YMMV / Future Robot Daltanious

• Accidental Innuendo: One of Daltanious' attacks is called "Pulse Guided Missile". Think about that for a minute.
• Base-Breaking Character: Kento is either a likable protagonist, or hated in favour of the supporting cast.
• Broken Base: Daltanious is either considered the unofficial fourth installment of the Robot Romance Trilogy, or reviled by fans of it for it's completely different style of tone and characterization.
• Cliché Storm: Daltanious does nothing original in terms of the Super Robot genre. Pick a Super Robot trope and Daltanious plays it straight every time. You have the Hot-Blooded hero, his The Quiet One rival, the token Nice Girl that breaks up their fights, the Conveniently an Orphan tagalong cast of kids and the Crusty Caretaker forced to put up with their hijinks. The main villains are aliens, because Aliens Are Bastards. You even have character designs ripped off wholesale from Mazinger Z. Arguably, the only wholly non-cliché aspect is the Plot Twist that The Helios Empire were a huge case of Bitch in Sheep's Clothing, that Kloppen was a clone and that Dolmen had a Dark and Troubled Past at the hands of the supposed "victims" of the story.
• Complete Monster: The Commander of the Zaar Reconnaissance Fleet is Earth's first taste of the Zaar Interstellar Empire's brutality. He leads his fleet into a bloody campaign of conquest across Japan which orphans hero Kento and his friends. The Commander plans to continue razing Earth's cities and destroying any military resistance that gets in his way until the whole planet submits to the Zaar Empire. When newly awoken, Daltanious destroys one of his giant robots and the Commander mobilises his entire fleet to destroy Doctor Earl's base and personally destroy Daltanious.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Kento's older sister. Even though she's unnamed and only appears in his flashbacks, many fans adore her and wonder how the anime would be like if she survived. Fanon often depicts her as a Cool Big Sis who acts more responsible than her idiotic little brother, and a wholly dedicated Alien Princess of the Helios Empire.
• Fandom Rivalry: A small, affectionate one with the GoLion fandom (see the Trivia page for details).
• Fashion-Victim Villain:
  • Kloppen, Emperor Dolmen's Dragon, wears a large headpiece with spikes that fan beside his head and a bamboo-stick like crown. His suit is orange with yellow stripes, accompanied with thick yellow gloves and a clunky belt with a red gemstone in the center. His armour is supposed to imitate that of a lion, but it makes him look like a rejected He-Man and the Masters of the Universe villain. See here◊.
  • And he somehow manages to look even more ridiculous when he takes his armour off.
  • Great Emperor Dolmen◊, despite his blue skin and purple sclerae, has poofy, curled-up ashen blonde hair reminiscent of a French aristocrat's wig and a tacky crown.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • Daltanious is HUGE in Italy, partially because a lot of kids grew up watching it on TV in the eighties, and partially because Italy adores mecha anime as a whole. However, the series is so popular there, it dwarfs anything else made by Tadao Nagahama. To this day, you have Italians discussing Daltanious and collecting figurines of it. It is even available on Italy's Amazon Streaming Service and received it's own original comic in the magazine Corriere del Piccoli (1981).
  • The series is also well-loved in many Latin American countries. Search up "Mirai Robot Daltanious" on YouTube and you'll find that the vast majority of videos speaking about are in Spanish. In Argentina, it's amongst the top two most popular mecha anime there (the other being Albegas).
• Genius Bonus: Daltanious is studded by Creepy Crosses because the anime is based on The Three Musketeers. In the original novel the musketeers wore clothes with crosses on them.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The main character has the surname "Tate" and makes a living by conning people. Despite this, he's still hailed as a hero by many.
  • Daltanious is powered through "Sigma Energy" and one of it's attacks is the "Sigma Beam".
  • Earl introducing himself to the heroes after they discover his ship.
  Earl: My name is Earl! Now, make yourselves useful!
  • The Plot Twist that Kloppen and Dolmen, two beings of outer space, are clones. In other words, they're imposters.^note GETOUTOFMYHEADGETOUTOFMYHEADGETOUTOFMYHEAD
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Many fans joke What Could Have Been if Daltanious was sent to World Event Productions as intended, instead of GoLion.
  • Any celebrity wearing a lion head as a fashion statement is prone to comparisions with this anime, such as Kylie Jenner wearing one to the Schiaparelli Paris Show.
  • He hates stupid people.^ExplanationIn the Italian theme song, there's a lyric Odia gli stupidi, aiuta i deboli ("He hates stupid people, he protects the weak"). A common joke amongst Italian fans is whar Daltanious would do if he was tasked with protecting someone stupid and weak, since it would be a paradox.
• Moe: Male example: Kloppen as a kid is absolutely adorable.
