Choujikuu Seiki Orguss

There's a strong feeling of early Gundam to the structure of this show. Most of it involves a group of misfits travelling through enemy territory in their ship, getting embroiled in local conflicts for an episode or two, and fending off attacks with their mechs. Where Gundam added variety with a new mech design almost every episode, Orguss instead shows us new species and cultures that have been mashed together in a cross-dimensional apocalypse.

The broad strokes of the plot in Orguss are great, presenting some tough moral dilemmas for the characters to overcome. The scene-by-scene execution of those ideas often fall short, however, mostly due ... to clunky dialogue and a habit of telegraphing upcoming twists. The characters are likewise an entertaining bunch, from the playboy pilot to the grumpy old combat robot, but many aren't given enough screen time to develop. It remains a good watch throughout its 35-episode run though, and only really falls down in the final minute with a confusing and frustrating ending.

Orguss is a show I was introduced to through some youtube show or another which was ecstatic about its representation in Another Century's Episode: R (PS3, Bandai Namco/From Software, 2010). After playing through the game and the Orguss parts while stumbling through the dialouge (私の日本語がすごいない) I was impressed at the character art and mecha design. This led me to a website named gearsonline (easily searchable enough) which had enticing descriptions of the show, its cast, and some of the art. I also had found the intro song (Sky-hurricane by Casey Rankin, Life in the Sky, 1983) which had me in LOVE. It's incredibly triumphant, with ... a large range of emotion and expressions, the flanger guitar effect combined with poppy piano has me in tears. (Additionally, the best part of the song is the first half!) The accompanying animation is also splendid, colorful, and evocative. Really, if this entire anime was just this opening, it would be a 10/10! Gypsy is also a rather fun outro song, though not as imaginative.

I am actually rather split on the overall tone and nature of Orguss. During this short review, I will try not to make comparisons - if I were to do that, I unfortunately just couldn't put it up to the high pedestal of modern classics such as Space Patrol Luluco (Trigger, 2016) - and judge it on its own merits.

THE GOOD:

Orguss has a very colorful palette, as shown in the intro. It pops very often with pleasing aesthetic design and direction. The budget feels rather low, but this doesn't really bother me so much. It's kind of funny rather, seeing cells of mecha just sorta slide into frame. A few more frames of animation sometimes would have a smoother presentation, and more kinetic energy, but I'm not a huge buff in this area and I generally enjoyed it. Animations do get reused, and this often feels a little lazy, but they're usually good to begin with. (Seeing the MC's stupid smiling face as he spins a stolen mecha in the air does warm my heart, even if half of it is stills that slowly pan or zoom in.) I also generally like the sound design, especially in the outerspace sections.

The setting of the show allows for a huge melting pot of cultures, literally popping in and out of space and time around each other. This is, on its face, pretty exciting! Unfortunately, they don't really do a whole lot with the idea, but it leaves room to sort of imagine conflicts that could arise. You might get the theme at this point which the show has good ideas, BUT is lacking in execution. Orguss plays with these ideas in a sort of monster-of-the-week kind of way, which feels a bit lacking but still serves a purpose. Did I accidentally watch an 80s sitcom with a dumbass protagonist who bumbles his way into bad situations? Possibly.

Characters do develop over time, especially the main character (thank FUCKING god). There isn't a lot of attention to the background characters in this area, but I feel that makes sense in context. The central drama is about the MC's internal conflicts - does he fight for himself? his ego? for his friends? does he experience love? or is he just selfishly using everyone for his own gains while protecting his fragile masculinity in whatever way he thinks he can? He is certainly in a scary and dreadful situation, losing everything he has except (for a moment) his aircraft, and his piloting ability. The only thing really left of Kei Katsuragi is to be a soldier, but the WHY of it is taken for granted - at least until he must confront it.

THE BAD:

As alluded to, the MC is a bit of a chauvinstic prick. It goes beyond just being a sexist asshole, he holds a woman at knifepoint and forces a kiss on her! She calls his bluff, that he would not actually hurt her with the knife, and he uses the kiss as a last ditch resort to establish some amount of control. Do I feel like there is an avenue for understanding this character, his plight, and the journey that he has to undertake to reach a point where he can respect others - and himself? Yeah. I think that's the only real reason I kept watching. He is really difficult to watch in the first few episodes, where that is a constant nuisance, and I wouldn't fault you for ditching the show based on that alone. A lot of these types of media live and die by the attractiveness of their main cast, physically and personality wise, and the MC is very hard to stomach - though he is a bit cute as an 80s anime boy.

Leaving that aside, as difficult as it may be, the other characters just act kind of... weird. Mimsy Raas acts like a very stereotypical heroine in the beginning, with superficial dialogue and voice acting (in Japanese at least) that makes me think she is trying to be that way. Shaia Tobu is also strange, she constantly makes bad decisions, and will complain when others take control as if it were a game to play. The Emarns are described as believing in souls and not taking mortality as hard as you might expect, but this is not at all consistent when someone who is important to them dies, and is in very fact important whenever the plot demands it. I can't decide if this is bad storytelling or they just wanted to have an excuse for a lighter mood, to allow for more slapstick humor. A feature of the times. In either case, I'm not really a fan.

