Shoukoku no Altair

I watched Shoukoku no Altair, also known as Altair: A Record of Battles. Here are my thoughts:

This is a historical show set in a vaguely medieval time period. Magic does not play a significant role in the show (if at all – I don't recall any magic but I hesitate to promise its total absence), and overall it is pretty realistic. The MC (Altair) does have protagonist plot armour in some situations, but as a whole I found the story fairly believable.

The setting consists of a variety of nations that resemble those of the historical-Mediterranean perimeter. The MC is a high-ranking member of a pseudo-Ottoman ... nation's government. The MC travels around throughout the show and different nations are featured along the way. Various ideologies of both nations and individuals are explored throughout the story. It is pretty interesting. The show accomplishes an impressive amount of elaborate worldbuilding during its 24-episode runtime. All the different nations depicted in the show were also potent imagination fertilizer.

Overall the story of Shoukoku no Altair is exceptionally well written and clever. The storyline is very intricate and unique. It is complex yet coherent and intriguing. I found the story very interesting and enjoyable. The writing (including worldbuilding and abstract themes) of this anime is its best feature. Most of the plot is related to political and military conflict between (and within) nations.

Beyond the plot, the writing explores themes relating, or at least tangential, to international relations and geopolitics. Themes such as military grand strategy, relations between a nation's culture and its foreign policy, and a wide variety of political themes in general. These themes made the show very interesting. There are often parallels that could be drawn between the story and real-world history.

In addition to being excellently written, the story is well executed. Despite the complexity of the story I never had any difficulty understanding what was happening. Furthermore, the pacing felt perfectly calibrated to me. It is a well-directed show.

One caveat I should mention is that, as you might expect of a manga adaptation, the ending of this anime does not have any finality. Although it does end at a major turning point in the plot, most of the conflicts that the plot is centered around remain unresolved. Personally I don't mind this (and it does signal that the adaptation is faithful) but I know it will bother others. I am very tempted to read the source material to find out how the story continues.

Despite the mature themes explored in the writing, the show does sometimes have a juvenile shounen-ish feeling. It's a very mixed bag though and varies from episode to episode. Generally speaking, I found the earlier episodes felt juvenile more frequently. As the show progresses, the strategy elements start to dominate more and more, and the scale of conflict increases. It takes time for the worldbuilding to develop to a point where the exploration of some political themes is even possible. My numerical rating for this anime increased as I progressed through the episodes.

It's also worth noting that this is not a particularly character-driven show. It is very much plot-driven rather than character-driven. It seemed to me that little attention was paid to depicting the emotions and feelings of the MC and other characters, particularly during the later episodes. This isn't a criticism, just an observation. In a different show this might be an issue, but for a strategy-focused show like this that explores abstract political themes it really isn't. Although there certainly are emotional episodes, some episodes are so devoid of emotion it almost felt like watching a history documentary. Again, particularly during the latter half of the show when the grand-strategy elements really reach their climax. Despite the show's length, there's also not a whole lot of character development, however there is a diverse variety of personalities in the cast, and perhaps more importantly, different sociopolitical attitudes. The show certainly has ideological diversity within its cast.

In a lot of ways the MC does feel like a generic anime protagonist. Although his lack of character development really isn't an issue, perhaps more effort should have been made to depict his ideological attitudes and their development throughout the show. On balance, I have a neutral feeling towards the MC, but I can understand the perspective of people who disliked him. I would agree that this is one element of the anime where there was room for improvement.

In my opinion, the OST is good. Nice OP and ED songs too. The voice acting is adequate but nobody really stood out to me. I thought the voice work for the MC was a little weak.

As for visuals, some of the character designs are nice. Due to the size of the cast and its cultural diversity, a wide variety of outfits are featured in the show. Unfortunately, the character animation is frequently crude and lacking detail. However, the background setting usually looks great (I took lots of screencaps); every episode has at least a few nice detailed landscape frames to admire. During indoor scenes a lot of the pseudo-Arabic architecture and interior decor is neat as well. The visuals are inconsistent overall, but there are certainly moments where things look awesome.


