Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu

The 150-year-long stalemate between the two interstellar superpowers, the Galactic Empire and the Free Planets Alliance, comes to an end when a new generation of leaders arises: the idealistic military genius Reinhard von Lohengramm, and the FPA's reserved historian, Yang Wenli.

While Reinhard climbs the ranks of the Empire with the aid of his childhood friend, Siegfried Kircheis, he must fight not only the war, but also the remnants of the crumbling Goldenbaum Dynasty in order to free his sister from the Kaiser and unify humanity under one genuine ruler. Meanwhile, on the other side of the galaxy, Yang—a strong supporter of democratic ideals—has to stand firm in his beliefs, despite the struggles of the FPA, and show his pupil, Julian Mintz, that autocracy is not the solution.

As ideologies clash amidst the war's many casualties, the two strategic masterminds must ask themselves what the real reason behind their battle is.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Yang, Wen-li Main

Tomiyama, Kei Japanese

von Lohengramm, Reinhard Main

Horikawa, Ryo Japanese

von Reuenthal, Oskar Main

Wakamoto, Norio Japanese

von Oberstein, Paul Main

Shiozawa, Kaneto Japanese

Kircheis, Siegfried Main

Hironaka, Masashi Japanese

von Schönkopf, Walter Main

Hazama, Michio Japanese

Mittermeyer, Wolfgang Main

Mori, Katsuji Japanese

von Mariendorf, Hildegard Main

Katsuki, Masako Japanese

Minci, Julian Main

Sasaki, Nozomu Japanese

Attenborough, Dusty Main

Inoue, Kazuhiko Japanese

Kikukawa, Yukio Producer

Ishiguro, Noboru Director, Episode Director, Storyboard

Aketagawa, Susumu Sound Director

Motonaga, Keitarou Episode Director, Storyboard

Reviews

May 27, 2008

santetjan

Recommended

This series is overrated on this site. That is to say, with 110 episodes, your vote only counts after you've seen 22 episodes, almost a full season, and those who don't like this show probably won't wait for 22 episodes to decide.
Which is a shame, as it's only after about 20 episodes that this series progresses from something that is slow, somewhat overly bombastic, and hinting at more to come to show itself to be one of the most intelligent pieces of anime that's been made to date.

When I say 'intelligent', I don't mean it to be cunning, surprising the viewer with unsuspected plot ... lines or new angles to view something. Nor does it delve deeply into some obscure theory of science or arts, bombarding the viewer with ideas he couldn't have come up with himself. In fact, there's absolutely nothing in this series that is wholly unexpected or very deep. What it has, though, is a sense of scale that's unsurpassed in any anime - or, for that matter, any television show - I've seen.
Legend of the Galactic Heroes centers around - you guessed it - a bunch of people who, according to populace at large that inhabits the fictional future this series plays in, are of heroic proportions. That is to say, heroic in a very classical sense, being possibly a negative thing as well as a positive.
The series is set in a future wherein the universe known to man is divided into two camps, the aristocratic and absolutist Galactic Empire, and the democratic Free Planets' Alliance, who have been embroiled in a war for some time, seemingly
being evenly matched. This balance is shattered when a military genius with a far-reaching ambition rises on the Imperial side, prompting the Alliance to, somewhat grudgingly, give ever greater backing to the most capable officer on their own side. Both men surround themselves with able staff, who become legends in their own right.
It sounds like your average hero of freedom-versus-tyrant story, but it turns out to be anything but. First of all, the heroes do have a sense of their own importance, but also the sense to question whether they are all that special, or whether the circumstances of their times have just brought them to a spotlight which people equal to them could never have aimed at. More importantly, the main question on which the whole series hinges remains an open one. This question is the age-old one of which is better, autocracy or democracy, the problem being that a good autocracy is usually better than a good democracy, but a bad autocracy being worse than a bad democracy. Within the happenings of the show, it becomes apparent that, militarily speaking, at least, a good autocracy has an edge over democracy in terms of speed and decisiveness, and this shows in how the series progresses.
A large part of the series is devoted to showing the war and its subsequent smaller-scale rumblings. The war is fully shown from the side of the commanding officers - one of only a very few shows to do so - and does show an appropriate sense of scale. With battles involving thousands of battleships and millions of men, simple depictions of large-scale tactics take the place of views of the battlefield itself, and a considerable part of the show is, laudable, devoted to discussions on logistics and military intelligence.
A larger part still, though, is devoted to discussions on politics, all within the greater autocracy versus democracy question. Again, these thoughts never go very deep, but what strikes one is that so very many possible variables are brought up. Almost any motive of rulers or the general populace that might affect a political decision is included at some point in the show, making me at least think to myself: 'They even thought of thát one.' The show does tend, here and there, to lean toward the old 'good soldier, bad politician' cliché, but, overall, it really lacks a clear villain, instead showing each possible side (apart, perhaps, from religious fanatics) from every possible angle. Moreover, all this is shown within a future universe that is highly consistent over the full 110 episodes, even if differences between the warring sides tend to be somewhat exaggerated: in many cases whole societies seem to act a bit too much according to a somewhat radical ideology, only to make their following actions be true to form.