As a contrivance of the plot, the MC has to be a good pilot and the enemy (Chiram soldiers) have to be bad pilots, unless the episode demands that one of them is good (random dude who evades every shot) for some amount of dramatic tension. Kei is just so fricking powerful in every scene until he loses due to absolute incompetence. There is kind of a weird connotation again, that the enemy is both so incredibly powerful and numerous yet also so stupidly weak. Why all the friendly fire?? Why do they seriously crash into each other when scared??? Did you guys not learn how to fly???? My suspension of disbelief only goes so far!

As mentioned by another reviewer, it is weird emphasizing the Emarns' reproductive cycle, the 2:1 ratio of women to men, and the awkward loli-robot. All of these things are a bit creepy. I can however, apply an angle of culture shock to it, if only to allow myself to continue enjoying the show. Do these aspects of civilization seem a bit horny and nonsensical? Maybe, but that's a matter of perspective. If this type of thing WERE the case in a separate reality, I would probably just accept it at face-value, and move on. The show does not really linger on these topics as they're introduced - which also feels a bit off. The pacing of the show just kind of introduces concepts and then... continues. For the first 14 episodes, it's hard to say exactly what happens. The gang goes home. Setups will be created for the cast to feel righteous in some cold-hearted mecha murder action, and then they do it, rarely with consequence. Also, realizing that the dinosaur Jahvy was basically just Jar-Jar Binks made it hard to take any scene with him seriously.

OVERALL:

Super Dimension Century Orguss is a good show to watch in the background of something else! I don't think it lives up to the intro, but there's a lot of show to engage with nonetheless. The best thing I can really say is that it lasted 35 episodes, and all of them CAN be an enjoyable use of time. I cannot really tell anyone who isn't already interested to watch it, and it seems in describing it to my friends they have decided to never do so, but if the premise interests you - take a chance!

Trailing after Macross’ fameーhere lies a horrid follow-up called Super Dimensional Century Orguss. I mean, Orguss LOOKS good, but the characters and plot are all over the place. The main character is pretty much a womanizing, rape-y douche-solider that got warped into a parallel world, where’s there’s subsequently… a harem of hair-tentacle girls and a robot loli. Great.

• So, our lovely protagonist, Kei Katsuragi, holds one of the girls, Mimsy, at knife point and tries to force her into kissing him. And because main character privilege, also known as protagonist syndrome, in real life, Mimsy eventually falls in love with him and he NTRs’ her ... fiancée. To make things worse, all of the women in this dimension have to have sex when they’re teenagers, because they’re infertile in adulthood apparently. What the fuck, Japan?

• The what-the-fuckery gets more intense when you find out that the ship captain’s twin sister Maniisha is being so antagonistic to the crew because her husband originally wanted to sleep with her sister? How are you supposed to like any of these characters when even fucking Jabby, pretty much the Jar Jar Binks of the show, is shown cheating on his girlfriend in a flashback? Why didn’t Noboru Ishiguro just make a NTR hentai?

• And the lolita robot-slave, I’m not fucking with you, gets jealous over Mimsey and expresses a romantic interest in the protagonist, which is partially reciprocated, because the main character is a piece of shit! Keep in mind: Noburo Ishiguro is the director behind Legend of the Galactic Heroes, the original Macross, Megazone 23, and the original Space Battleship Yamato, so Orguss’s visual direction is on point. That’s what makes it so bad…

• There are some weird visual conniptions, in character movements and general robotic animation, but overall I thought the designs and directing were appealing to look at. I thought the idea of what would happen if a singularity were to exist within a parallel dimension was supremely dope, and wished that all of the internal character drama didn’t distract from the conceptual coolness.

• I didn’t think that Orguss 02 was that much worse than the original, though obviously inferior in direction. There’s another rape-y, douchebag character, that’s not in the main cast, and actually gets bad karma in the end, instead of being celebrated as a hero home-wrecker. The main villain from 02 was silly, he’s exactly like Shakespeare’s Hamlet (not exaggerating), except if Hamlet wanted to destroy all of humanity to cover the Earth with beautiful flowers.

• But, overall it isn’t that inferior to Ishiguro’s vision. The director who did the second series, Fumihiko Takayama, also was behind Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in Pocket, which I enjoyed. Both Orguss stories kind of made me feel trailer trash for watching them, with little-to-no sophistication with the writing.

• The original Orguss is like a much, much worse version of the original Mobile Suit Gundam, as far as women being cast as meat bags that are just there to sleep with and don’t really do anything that useful, but the original Gundam actually has them written as human beings, not just conquests.

• With the little eyebrow turns you gets from the dated subject matter in Gundam, you also get a superbly executed and iconic story, characters, and world. Whereas Orguss just seems like a cheap, bargain bin pulp magazine from the 80s. I did like how the story wrapped up at the end; Ishiguro is really great knotting together all of the strings of the story with a glorious conclusion in the endーnote to viewers: the prime example of this is Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

• If you’re wondering why Legend of the Galactic Heroes is is considered the greatest sci-fi work in anime history; you have to watch it to the end to know what I’m talking about. Every question or head scratch you might have about the show is answered. I give the original series of Super Dimensional Orguss a 4/10 and Orguss 02 a 3/10.