At the time I started my reviewing attempt though, "Legend of the Galactic Heroes", or LoGH for short, provided a refreshingly nuanced commentary on different political systems that stood out amongst the monotonous chorus of "more democracy needed" slogans thrown at any problems a country might have. In particular, LoGH poses an intriguing question: how does democracy stack up against a benign dictatorship?
The 110 episode juggernaut that is LoGH takes place thousands of years in the future, in an age where war is being fought between two factions who between them control most of the known universe. On one side we have the Free Planets Alliance, a democratic republic rife with corruption. In the other corner stands the Galactic Empire in which a young, upright noble with huge ambitions seeks to climb to the very top of the hierarchy. It's also an age when humans have spread throughout the galaxy, when battles are being fought by spaceships, a giant Death Star-esq space fortress, and ... battleaxes? Eh??
It didn't take me long to notice that a lot of details in LoGH seem kinda odd. For a show which has garnered such wide critical acclaim, it has more than its share of rough edges, particularly in the earlier stretches.
For starters, the world-building comes across as overly artificial and reliant on plot devices. The two factions in the story are connected by just two narrow "corridors" due to the "unnavigable space" around them, the nature of which never gets elaborated. The idea of unexplained, invisible but physical choke points in between two massive regions in space seems rather absurd. Then there's the mix and match of future and past elements. Though not necessarily a problem as the likes of "Cowboy Bebop" and "Gankutsuou" have pulled off similar stunts with great success, LoGH simply doesn't have the stylistic panache to make the combination work. What it ends up with is juxtaposed silliness like rebellions on distant planets by peasants with pitchforks, and troops running around on spaceships waving battleaxes (the latter courtesy of another overpowered plot device called directional Zephyr particles).
More than the world-building though, what really holds LoGH back is the storytelling. The director Noboru Ishiguro notably directed the original "Macross" series, which I enjoyed because of its human drama despite the silly story. In LoGH though, he initially seemed driven to abolish as much as he could the human touch that made "Macross" engrossing to me, deploying a method of storytelling which smacks of a history textbook: aloof and dry in a quest for objectivity. Unfortunately, this means for the first twenty-odd episodes or so, LoGH takes what should have been a compelling story and imbues it with all the compelling quality of someone reading off a historical timeline: in 795 UC, this happens, then that happens, and the fleet is commanded by Admiral Karlheinz Friedemann von Duchebaghoffermeister in the flagship PHXHFYAKJH ... [two scenes later] he was killed in this battle. Due to the stuffy nature of the narration, when occasionally LoGH does try to loosen up with some decidedly odd humour, the effect is tonally dissonant like a socially awkward professor telling a lewd joke at an academic conference. The occasional sensationalist scenes of cannon fodder yelling out "MAMA!!" just before they get graphically blown to bits also jars with the series' generally scholarly tone.
Those who claim that LoGH contains great characters are only telling you part of the story: they neglect to mention that most of the anime's 2763 characters are cannon fodder. Despite this, LoGH still insists on giving them VIP character treatment, providing them with the screen real estate to announce their title and full name, the latter of which is often so long that it'd threaten to run off the right side of the screen. Most of these characters are so shallowly written that you'd struggle to extract a single dimension even if you pooled them all together. They seem to serve no purpose other than as stepping stones for the more important characters, making them look good and helping them ascend towards their rightful, lofty place. As a result, while LoGH does have a decent amount of good characters, they end up getting buried under the sheer weight of the number of useless ones.
However, gold is still gold even if you take a shit over it, and eventually, the strength of LoGH's underlying story starts to shine through as the storytelling slowly improved. In the anime world, LoGH is perhaps unparalleled in its scope and ambition. At the forefront of this is its political commentary. I can't think of any other anime that approaches its sophistication in this area. LoGH recognises that the world is rarely made up of absolutes, and strives to highlight the shades of grey in the political landscape. In fiction, you can find plenty of stories that criticise autocracy and authoritarianism, but not so many that can articulate its potential advantages in areas such as speed of reform. Fewer still can point out subtleties like the paradoxical parallels democracy has with autocracy in its tendencies to follow charismatic leaders rather than ideas. LoGH may not always be eloquent in making its arguments, but its ideas do give you pause and make you think. That said, one subject which LoGH does deal with rather primitively is religion, for which the only representation comes in the form of a bunch of fanatic cultists. I'm not a fan of religion, but LoGH's portrayal seems excessively one-sided even to me.
Once you get over the first part of the show where every cannon fodder and their dog, as well as the fleas on said dog, are vying for your attention, the good characters eventually manage to scrape together enough screen time to distinguish themselves from the faceless crowd. People tend to summarise LoGH as the story of the rivalry between Yang Wenli, a military genius of the Free Planets Alliance, and Reinhard von Lohengramm, the rising star in the Galactic Empire. However, I don't think this is quite right. To me, Reinhard stands alone as the central figure of the saga - even if LoGH does tend to frame him as the antagonist - as the whole story revolves around the imbalance in LoGH's universe brought about by the weight of his influential life, with Yang Wenli acting as the heaviest counterweight to his rise. This interpretation makes particular sense when you consider how things pan out in the final season of the show.