This being true to form applies also to most of the actions that, at first glance, seem to be overly dramatical, in the first place many of the actions of the dozen or so main protagonists. However, when thinking about the how and why of their actions, it usually becomes clear that they cannot have but acted as they did, according to cultural mores and individual character. A case in point would be the reliance of many Imperial officers on the character of some military commander to predict his battlefield tactics. This would seem lunacy, until it is remembered that the Imperial commanders are a tight-knit group, mostly of noble birth, and known to each other: each commander would know the peculiarities of all others, which become all the more predictable as the importance of gaining personal glory and honour in battle are taken into the equation.
This reliance on known characteristics of all personalities is also possible because the characters don't evolve all that much. Now, I've never understood why 'character progression' in general seems to mean having characters make a full volte-face, and I am, in fact, happy with a series that shows all characters as being fully grown, and fixed in their ways. Each has a specific role to play, and a mind-set that might be predictable, but is, again, true to form. This doesn't make the character shallow. Far from it: their characteristics mean that each takes a single position to a fitting extreme, making for interesting differences between the characters, and accompanying differences in outlook.
That said, it is indeed true that the characters may be somewhat flat, and quite a few seem to be included only to show a different point of view toward a specific situation or theory, but it is exactly this relative flatness that makes it possible for them to discuss so many situations.

As for the art, it is old and outdated, but that can't be held against the show. It is a shame that, mainly in the first season, the series is at times simply bad: persons walk in an awkward way, scenes are recycled, and even relative positions of facial structures change from frame to frame. There's no excuse for that. Technically, though, the art definitely gets better during the course of the show.
In fact, the show being old might be a boon. The creators have opted to make the drawing style relatively realistic, which fits the series splendidly. One has only to look at the manga to see how different it could have been: the style of the manga doesn't fit the show at all.
Real points have to go to the design. Again, nothing is really innovative, from the spaceships to the almost 19th century looking setting to the uniforms of the soldiers. It is, however, solid, and consistent, and really brings the world to life.

The music is outstanding. It mainly consists of generally well-known classical compositions, which, granted, have been often used before, but never have they been used to such splendid effect: especially the use of pieces during battle sequences, fitting the individual scenes to the music, is a joy to watch.

As a whole, Legend of the Galactic Heroes never tries to be overly deep, and, though it tends to be somewhat bombastic, never loses itself to any glorification. It is slow and quite meticulous, focusing on a lot of details, and consists for the largest part of dialogue, not action. The story progresses slowly, and only after about a season's worth of episodes the real story starts to evolve.
And this show never, ever tries to evoke an emotional response. The whole series is based on having the viewer have an intellectual understanding of what happens, not an emotional one. There are, thus, no cheap tricks to elicit emotional response, nothing overly dramatic (barring a few strokes of bombast), and no characteristics that make a main protagonist or villain.
I can only applaud this, considering it a feat to produce such a good series without relying on drama. Legend of the Galactic Heroes is, in this sense, the absolute antithesis of my other personal favourite, Le Portrait de Petit Cossette, appealing to the rational side of the viewer, even when the protagonists act with all their vaunted 'foppery and whim'.

