Super Robot Wars Anime Marathon #7: Aim for the Top! Gunbuster

Another anime featured in Super Robot Wars T that was a no-brainer for me to watch is Aim for the Top! Gunbuster, a series that only features six episodes. If it had been longer, I might not have tried watching it, since it’s probably older than any other anime I’ve ever watched. I also would have really missed out on a thought-provoking series with an art style I find I extremely enjoyed.

I definitely jumped to conclusions about this series. I figured that because it was from the 80s, I would have trouble relating to it and that I wouldn’t care for the art. Neither of these things was true. In fact, I find I enjoy the art style more than a lot of more modern series I’ve watched. There’s something very expressive about the characters’ faces and I find I really enjoy the juxtaposition between vestiges of realism and large, expressive eyes. I also enjoy the fact that this is a late 80s series in which female characters feature prominently. The protagonist is a decidedly average teen girl who is just one among many being trained to pilot mass-produced, utilitarian mechs. 

Noriko

Noriko is not particularly skilled at piloting mechs, in fact, so when she gets chosen as one of two students to go into space for a mission, she’s ruthlessly bullied by her classmates. The brilliant Kazumi Amano, who Noriko idolizes, is considered among the best pilots in the world. She was always going to be the first choice for this opportunity to go into space, but Noriko was never in the running. Coach Ota sees Noriko’s potential, however, and is confident she has what it takes to be a skilled pilot. Noriko also has a personal stake in going to space, as it’s where her father died in a previous mission.

Kazumi

It’s not long until Noriko and Kazumi venture into space, where they get the opportunity to witness the circumstances of Noriko’s father’s death firsthand. It becomes apparent that Earth is the victim of a prolonged siege by an army of insectoid aliens. Here’s where the anime becomes some mix of fascinating and confusing. In the world of Gunbuster, humanity relies heavily on faster-than-light travel to navigate the far reaches of space. Due to the way this travel works, significant time dilation occurs. As a result, when Noriko reaches the ruins of the ship on which her father died, only two days have passed since it occurred, even though it’s been far longer since he’d actually been missing. She also takes about an hour to explore the ruins, which results in 6 months passing on Earth. These discrepancies in time become far more important later on.

Exploring the space ruins

What also becomes important is the lopsided relationship dynamic between Kazumi and Noriko. Noriko looks up to Kazumi and sees her as something of a mentor and hopes that Kazumi sees her as a bright young student. However, Kazumi feels resentful of Noriko and feels her inexperience will endanger herself and others. 

As it turns out, this space mission is pretty important. The crew is being trained to pilot Gunbuster, a revolutionary giant mecha that requires two pilots to function. It may well be their only hope against the Space Monsters, who threaten to engulf the Earth if not destroyed. Meanwhile, the proposed pilots aren’t getting along and Noriko finds herself gravitating to another member of the team, the handsome Toren Smith. There’s a cute scene where they both take a sip from a drink with the same straw, and Noriko breathlessly considers whether she’s experienced a secondhand kiss.

A secondhand kiss

The wistfulness of that scene is dashed by the brutal reality of the following scene, however, when Noriko finds she’s too petrified to work together with Toren when a group of the Space Monsters attacks him. This incident only worsens Noriko’s deeply entrenched fear of space combat and does little to improve her reputation among the crew.

Noriko does manage to redeem herself later by defending the Exelion (their ship) from a horde of Space Monsters with the incomplete Gunbuster, but by this point, humanity has suffered heavy losses. It is a Pyrrhic victory at best. They decide to retreat for now and return to Earth, where 10 years have passed. Old friends from the academy are now fully-formed adults. The brash prospective pilot who challenged Noriko to a duel in the first episode is now 27 with a small child of her own. How odd it must feel to be defending humanity from an alien menace while everyone you know rapidly ages past you. I wondered, at the time, how sustainable this process would be. Surely they would have to continue to go back into space to fight more battles?