Given Reinhard's importance to the story, it's fortunate that he's also the most complex, most fascinating, most well-written character in the series. As a victim of the aristocratic system, he wants to climb to the top and change the system for the better. But to get to the top, he often faces tough decisions that pit his ambitions against his sense of righteousness. This tension within him and the vastness of his ambitions is reminiscent of a flawed hero in a Greek tragedy, and it's what drives my interest in his character. Early on, I thought I could see where his inner conflict might lead him, but the story actually ended up in places I never expected.
Being an OVA produced over the course of a decade has benefitted the quality of the production. As a result, LoGH has aged pretty well for a 100+ episode old series. You'll not find howlers like headless or badly deformed character models here. That said, people singing the praises of its music to the heavens and back just because the soundtrack comprises purely of classical music seems to me to be doing rather lazy critiquing: "Mars of Destruction" also used plenty of classical music, and no one talks about the greatness of its music, at least not in a non-ironic way. How the music is used is as important as the quality of the music, and I'd give LoGH's usage of music a pass, but not much more - sometimes it enhanced the atmosphere but on other occasions LoGH's choice of music can also be distractingly inappropriate or painfully unsubtle and cliched. Anime such as "Hyouka" and "Nodame Cantabile" serve as far better examples of anime making great use of classical music. I also wish the space battles could have been more excitingly animated. Instead, we mostly get boringly plain lines of lasers flickering on and off amongst bulky ships floating around at snail pace, while commanders stand around looking at flat, monochrome, primitive geometric shapes on their screens. The unimaginative battles scenes are often dull enough to send people to sleep, so definitely don't approach the series expecting to be wowed by spectacles such as the Itano Circus.
Warfare forms a big part of LoGH, and the series is famous for its deep, strategic battles. However I regard this aspect of LoGH to be radically oversold, and while the story and characters do redeem themselves as the show goes on, I became only more disillusioned and disappointed by the warfare of LoGH. The praise seems to stem mainly from the tremendously detailed nature of LoGH's space battles, and their being modelled on real naval battles. Neither of the two reasons necessarily results in something great, but they're probably enough to pull the wool over the eyes of those who aren't looking too hard. But I personally don't think most of LoGH's battles stand up to scrutiny.
Like its world-building, LoGH does a poor job of integrating the old and the new when it comes to warfare. It's all very well taking inspiration from naval battles, but when the results are strangely two-dimensional space battles with the plot devices like the "unnavigable space" playing significant roles, then something's gone awry. When the show tries to get inventive, the results are usually … a bit strange. Ironically, there's an admiral in the series derided as "Succumbed to Theory Staden" because of his over-reliance on theory, and yet LoGH itself often feature whacky things like the "infinite walls of defence" formation and the "snake eating its own tail" battle situation which, though theoretically interesting, are so riddled with practical problems that I have a hard time envisioning their existence in reality.
As for LoGH's love of detail, the problem is that constructing large scale battles with convincingly good strategies and tactics is hard, and the more details you add, the harder it gets for those details to come together coherently. Sometimes, less is more, and I can't help but feel LoGH should have shown more of the forest rather than the trees. Instead, a typical LoGH battle will often feature details on the level of: a ship commander farts at just the wrong time, causing a crewman to accidentally press a button and fire a laser, which just happens to hit the weak point of their flagship, blowing it up and turning the tide of battle. Sometimes minute details and sheer good/bad luck can and do play a crucial role in battles, but I just feel this happens too much in LoGH. What's more, when two commanders clash, misfortunes only ever plague the one with less plot armour. Yang Wenli for example, with his colossal amount of plot armour, never seems to have to deal with random shit that's out of his control, whereas a key hallmark of a great commander is often their ability to adapt tactics to unfavourable turns of events - the battle of Dragon Fang from "Last Exile" being a prime example in anime.
This is not to say LoGH's warfare is uniformly terrible. One aspect I did like is how I could feel the difficulty of manoeuvring large ships in space. Perhaps as a result of being modelled after navy battles, the ship's movements feel lumbering and unwieldy, which strikes me as far more believable than typical visions of flashy space battles where nimble ships dodge and weave between laser shots like in a dogfight.
As much as I like to moan about the strategic shortcomings of LoGH, the show contain moments of genuine brilliance. My problem is that it doesn't contain enough of them - most of the battles comprise important characters using perfectly ordinary tactics to beat down idiotic admirals. I want to see more battles won through brilliance and not lost through utter stupidity. Instead, we constantly get TOLD about the fearsome reputation of a lot of these commanders, but I couldn't FEEL it through the battles themselves.
And that's a recurring problem in LoGH - too much telling, not enough showing. It's interesting to compare the series with the movie "Overture to a New War" which retells the events at the start of the saga. The movie fixes nearly all the problems I had with the main series: it's more tightly written, it humanises the characters with deft touches, and it quickly got me immersed in the story. Notably, the movie had a different director. Had the LoGH main series been more like "Overture to a New War", then it may well have ended up as one of my favourite series. As it stands though, while LoGH can sometimes live up to its billing as a sprawling epic, at other times it comes off as a galumphing, clumsy hulk of a story. On balance, I think LoGH certainly qualifies as a good show but falls short of being a great one.
Personal rating: +1.5 (very good)