My overall rating: 8/10
This anime is exceptionally well written. The story is interesting and clever, the themes explored are thought provoking, and it contains some of the most elaborate worldbuilding I've seen in a while. It is rare to see anime handle a topic like political strategy so competently. Furthermore, the anime is well executed and doesn't have any major direction issues. Visually, the setting looks good but the character animation is often sloppy.

This is an underappreciated show that would appeal to a lot of people, including those who aren't typically anime fans. I would definitely recommend Shoukoku no Altair to people who like political/military strategy stories. However, I should warn you that I found the first couple episodes comparatively weaker to the rest of the anime. The show feels a little juvenile at the beginning, but it eventually develops an elaborate world with a rich complex story. Don't judge it prematurely based on the first few episodes.

Also, the manga might be a better way to approach this franchise. I haven't read it, but the fact that the anime's best quality is its writing does suggest that literature is the optimal consumption medium.

I liked this way more than Arslan Senki (a similar anime in concept).

>I will never command a unit of attack-falcon-equipped soldiers in a medieval war between civilizations on the Eastern Mediterranean perimeter
JDIMSA

Had some potential but ultimately disappointing and full of contradictions and lack of focus on what it's trying to be. Is it supposed to be a documentary? A memoir? An epic of good versus evil? Or just the gritty nature of war? A JRPG? Serious political and philosophical discourse? Or just simplistic black and white conflicts? A coming of age? Or mindless heroic quest? It bounces between all of these without really figuring out it's own identity. Even the ending after 24 episodes is indecisive with no change or progress towards any goal.

Let's start with the good. The only reason why I even started watching ... this is because the composer for To Your Eternity cut some of his teeth here. You can definitely hear the influence, and it's good in a sort of ambient way, but becomes repetitive with the same track being repeated in almost every dramatic scene, and doesn't stray far from the sort of background music you hear behind some popular RTS games. The background art and sets are very detailed, interesting, and varied. Good voice performances, even if the dialogue can be very dry at times. An interesting alternate universe that some call historical fiction but is far too scrambled and fanciful to have any real connection to history beyond all the obvious plucked and rearranged existing cultures like Florence, Phoenicia, etc. Even the alternate future of a zany show like Code Geass is more historically grounded.

Then there is the bad. For what is supposed to be a military drama filled with strategy and posturing and some sense of realism, it relies very heavily on deus ex machina to save the day. It can spend ten minutes talking about the political benefits and costs of a certain action, but the actual conflict ends up being laughably simplistic and frequently one-sided. It vacillates between bloodless cartoon battles with no casualties and the righteous victors winning, to a bloody massacre where people's heads are held up on spikes to signal triumph and conquest. Even the lack of animation reflects how little effort was put into the actual details on the battlefield. Encounters between prominent characters never go beyond a single attack that slashes the screen. It feels like watching manga panels flying by instead of an actual anime. This macro level perspective would have been okay if there was actual strategy involved, but there usualy is none. They are always self-assured of their victory, either by surprising the enemy or having the enemy blindly fall into a trap. There is no back and forth or contest or any sort. Very one-sided and boring.

If you've ever played a classic JRPG like Dragon Quest, then you have the basic footprint for most of the show and it's characters. The main character is devoid of personality. He is the quintessential good guy who always makes the morally correct decision. A genius. The chosen one that everyone praises or scorns incessantly. In the case of Dragon Quest XI, it was "the luminary". Skyrim? Dragonborn. In this case, it's Mahmut Bey. His name is repeated so much you will start having nightmares about it. He travels from town to town, solving problems, acquiring companions, and adding political allies against the threatening empire. And like a classic Dragon Quest JRPG, it's all very simplistic, much like the military campaigns mentioned above. Things solve themselves in one fell swoop. People join him with zero persuasion. He frequently does absolutely nothing but they always attribute some great feat to him anyway. He is less a character and more a catalyst and political agent that spurs others to act and events to happen simply by being there. Just like the player character in a JRPG that triggers flags for things to happen in the game. And just like Dragon Quest, all the characters in the show are unabashedly one-dimensional and his companions indestructible.