The unfinished Gunbuster

The fifth and sixth episodes of Gunbuster are its best and also the ones I find myself repeatedly thinking about. Time dilation again comes to the fore as an important element of the series’ conceit, but in ways that send my imagination sprawling. There is giant mech combat, of course, and the titular Gunbuster finally gets its moment to shine, but I found myself thinking much more about the friendship between Kazumi and Noriko, about their selfless journey to save humanity, what they sacrifice, and the unanswered questions posed by the story’s finale. The final episode, animated entirely in black-and-white, might be dismissed as a cost-cutting measure, but it was actually the most expensive episode to produce. This highlights how deliberate and how appropriate a tool it is to underpin the sober reality of the conclusion. It is heartbreakingly tragic, but ultimately extremely satisfying and, perhaps more importantly, hopeful. At the end of the day, it would have been very easy to end this series in a way that was expected, but the twist at the end is what will make me always remember it.

No caption required

Super Robot Wars Anime Marathon #6: Expelled from Paradise

After making my way through a big chunk of Super Robot Wars X, I was already making plans to watch some of the series represented in Super Robot Wars T. It felt like it made a lot of sense to start with Expelled from Paradise because it’s a movie! Unlike something like the gargantuan 50-episode Code Geass, a movie would be much less of a time investment. 

Expelled from Paradise is a sci-fi story that is only tangentially mecha-related. Sure, our hero, Angela Balzac, starts out in a giant mech, but she quickly loses access to it until the film’s finale. Most of the meat of the movie is Angela and Dingo (voiced by Steve Blum) traveling the desert surface of the Earth, carrying out her orders. In the far-flung future, society has progressed to a point where physical forms are no longer considered necessary. The elite exist only as data, living out virtual lives in servers suspended in space, far above the surface of Earth. Our hero is established as a bikini babe/secret agent/super spy lounging on a virtual beach, shortly before a rift in reality brings an urgent matter to her attention. Then, for gratuitous fanservice reasons, Angela dives through cyberspace to her next destination, completely nude. She’s quickly given orders to go down to the surface, where she must address the issue of their unknown attacker. Someone known as Frontier Setter has made hundreds of hacking attempts on them, which is bad news for the utopian society of Deva that they’ve built.

This kind of sets the tone for how Angela will be portrayed, right from the beginning.

Angela doesn’t have a physical form, though, so it becomes necessary to build her an organic body. In yet another contrived twist, she impatiently cuts off the creation of her body before it’s done, meaning the body that is created for her isn’t fully formed. In other words, her new body is that of a 16-year-old girl, which had me asking uncomfortable questions about why the story’s creators found it necessary to jump through hoops to transform the protagonist into a buxom teenager. The questions themselves might have been uncomfortable, but the answers are sadly all too clear.

It is at this initial stage of the film where Angela finds herself piloting an admittedly cool giant mech, although I would have preferred to see it rendered in hand-drawn animation instead of the slick CGI that’s become more and more common. The mech’s only real purpose is to get her safely to the surface of the Earth, until of course she’s waylaid by a series of giant sandworms who seem to be having a bad day. She’s able to fend them off with the assistance of Dingo, who turns out to be her contact. What follows is a series of scenes between the two as they try to track down Deva’s supposed attacker. 

Dingo meeting Teen Angela

Of course, the topic of physical forms and their necessity comes up, and it’s only in these scenes where I felt the movie really retained my interest. The premise of advancing beyond physical forms is an interesting one, despite the story’s hackneyed approach to it. Even so, I found Blum’s genuine performance as Dingo engaging as he extolled the virtues of simply being alive. There’s a scene where Angela gets sick and she laments the terrible fortune of having a body. Dingo can’t disagree, but at the same time, it’s hard to experience joy without the contrast of pain.

Inevitably, the duo track down Frontier Setter, but instead of being a dashing super hacker, it turns out he’s just an AI inhabiting a small, friendly-looking robot. Its attempts to hack Deva weren’t malicious, after all. It was all a misunderstanding. In fact, his entire goal was to establish contact to share the news about his goal—to establish a new society for humankind away from the ravaged Earth. Frontier Setter has existed for hundreds of years, gathering information and intelligence. At this point, he’s become remarkably human. Even Angela is taken aback by his humanity. After all, she normally exists only as data, so does she even have any more of a claim to humankind, herself? Despite her misgivings, she understands and plans to relay the misunderstanding to the shadowy Council of Deva.

I forgot there's a scene where Frontier Setter and Dingo bond over Dad Rock.

