
3. The pacing. This series is LOOONG! I mean like Longcat long. It is also extremely slow at times and requires a large amount of patience. LOTGH fans will tell people, "don't worry, it starts getting good around episode 60!". The sad thing is that they aren't entirely joking. Not every anime watcher will want to watch a series where the first 26 episodes are basically just an introduction.
4. The sorrow. Do you have a favorite character? He's going to die. I fucking guarantee it. Almost EVERY loveable character dies in this fucking series, and they don't die happy old men.
Overall:
As much as I bash MAL's ratings and question the dogma of anime forums like reddit and /a/ on 4chan , I will admit that with Legend of the Galactic Heroes...people actually got it right. This REALLY is a great anime that deserves all the praise it gets! Is it a perfect anime with zero flaws? No. I think I just demonstrated a few reasons why some people might not think so. However, I personally really like this series overall and give it a very well deserved 9/10.