So you can see the problem with mixing a dated role playing game formula with complex military and political scenarios. For how insightful or ingenious some of these strategists might seem in the war room, the actual battles are fought on an 8-bit console with no RAM, little processing power, and not enough space to even input a full name, by sprites with two frame animations. It's frequently a low impact snooze-fest with little stakes. The simplistic and self-assured characters lack any nuance, development, or appeal that would make you want to care about any of them or the future of the involved nations. The writers can't figure out whether they want to paint the Empire as strictly evil, or that war with them was an inevitable necessity as huamnity vied over resources. Saturday morning cartoon or history channel series? They just keep flip-flopping. Even the great leaders of each nation, with all their gravitas, keep making non sequiturs after giving long speeches about their political philosophies.

The most apt example of the ridiculousness of the show's premise comes in one of the later episodes where they try to justify the Empire's need for expansion and Torqye's (the nation they want to conquer) military might. The Empire is allegedly a poor, agrarian society that needs land to survive, which is why they aspire to annex more land. For one, how can such a primitive society have access to iron-age weapons and technology when everyone else is stuck in the bronze age? Why can they not manufacture or sell any of it for profit, even though they own such robust mercantile ports? Why are they trying to conquer, you know, the MIDDLE-EAST when their own lands are a million times more fertile? There's a hilarious scheme later on that makes absolutely no sense, where Torqye ships fragile glass ornaments to the east. The merchants handling the trade run out of cushioning material for a single ship's worth of these ornaments, so they buy up all the grain from a nearby colony of the empire that sells grain. Somehow this one ship's worth of grain-based packing material is enough to stall the entire Empire from preparing for war, because they apparently were desperate for that pitiful amount to feed their troops.

And Torqye itself is also full of contradictions. The army "prefers" to sleep outside in tents because they are a nomadic, equestrian people. But they are also filthy rich, have large imposing palaces, and can bully the Empire with their financial assets. They are both peace-loving and complacent while also master horse-riders, archers, and lancers. For such peaceful people, they are run by a council of military officials, aka a stratocracy. One of the deus ex machina moments is when the brother of one of the regional sultans commands a squad armed with a primitive gun called a sharkya, that he invented, to massacre his treasonous brother. That iron-based gun is never seen nor heard of again. There's also a shoehorned subplot where a kid, his family having fallen to the Empire, invents a powerful cannon and demands that it be produced and used against them. Not once, but TWICE are the chickenscratch blueprints burned by both Mahmut Bey and his mentor, followed by a meaningless speech about how dangerous it would be in war, when they themselves are already savagely blowing people up as it is, dropping napalm on them to be burned alive, or parading the heads of generals on pikes. There are also many incidents of regicide and family members murdering their kin, all in the name of "peace".

So I reiterate again. Is this show a storybook fairytale scenario with life lessons and morals designed to educate children, or a gritty, morally ambiguous, realistic representation of the consequences of war and political machinations? It fails at both. It fails at both the macro level at building a compelling geopolitical narrative and at the micro level with cardbaord cutout characters that are just a means to an end. And even turning your brain off and ignoring all details and context, the battles still lack any visceral impact or excitement.

This absolutely butchers the manga. So many scenes were cut out and shortened down to almost nothing, and plenty of scenes were changed for the worse. Even some characters are cut from the show. I don't know why they even bothered with animating this series if they're gonna cut out so much from it. The opening songs are nice and so is the animation, as is the soundtrack and voice acting, but this anime bares little resemblance to the manga it's adapted from.

At the start it wasn't so bad, it had the characters and the scenes, there were some deviations but nothing that was ... bad. Around episode 15 and up, it's nothing but shortened scenes and many strange changes, plus the pacing feels strange because of the cut plot. Don't waste your time with this anime, read the manga instead and you'll have a much more enjoyable and less confusing time