Leaving her organic body behind, Angela relays the news, only to be punished for failing to carry out her orders. Intent matters little, the Council decrees, and for her impertinence, she will be imprisoned indefinitely. For the deathless citizens of Deva, this is a harsh punishment indeed. They have little interest in Frontier Setter’s intent to proselytize. After all, what better existence could there be than in Deva? Of course, it’s worth noting that one’s existence in Deva is based entirely upon a caste system in which only the most privileged can afford fully realized simulations, but that’s neither here nor there.

Suffice to say, Frontier Setter and Deva hatch a scheme to bust Angela out, and we finally see the triumphant return of mech combat for the film’s closing, except this time she’s battling her former comrades, all of which are gifted with conventionally attractive female bodies. 

Overall, this film has some interesting things to say, but nothing that the sci-fi genre hasn’t explored before. It also doesn’t approach it in as sophisticated a way as I would prefer and also highlights some pretty uncomfortable fanservice. I’m glad I watched it just so I could have some context for when I play Super Robot Wars T, but it’s not a film I can award a lot of accolades.

I haven’t played Super Robot Wars T yet so I can’t comment on how this anime is implemented in that game, but I’ll get there! More on that in… some time, I’d say.

Super Robot Wars Anime Marathon #5: Martian Successor Nadesico

Now, this is an anime I’d been planning to watch for several years, ever since I played Super Robot Wars J on the Game Boy Advance. I’ve always struggled with attention span when it comes to anime, so when I tried to get through this series in 2014, I didn’t manage to make it more than a few episodes. For posterity, my last entry about this series was made seven years ago.

Despite this, I found the characters and setting of Nadesico to be pretty charming, even filtered through a strategy RPG about crossover giant robot battles. As a result, I made sure to take advantage of the Nadesico squad in every game they appeared, despite always putting off watching the series. Every time I played a new SRW game, I’d think, “Hey, I should watch that series” but never did. Until recently, anyway.

My latest excuse for deciding to watch Nadesico is because, well, during this pandemic, I’ve had a lot more patience and time to watch lengthy anime series, as one might guess from the last few entries on this blog. Also, I’m planning on playing Super Robot Wars T soon, which features yet another appearance of Akito, albeit not the version from the main Nadesico series. I figured it might finally be time to dive in. 

Our hero.

Despite not having watched the series in several years, the first few episodes felt quite familiar. Our protagonist, Akito, is a citizen of Mars at the series outset, although his home is abruptly attacked and presumably destroyed by aliens. These mysterious foes are known as Jovian Lizards and they hail from Jupiter, although we won’t learn much more about them until much later. It seems like Akito and his friends and family are done for, but he somehow ends up on Earth with no memory of how he got there. Despite being a trained mech pilot, the trauma Akito holds onto regarding his past results in him diving into cooking as his new passion. Ironically, this is precisely how Akito inadvertently ends up on the crew of the Mobile Battleship Nadesico, where his role as the cook will be short-lived.

Yurika

You see, the captain of the Nadesico is the bubbly young woman, Yurika, who also used to live on Mars and remembers Akito from when they were children. Akito’s memories aren’t as fresh in his mind, though, and repeatedly finds himself fending off the captain’s romantic advances. Yurika is convinced she and Akito are soulmates because of their childhood friendship. She might be right. Even so, Akito isn’t willing to make that kind of commitment, especially once he gets suckered into being a member of the Nadesico’s contingent of mech pilots, which, in the beginning, consists of himself and Gai, an excitable man and self-professed #1 fan of in-universe anime, Gekiganger.

Gai, the man himself.

It’s worth noting that despite some tragic things happening right from the beginning, Nadesico’s tone is primarily comedic. Even so, I found myself not often knowing how to feel. I would ask questions like “is this supposed to be funny or serious?” For example, Akito’s backstory is quite sad, on paper, and so is what happens to an important crew member very early on. On the other hand, the anime briskly moves on and features light episodes about going to the beach and having singing competitions, all while a war with aliens rages on. Even this alien race is frequently played for comedy, while the anime humanizes their otherworldly customs and weaves their unusual origin into the worldbuilding of the Nadesico universe.

