Five Star Stories

A fairly standard story. A young man must save his true love from a greedy merchant. Decent way to spend an hour.

Pros:

-- (Nice aesthetic) - Renaissance Italy combined with mecha and other classy tech
-- (Specificness) - the story is a small piece of a larger tale, so instead of being another tale of The Ultimate Hero defeating The Ultimate Evil, it's a more personal journey of a man realizing that he loves a woman and should save her, even though they're not lawfully allowed to be together
-- (Engagement) - the story is fairly absorbing and moves along well. We have sympathy for out hero and ... root for him to outwit his enemies

Cons:

-- (Overcomplicated) - This is a fragment of a larger universe, so not only is there an infodump at the beginning, but one needs to go to Wikipedia if one is to understand what exactly is going on.
-- (Straightforward) - The actual plot is basic: hero vs. irredeemably greedy, lusty, and gluttonous old ruler. Guess who wins?
-- (Deus-ex-machinas) - The story is so simple, you'd think this isn't needed; but apperently the plot must go in a certain direction, and several fortuitous coincidences conveniently steer it the right way.

It's a beautiful show, with distinctive character designs and richly drawn backgrounds. And the prettiest of pretty-boy main characters to boot. And yet...

The thing is, Five Star Stories is a very long-running and popular manga series. In fact, so long running is that it started in 1986, and is still coming out three decades later. It's a massive exercise in world building (or, rather in this case, multi-solar-system building), with a back-story that stretches past a thousand years, far too many characters to count, and intertwining machinations that would take hours to explain. Think Dune. Think ... Legend of Galactic Heroes. It's a massive amount of material.

And here, you have a single, one-hour OVA, to cover it all. Or, to be more succinct, to introduce it all.

An almost impossible task, and unfortunately it shows. There's a ton of exposition that has to take place, all sorts of explaining of concepts and people, and it's a whole lot to take in at once. You spend half the time just trying to suss out who is doing what and why, and it never really sinks in.

I guess if this whets your appetite, this is to entice you to check out the manga. Which, was probably half the intention of this one-shot OVA in the first place.