Reviewer’s Rating: 10

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Jul 22, 2011

ManlyTears

Mixed Feelings

I can’t believe people has dubbed this most intellectual and complex to have come to anime. This is pretty much all talk and an unoriginal generic war story. Basically it follows two men and a guy who drinks tea on death star. These three are your typical “fight against the man because they are corrupted” characters. Of course everyone is corrupted because apparently humanity always ruins itself in the future. Humanity is split apart so our heroes must re-unite the universe, lame. If this was like 50 episodes I would probably rate this 7 and consider recommending to people.

This anime pretty much consists of dialogue ... that people claim to be complex and deep but is actually boring and made up of re-used history quotes.

I am going to pull a LoGH right now,

“One cannot taste bitter until one has tasted sweet.” -Confucius

“I can ride my bike with no handlebars, no handlebars” –The Flobots

“For the moth will eat them up like a garment, and the worm will eat them like wool” –Isiah 8

“They ask me why I do it? Cause I’m the fkin man” -Belly

I guarantee you a bunch of LoGH fans just saluted me with tea in the air and pinkie’s up.

There are like 100 characters and 90% of them die with incredible stupidity. All the bad guys are pretty much lame and underdeveloped. They die a dog’s death and never even put up a good fight. All I saw was victory after victory with no conflict. The only interesting battles are when some blonde woman battles a dorky looking blue haired guy.

The art and animation is pretty lame, movements are stiff and pretty much everyone is ugly.

The sound is the best part of this anime. It uses a lot of classical music which really fits sophisticated intellectuals like me. I really hate everyone’s voices though because they all sound emotionless throughout the entire 110 episodes.

If you want to be bored out of your mind and live in stale air for 110 episodes then go ahead and watch LoGH. By the time you finish you will probably have pale skin from the lack of sunlight. The ending is really crappy too, I was crying manly tears because I wasted so much time on this lame anime.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Mar 26, 2014

ktulu007

Not Recommended

Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu is a somewhat odd series, in anime terms. It began as a series of novels in the 80s, got adapted into a manga and, over the course of the late 80s to late 90s, it was turned into a 110 episode OVA. The odd part being that it was released as an OVA. For those of you who don't know, an OVA is a direct to video/ DVD release rather than one that runs on a televised network. Usually OVAs are pretty short, running somewhere from an episode to maybe a dozen. A hundred and ten episodes is virtually unheard of from ... an OVA. Why was it an OVA? I have no idea. It's possible that its content was deemed unbroadcastable at the time but I really don't know. Let's take a look at this insanely long OVA.

The basic story is that two forces, the Imperial Empire and the Free Planets Alliance, have been at war for centuries and the plot follows their conflict and struggles with a focus on the politics and stratagems. So, how competent is the execution? The short answer is it's not but allow me to extrapolate. The first issue is that the strategies used in this shouldn't work. They're really basic and rely on the other side being incompetent. The first strategy you see is “get all our ships together and hope that their fleets are far enough apart that we can take each one out individually before they can meet up.” It only works because the enemy is stupid enough to disperse their units far enough that it can work. There's another strategy that basically comes down to putting on enemy uniforms and using one of their ships. So, these guys have been at war for centuries and no one has ever tried disguising themselves before? For that matter, they don't keep track of their lost ships or have any kind of code words to identify their own soldiers? The future is dumb. That leads to another issue, since the strategies are pretty much all ones that shouldn't work you can usually tell which ones will or won't based entirely on whether it was one of the main characters who came up with it rather than based on any merit in the strategy itself. If either side had a single person who had read and understood Sun Tzu's Art of War this would be over in five episodes.