For me, Nadesico works best when it’s about the interaction between its characters. The overarching plot and mystery behind the aliens and the military conflict are not nearly as interesting. Although the dynamic between Akito, Yurika, and other crew members is framed more as a high school comedy than anything, it’s the part that I personally found most appealing. Like many anime protagonists, Akito finds himself in a position where he’s fending off romantic advances from all sides, whether it be Communications Officer Megumi, who stumbles her way into an unofficial girlfriend role very early on, Captain Yurika’s undying (and frequently unrequited) affections, or even ace pilot, Ryoko’s begrudging crush. It’s not clear why they’re so attracted to Akito, though, since he’s kind of an awkward dude. Sure, he’s great at piloting giant robots, but so is Akatsuki, who joins the crew a little later on. He’s even much more of a pretty boy! Even so, Akito seems to be the one the girls cling to.

Megumi

One important thing about Martian Successor Nadesico is that a good 90% of the crew is female, which is played almost entirely for comedy. There’s Ruri, for example, who is a pre-teen prodigy serving as the ship’s Science Officer. She’s basically a living encyclopedia of knowledge, perhaps because she spends a lot of time querying the ship’s built-in database of information. She’s also prone to dismissing the childish antics of other crew members as idiotic, which serves as something of a catchphrase for the character. And by “something of a catchphrase” I mean “most scenes involving Ruri end with her saying ‘baka’ in some context or another.

Ruri

There’s also the glamorous Minato, a former secretary who now serves as the Navigation Officer, Jun, Yurika’s right-hand man who absolutely has a crush on her and is a stickler for the rules, and the three female pilots who join a few episodes in. There’s the aforementioned tomboy, Ryoko, the eccentric Izumi, whose weird puns and jokes don’t translate that well into English, and Hikaru, whose interest in gadgets has her striking up an unlikely friendship with Uribatake, the engineer. One scene has Uribatake, who I read as being a man in his mid-30s, misunderstanding the friendship he has with Hikaru, who is basically a teenager. It was kind of creepy!

Ryoko, Izumi, and Hikaru, right before Izumi makes a nonsensical joke.

As much as I enjoy the characters and humor of Nadesico, I found getting through the series to be more of a slog than I expected. There are many filler episodes, only some of which are actually any fun, and the plot isn’t easy to get invested in. The weird tonal mismatch between the comedy and drama elements of the show also often left me cold. I almost would have preferred if the show was purely a comedy, because those elements were generally stronger, even though those parts didn’t always work. 

Now, there’s also a Nadesico movie that I decided to watch, not out of any particular interest, but because elements from the movie are represented in some SRW games I’ve already played and SRW T, the one I plan to play soon. Akito now pilots a mysterious black mech and the tone has taken a sharp turn toward the serious. The plot is also highly confusing because much of the intervening story elements that take place between the main Nadesico series and Prince of Darkness were from a video game on Sega Saturn called Martian Successor Nadesico: The Blank of 3 Years. As such, it’s not clear at all why young Ruri is now the captain of the Nadesico, where her new crew members came from, and why Akito and Yurika are nowhere to be seen.

This is still Akito, somehow.

Even by the end of that movie, I was still confused about what had actually happened. Akito is absolutely not the character I remember, nor does he even have a lot of screen time in the movie. Many of the anime’s characters show up again, but with only an hour and a half of runtime, none of them really get the chance to stand out. In fact, much of the movie is concerned with Ruri and the new characters, Saburouta and Hari. Saburouta showed up briefly in the main series but never had an important part. Since the game is not available in English, we’re only left to wonder how this former enemy ended up on the Nadesico and, perhaps less importantly, dyed his hair blond and red.

Saburouta

Hari is basically just a little kid who has essentially taken on Ruri’s former role as the resident child prodigy. Again, it’s unclear how he came to be in that position or why we should care. Even though I mostly watched this movie or context on these characters and how they ended up where they were, I didn’t really feel like I knew much more than I’d gleaned from simply playing SRW games in which these characters appeared.

Hari

Disappointingly, neither of these experiences ended up being as enjoyable as I hoped, which made me a little leery of tackling other anime from the 90s (or 80s), but as I’ll write about soon, you’ll see I wasn’t quite done with that era.

