Aoi Umi no Tristia

Aoi Umi no Tristia (Tristia of the Deep Blue Sea) is another example of a series that just throws together cute girls, mechs, explosions, fan service and hopes enough suckers will watch it. Consider myself hoodwinked.

The plot for Tristia starts off simple enough, with a domestic Golem (mecha) competition. Yeah it’s what it sounds like, robots doing housework... exciting huh? Of course it soon turns into mecha battles between rivals Nanoca and Panavia. Panavia seems to be bent only because she finishes second in every inventor contest the two of them entered. There is a mysterious man seemingly behind Panavia ... who is after information about Nanoca's mecha Tenzan. This might have proved to be an interesting plot element, except for the fact that there is no resolution to it! None, zero. So when the show is over it doesn’t really feel like it ever ended and leaves you with an unsatisfied feeling. Well that is if you could work up enough emotion to care about the story in the first place.

In addition to the bland unfinished story there is unrelated bath scenes, boob jiggle and other examples of pointless service. The action isn’t good enough to be noteworthy either. They aren’t exciting or interesting and the battles between the mechs have a feeling of been there, done that. The script is also pretty silly, with a lot of dialogue that will just make you wince. This could have been the translation, but call it intuition, I suspect it is equally cringe-worthy to native Japanese speakers over the age of 15.

The characters could best be described as bland. They are all stereotypes of personalities everyone has already seen many times over. While the girls are all cutely animated that’s about the most redeeming feature any of them have. We learn almost nothing about any of them, besides a little back story about why Panavia dislikes Nanoca and we get a little of her background mainly in passing. Honestly you will learn more about the characters and the town of Tristia by reading the plot summary than by actually watching the anime.

Animation is good but not great. The characters are cute looking and the backgrounds are pretty good but the fights and action aren’t spectacular. Despite having a couple of respected actresses, I would have to give low marks to all of them. Mostly due to the poor material they had to work with. I found the music, in particular the background sound to be really dreadful and cheesy.

In the end, Aoi Umi no Tristia has few redeeming qualities. There are a few laughs but overall it feels uncompleted and boring. It doesn’t have enough mecha action to appeal to fans of that genre nor is the fan service good or even plentiful enough to attract fans of that. Spend your time with something else.