The political “intrigue” also falls pretty flat. Its big downfall is the narrator. Yes, this series has a narrator. The narrator likes to tell you what the impact of any political discussion is going to be and even spoils death scenes. Just to make sure they leave as little impact as possible. Even putting the narrator aside, a lot of the political points they make are either stupid or get contradicted by the series. To give an example of the first, they have a criticism of the Alliance's leaders that “they aren't going out and fighting” and the series acts like it's a brilliant and poignant point, but it's not. Any war effort needs people to take care of getting resources, oversee distribution and hundreds of other administrative details that you couldn't do while also fighting. Furthermore, you don't want your leaders going into the fray because of the potential for social disarray if a bunch of those leaders were to just get killed all at once. Do they really think that social chaos would be good for the war effort? The future is dumb. This series also advocates the idea that war leads to societal advancement and society stagnates under peace. That's another particularly stupid one. Society doesn't stagnate in times of peace. It advances technologically and socially. Quality of life goes up and social problems are gradually taken care of. Frankly, the societies presented in this series could use some social justice advancements given that their gender roles have regressed back to roughly the 1950s. The future is stupid. Moving onto a contradiction, towards the end when it looks like peace is coming one of the characters discusses how “if only they'd been able to just talk so many lives could have been spared” which is fair enough but not even five minutes later he says that he's going to return to being a soldier and fighting. Yes, if only your sides could just talk, you know, rather than planning for the conflict to resume. Why is the future so stupid? Even putting the major issues with the politics aside, it's just dull. The scenes drag on far longer than they need to, especially since the narrator has already told you how it's going to turn out in most cases.

The characters in this are pretty flat. Most of them are defined by a couple basic traits or an archetype. Like the guy who doesn't talk or the aggressive guy. Even with over a hundred episodes to work with, none of them ever get around to becoming fleshed out or developed in any substantial way. The female characters have it even worse since they get to be defined by their relationships to the men around them, usually their love interests. If the characters were compelling the series could have at least had some emotional investment but they aren't. They're boring.

The art in this is really badly done. The characters tend to have these flat, emotionless expressions or look dully surprised. I remember one death scene in particular where one of the characters was looking at a dying loved one and their facial expression was what you'd expect from someone who had been staring at a computer screen too long and was tired, not the expression of someone losing a loved one. The action scenes are really bad too. The space combat scenes can be summed up as “phallic ships fire at each other. Some get destroyed. Cut to one of the major characters standing in their bridge and either giving orders or reacting while looking strangely emotionless.” After a while they all start to look the same and kind of blend together. The land-based battles are even worse, somehow. You get a lot of scenes where soldiers are firing shots at people who are charging with melee weapons and somehow miss every single shot. Cobra soldiers are better marksmen than these clowns. Making one side incompetent because you want the soldiers on the other to survive doesn't make the surviving squad look bad-ass. It just makes the action sequence look lazy. Characters will also go cross-eyed for no reason and a lot of the movements just end up looking stilted and unnatural. The art is also a problem when it comes to death scenes. There are quite a few that are supposed to be dramatic but end up being done in such an over the top way that they end up being humorous instead. Like Toga Guy's. (That isn't a spoiler. He dies very shortly after showing up and it's obvious from the moment he appears that he won't survive.)

The voice acting is the best part of the series. It's not the best, but the actors do a good job of emoting and delivering their lines. If the art actually gave the characters expressions that matched the dialogue it would be far more effective, but at least the actors were putting an effort into it, even if they were the only ones involved in the OVA who were. The music is pretty mediocre. It's not bad, but it's not good either.

The ho-yay factor is a 2/10. There are some scenes where Kircheis and Reinhard look like they're more than friends. There's also a scene about the Empire's history that involves a gay Kaiser, but that's the extent of the homo-eroticism. There really isn't much.

That's Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu. It's actually pretty painful. Sure, you get the occasional scene that's over the top in a funny way, but most of the time it's just slow and boring. Any potential for dramatic tension is lost thanks to the narrator, the strategies are idiotic. The politics are asinine. The characters are flat and the art is really bad. My final rating for this is a 2/10. I would not recommend slogging through this one. Well, that's the last review of March. The request queue going into April is: Shinsekai Yori, One Outs, Doki Doki Precure, Sword Art Online and Shingeki No Kyojin. Next week I'll look at none of the above and check out Muteki Kanban Musume instead because I really need a laugh. I'll get back to the queue after that.

Reviewer’s Rating: 2

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