Martian Successor Nadesico in Super Robot Wars

I used the following units in Super Robot Wars J and Super Robot Wars A Portable

Nadesico - Yurika

Aestivalis Akito - Akito

Aestivalis Ryoko - Ryoko

Aestivalis Izumi - Izumi

Aestivalis Hikaru - Hikaru

I used the following units in Super Robot Wars J only

Aestivalis Gai - Gai

I used the following units in Super Robot Wars V

Nadesico - Ruri

Black Sarena - Akito

Aestivalis Custom - Ryoko

Super Robot Wars J was my first introduction to Nadesico and a big part of why I was interested in the series is because of how versatile they became as part of my squad. I was particularly a big fan of how they could recharge their energy by staying in range of the Nadesico. None of the units packed a big punch on their own, but their combo attacks were quite powerful and usable repeatedly due to how easily I could restore their energy. They didn’t serve me quite as well in A Portable because that game is really hard. In SRW V, Akito’s new mech is a powerhouse, but none of the rest of the squad is around anymore. It’s harder for Ryoko to compete on her own, even if she can call out her comrades to assist with her single mech combo attack.

Super Robot Wars Anime Marathon #4: Cross Ange: Rondo of Angel and Dragon

By the time I started Cross Ange, I had already gotten impatient and started Super Robot Wars X, but in this case, I felt it was somewhat justified. After all, I’d already played through Super Robot Wars V in its entirety, a game in which Cross Ange made its debut. Because these games frequently cover the plots of these anime series so exhaustively, I’d already been spoiled on a lot of the crucial details of the plot.

This begs the question: Why would I be compelled to watch Cross Ange? Well, in all honesty, it’s really only because I enjoyed using Ange’s mech, Villkiss, in SRW V and planned on using it again in SRW X. I felt like it was a great design and the attacks were really fluidly animated. That opinion hasn’t changed, exactly, but watching the anime certainly didn’t improve my opinion on these characters or the world they inhabit. 

It’s worth noting that in most of the anime I’ve watched so far, I’ve had things to say about the gratuitous sexualization of female characters. A lot of mecha anime are targeted at teen boys, so it makes sense, even if it bothers me just about every time it happens. Cross Ange is particularly egregious here, though, and often in more shocking ways. Our protagonist, the titular Ange, is subjected to a pretty horrific implied rape/cavity search in the very first episode, for no real reason other than to drive home the point that her circumstances have gotten dramatically worse.

Things aren’t looking so dire for Princess Angelise when we open our story. She’s a celebrated member of the royal family in the Land of Mana, a world in which to be human is to be capable of using magic. Angelise is attended at all times by her fiercely loyal maid, Momoka, who frequently performs magic on Angelise’s behalf so she needn’t exert effort that would be beneath her. Angelise also spends a great deal of time competing in a bizarre Quidditch-like sport in which players ride flying vehicles around scoring goals on each other. She’s quite good at it, which will become important later. 

Not Quidditch

It soon becomes clear that not everyone can use magic. A scene early in the first episode shows a newly-born baby crawling through a magical pyramid barrier, much to the shock and disgust of gathered townspeople. It turns out this is proof that this child is unable to use magic and as such must be exiled from the Land of Mana. Those unable to use magic are dubbed Norma. Years of ingrained cultural tradition portray the Norma as despicably violent subhuman monsters who cannot be allowed to mingle with civilized society. Exiling these children is seen as a kindness necessary to maintain peace. Angelise, as much a product of this society as her subjects, fervently agrees. She witnesses the scene with the infant child and zealously declares that all Norma should be eradicated. From the very beginning, Angelise is a tough character to like.

Predictably, it soon becomes clear that Angelise herself is a Norma. Her brother, Julio, is quick to reveal this to the gathered citizenry. Evidently, this has been an open secret in the family for some time, but it is news even to Angelise herself. Momoka’s penchant for using magic to assist her is revealed to be a farce. Angelise had been unable to use magic all along, and we’re supposed to believe that she had never once even attempted to do so, despite it being a very normal thing for their people to do. We’re also expected to believe that she had never felt any angst or concern at the fact that she had never used magic or considered what the implications were. The alternative is that her privilege is so blindingly entrenched that she never felt the need to think about these things. Again, she is a tough character to like.

Julio

Regardless, Angelise isn’t ready to believe that Julio’s words are true, despite it becoming apparent that she cannot perform magic on command. To further drive the point home, the guards attempt to restrain her in one of those pyramid prisons, and she breaks free from that as well. To add another layer of tragedy to this story, Angelise’s mother, the Queen, throws herself in front of her daughter to protect her when she acts foolishly in front of the guards, only to be shot and killed herself. This doesn’t win Angelise any new fans. 