• Rooting for the Empire: With the Awful Truth of the Helios Empire coming out, many fans were quick to turn on them for being Bitch in Sheep's Clothing and felt like Dolmen's wrath was justified. This is somewhat touched on in-universe, where Harlin decides to let the Helios Empire stay a relic of history, and establish a new kingdom where all people, clone or not, live as equals.
• So Okay, It's Average: While the other Nagahama Super Robot shows were well-loved, Daltanious didn't reach quite the same level of popularity^note YMMV on whether it counts as a Nagahama anime given how he didn't direct and it and left the crew before it even aired. Due to it's Cliché Storm and Denser and Wackier elements, it failed to resonate with fans of his previous works. It has it's own following comprised of mecha enthusiasts and people who grew up with it, but the general consensus is that it's not very good.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: As stated in the Ensemble Dark Horse section, many fans adored Kento's older sister and were disappointed that she was unceremoniously killed. In her few moments of screentime, she's seen as a smart, no-nonsense Responsible Sibling, which makes her the complete opposite of Kento. Her addition into the cast would have balanced out many of the main character's unsavory traits.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Or rather subplot in form of Catine and Judela, vain and shallow women with plans to mooch off Kento since he's the heir of the Helios Empire. It would have been interesting for the two to undergo Character Development, similarly like Earl did, and grow past their prejudice against clones even after Kento was falsely accused to be one by Kloppen instead of being the center of a slapstick romantic comedy.
  • It's never shown how Dolmen escaped to Zaal and brought down the Helios Empire, despite being born a clone (which means he would have been under constant surveillance by the Heliosian Royal Guard), and never having any contact with the outside world before.
• Ugly Cute:
  • Nova, despite being a creepy panther, is very pretty and acts rather cat-like when it's on it's own.
  • Meralion is a gigantic metallic Robeast, but retains many of her feline characteristics from being born a regular lion.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Emperor Dolmen, even if the heroes sympathized with his Dark and Troubled Past. While it's understandable why he wanted to bring the fall of Helios Empire, he also invaded several planets that had nothing to do with his oppression. Despite claiming to be the voice of the oppressed clones, he never used his power to challenge their societal mistreatment, even when the Zaal Empire was the most powerful in the world. He's more than happy to use Kloppen in the same way the Helios Empire exploited their clones, and only abandoned him because he outlived his usefulness. Dolmen comes off as someone who believes that he's entitled to do whatever he wants because he had a shitty upbringing.
• Values Dissonance: In one episode, some bandits steal Sanae's kimono and Danji is so angry he almost beats the daylights out of them. To Westerners, the reaction to this would be "why would they steal something so petty as clothes?". However, in Japan, kimonos are Serious Business, they can actually cost the same amount as cars, and are crafted by skilled designers.
• The Woobie:
  • Harlin. He was orphaned at young age, separated from his adoptive father while trying to find the truth about his past, presumed dead by his immediate family after he goes missing at sea, enslaved at Planet Marios and then hunted down so he can be killed once he escapes. By the time he gets back, his only surviving family member is his son; everyone else died in the Zaal invasion and his adoptive father passed away from heart failure years earlier.
  • Kloppen. The man was a monster, no doubt, but that doesn't take away from his story being a complete tragedy. Born as a clone of Harlin, he was groomed, on the Emperor's orders, to believe that he was the Zaal Empire's real Crown Prince and the one destined to bring it to glory. When the truth comes out - that he's a clone, the Emperor was just using him, and his own father figure was complicit in his grooming - he's spurned by his comrades, mutinied against by his own soldiers and reduced to a prisoner in front of the heroes. When they refuse to persecute him, Kloppen is touched and defects to their side...only to sacrifice himself later to save the life of the very man he tried to kill many times, Harlin. However, he does so with a proud smile on his face, his last words being that he wants to live through Harlin, and wishing glory to the Helios Empire.
    • Kloppen's whole childhood counts. The way Namil and Dolmen treat him disturbingly similar to how Real Life authoritative figures groom children, and Kloppen sounds so scared the whole time. Not only does Namil hide the fact that Kloppen is a clone, he also orders him to wear a mask to hide his true identity, so that no one will figure out that he's Harlin's doppelganger. Kloppen is forced to wear this mask for years, until Namil is certain the real Crown Prince of Helios is dead. By the time he's an adult, his brain runs on Blue-and-Orange Morality as a result of his upbringing.
  Dr. Namil, after telling Kloppen of his designated purpose: "Kloppen. You will now live with me. I shall be your father and teacher."
  Kloppen, trying to be brave: "With you, sir?"
  • Dolmen. He survived through unimaginable abuse from the minute he was born, being restricted to a prison cell and punished for every flaw of Emperor Palmillion's as he was his clone. When he resisted, he was beaten and abused, and some parts of his flashbacks even imply that as a clone, he went through Mind Rape. Once the tables were turned and he had the higher ground, he went on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge and established the Zaal Empire to get back at Helios, starting by sinking the Empire and then conquering several planets en masse.

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