Angelise isn’t set to be executed, though. Her fate is the same as all Norma. She will be excommunicated from the Land of Mana and will live on the island of Arzenal, where all Norma live—and die. This is where the horrific and unnecessary cavity search scene occurs that I described earlier. It wasn’t a pleasant way to end the first episode.

What follows are a series of episodes setting up a significant chunk of the anime’s setting. Angelise—who decides to go by Ange from now on, to distance herself from her former family—soon discovers that she must now live a life of forced servitude. Her other option is to starve since the only way she can get food is to buy it. To make money, she has to hunt dragons. That’s right, the purpose of Arzenal is to fight off enormous dragons that come pouring out of the sky from arcane portals. Fortunately, the Norma of Arzenal are well-equipped to fight these dragons, as they’re outfitted with an array of combat mechs that seamlessly transform from what I could only describe as an air bike to a more traditional, sleek, humanoid figure.

Dargons.

For reasons that are initially unclear, all Norma are female. As a result, most Norma who live in Arzenal grow up only interacting with other women. It makes sense that in a setting like this, romantic relationships would still develop, and I personally think it would be weird if the anime didn’t explore that. As one might expect, though, these relationships are often framed in as lascivious a way as possible. There are bath scenes aplenty and a surprising number of sex scenes too. After the first episode featured a sexual assault, the very next episode features another assault from Zola, a superior officer in the Norma Paramail Squadron. It’s implied that this character has assaulted other members of the squad as well, and has created a weird Stockholm Syndrome dynamic in which her former conquests have become dependent upon her. This is just a gross plot point that doesn’t disappear when this character is violently slaughtered in a mishap in the following episode.

Zola, vile predator.

Speaking of violence, this anime has that in spades too. The early episodes seem to want the viewer to feel bad in as many ways as possible. Ange is the victim of two separate sexual assaults in the first two episodes, but on top of that, she inadvertently gets her mother killed. After that, she tries to escape Arzenal in one of the ParaMails when she’s still learning how to use it. As a result, one of the other rookies, entranced by Ange’s stories about the Land of Mana, gets off course as well. She is framed as a cute little girl somehow still holding onto her naivete even in the brutal conditions of Arzenal. She is dramatically torn in half by one of the dragons because the others aren’t around to protect her. Ange gets blamed for this, of course, and obviously, she doesn’t succeed in escaping. Now, Ange is hated by the people of her homeland and hated by the Norma as well. The viewers also don’t feel great about her because she spends much of the first few episodes insisting that she’s not a Norma and that she still continues to believe the Norma are subhuman garbage.

It’s hard to come back from indirectly being responsible for two squad members’ deaths, but this is a 26 episode anime, so you know things have to turn around eventually. Ange eventually distinguishes herself as an extremely skilled ParaMail rider, thanks to her previous experience in Not Quidditch. In fact, she gets so good that she ends up hogging all the dragon kills, making far more money than her fellow riders. It’s a good thing she makes so much money because one rule of the land in Arzenal is that if you’re responsible for another squad member’s death, you have to pay for their gravestone. 

During the ceremony for Zola and the other girl’s deaths, a fellow squad member laments Zola, claiming “her only flaw was her tendency to womanize.” Meanwhile, I’m thinking, “she wasn’t a womanizer, she was a rapist! There’s a difference!” 

About six episodes into the anime, we meet one of the only important male characters in the anime, who still only pops in now and then. Fellow squad member, Hilda, thought it would be funny to stuff a bunch of underwear into Ange’s mech’s exhaust… port… or whatever, which results in an unexpected crash landing during a routine expedition. She ends up marooned on an island, where she meets Tusk.

Hilda the Grump

Now, Tusk is framed as a nice guy who happens to be a great mechanic, but much of the “humor” surrounding his characterization is due to his unwanted sexual advances, even if these advances are frequently portrayed as accidental. I’m of the opinion that he knows what he’s doing at every step of the way but feigns innocence to get away with it. For example, the day Ange awakens on the island, she’s been stripped of all her clothes, and Tusk, a stranger, is sleeping in the same bed with her. There’s no way to explain this away as anything approaching appropriate. Throughout the anime, there are pratfalls in which Tusk somehow ends up with his face buried completely in Ange’s crotch. This happens over and over. And over. Here’s a choice quote from their first meeting when Ange expresses her feelings that Tusk is some kind of pervert. 

“Do I really look like the kind of guy who’d take advantage of a girl? To feel up her ample, well-shaped breasts while she’s unconscious? To enjoy her unresisting flesh every which way? To explore the most intimate secrets of the female body? Do I really look like that kind of guy?!”

Tusk with big fuck boy energy.

Yes. You do.

I could rant all day about how annoying and gross the sexual content of the anime is, about how unnecessarily violent and gory the anime is for no real gain, but it’s worth talking about the things I do like. On the surface, the premise of the anime is interesting. I like the broad strokes of Norma being exiled from human society and their mandated struggle against the mysterious invading dragons. I like the idea of Ange coming into Arzenal as a teenager when the other Norma have been in Arzenal since birth. It does create an interesting dynamic between the characters. Unfortunately, none of the characters ever end up being very likable. Ange is arrogant, annoying, and selfish for a good chunk of the anime, only to evolve into a generic protagonist that still somehow manages to be a damsel in distress on many occasions. 

There is less emphasis on the other members of the squad, but a few of them do have moments of character development. Salia is appointed leader of the ParaMail squadron after Zola’s timely demise, but her character arc mostly amounts to her feeling inadequate for not being the Chosen Hero she always expected to be. She feels Ange, an outsider, is the one getting all the glory, and she can’t reconcile that with how she feels about herself.

Salia

Hilda is the one most affected by Zola’s death and feels she should take it upon herself to follow in her despicable footsteps. As a result, she spends a significant chunk of the series being a huge bully. Her only redeeming traits come after she dares to hope for more than what can be found in Arzenal, only to have those hopes dashed.

Jill

Rounding out the squad are Vivian, Rosalie, Ersha, Chris, and Jill, all of whom mostly fade into the background. Vivian frequently serves as a comic relief character who springs nonsensical “pop quiz” questions on others. Rosalie and Chris essentially serve as members of a polyamorous relationship with Hilda, but only have important character moments very late in the anime. Ersha is a mother figure that similarly only becomes more important later on. Jill is the de facto leader of Arzenal, but her importance beyond this fact isn’t clear initially.

Most of the cast, including Rosalie, Chris, Ersha, and Vivian from the left.

Cross Ange becomes much more than the story of Arzenal and the defense against dragons in the anime’s second half, but I also feel this is the point where the story really falls apart. An omnipotent villain is introduced and despite a principal plot point of the anime being dragons, the story becomes significantly less grounded and more sci-fi. Although there were a lot of things along the way that repelled me before this point, this was the part of the anime where I no longer really resonated with the story, and that didn’t change at any point on the way to the finish line.

What’s framed as an interesting twist is really just nonsensical at the end of the day. The extreme power of the villain is also disconcerting because it’s not clear at any point why this villain doesn’t utterly destroy everything in his way. I’ve never liked villains like this. Just as heroes with no weaknesses aren’t interesting, neither are villains without weaknesses. As a result, any effort to defeat or destroy this villain ends up being a series of convoluted contrivances. Cross Ange is no different in this regard.

Ultimately, Cross Ange is a bizarre and often disturbing anime that frequently made me uncomfortable. There’s a skeleton of an interesting premise in there but I couldn’t recommend that anyone slog through it just to experience it. Play the Super Robot Wars games in which they feature and you’ll have a much better experience than actually watching the anime.

Cross Ange in Super Robot Wars V and Super Robot Wars X

I used the following units in Super Robot Wars V.

Villkiss - Ange

I used the following units in Super Robot Wars X.

Villkiss - Ange

Enryugo - Salamindinay

Both of these games feature a whole lot more of the ParaMails from this anime and although I experimented with some of them, I found that I didn’t feel it necessary to slot in any more of those units. I had briefly considered using more from Cross Ange in Super Robot Wars X, but after actually watching the anime, I quickly changed my mind. Having said that, Villkiss was a powerhouse in SRW V and one of my best units, but it didn’t quite rise to the top in SRW V, even though it remained a solidly reliable choice. Salamindinay is a character I didn’t even get around to since she mostly features in the anime’s second half, but her red ParaMail was often useful in SRW X due to its extremely long range. I don’t have too much more to say about them than that, but I can say that the SRW adaptation of the Cross Ange story is significantly less disturbing than the anime’s variant. Again, I can absolutely recommend skipping this anime.