Anime/Shirogane no Ishi Argevollen

Agreed. There was a lot of chaff. No real reason to not include both character development and action. And not just Jamie's character— Tokimune considering he might die was a good moment but it ended too quickly.

The poor captain of the 8th division is obviously the brass' butt monkey, and the brass has been making a poor showing of character since episode 1. "Nothing to worry about. They can't..." is not something a subordinate should EVER hear a general say during war time. When a superior says "there's noting to worry about," that's the time you need to worry most because he doesn't care about you, and has written you off as dead, or worse is both arrogant and incompetent.

As for the lack of airpower, there's a good reason off the top of my head. Planes need runways, and that's a LOT of space that has to be defended. Plus airplanes with firepower are either delicate, or big, slow, and hard to maneuver. They also tend to be quite expensive in resources. Sure, they could go with blimps, but those are slow, difficult to steer, fragile, and tend to go down in epic fashion. There's also been quite a bit of fighting underground which makes airpower worthless. Yeah, the plot did kind of jump around a bit, but it worked, and Jamie's escort was actually played very realistically. I'm glad he survived.

Those were some really really good massages. I was surprised that other than that brief hentai audio scene this episode was fanservice free considering the shore leave to a resort city premise.

New episode, I love the contrast between somewhat-inexperienced Tokimune with his Super Prototype Argevollen and battle-hardened and experienced Richtofen in his customized, yet still mass-produced,Trail Krieger. It's pretty obvious at this point that, had the latter something equal to Argevollen to work with, he'd kick the tar out of Tokimune.

Also interesting hints about what happened to Tokimune's sister. It's probably bad, for things to be covered up so thoroughly, and for demoting a field marshal down to lieutenant.

Just got around to seeing the first episode. It may not actually mean anything, but I don't remember seeing any birds or flying insects in this or the PV. Perhaps without that inspiration, the humans just never thought of flight? Even the hoppers seem to be a radical new concept, and a clear failure of the protagonist's country's spy service to not see that coming.

Second episode: Yep, I'm thinking this is a world where there are no flying creatures.

Protagonist's country has some equality, there are women in the armed forces; don't see any in the invader army. On the other hand the protagonist country's government seems isolationist. They've relied heavily on one fortification, and not updated their military tech—not to mention the brass being more invested in saving their own butts than in leading the troops. (And the antagonist's leader says they're coming as liberators...hmm.

Actually it does seem that the Ingelmian forces literally got caught with their pants down this episode — they were massing for an attack after all, and they probably weren't expecting a pre-emptive strike on them given how Arandas has been on the defensive all this time.

That said, it turns out that the "bad guys" in this case is the corporations supplying all these technology to the opposing forces. Corporate evil indeed.

Third episode—Enemy Ace with a familiar name. "Gate of No Retreat" is retreated from. The ending implies a bit of a timeskip, hopefully the protagonist will get better with his mecha.

Jamie clearly was not the lead engineer on the Argevollen project—perhaps she's an engineering intern?

Military Intelligence guy is clearly a villain, while most of the enemy forces are just antagonists; Richtofen is leaning more towards the villain side himself (the retreating soldiers are legitimate targets, but it seemed a bit too gleeful how they were rubbed out.)

So Argevollen has become a demon, eh?

The real enemies are war profiteers of course.

It was nice to see our boys take the offensive.

I actually felt bad for all those Ingelians getting slaughtered. I liked that Major too.

That was a completely avoidable shoulder charge, get it together Tokimune.

edited 30th Aug '14 1:49:54 PM by jedi1113

Episode 4: Our protagonists get some downtime, but we still learn very little about their culture. There's no posters on the walls, no music playing...Still no birds or other flying creatures.

It's clear that Jamie is very junior at her company—and apparently jobs for beginner engineers are scarcer than you would expect in wartime. Unclear if the guy from the company is sinister or just a corporate jackhole.

eta: correction, the protagonist's country seems to bury their dead, or at least have tombstones for them. Also, our hero has a Dead Big Sister whose death was not normal, and someone presumably is to blame. He thinks he can find them in or through the military, which is why he joined up.

etaa: Episode 5, we learn more about the sister's mysterious death, which opens up the possibility she's not dead and will appear as an opponent later on. Jamie may have feelings for Sugu, but she can't say they're love. Corporate guy is still a jerkass. Has the rest of the army decided to change the plan to get rid of unit eight?

edited 2nd Sep '14 1:32:29 PM by SKJAM

Prototypes sure are annoying, eh?

A hot spring trip brings man ass and previous life reveals.

Uh, I don't think you can just brush off your command responsibility that easily.

Does Seeker just live in the trees?

I found male pilot guy sneaking up on the tank like that hilarious for some reason.

I do like how they keep pointing out the problems with having a Super Prototype around. Including issues with maintianance and getting spare parts.

That's why you generally start producing them once they realize they work.

I knew that fish looked suspicious!

Episode 6: Jamie gets the spotlight, and the male lead gets to discover his inner Shinji Ikari for a few minutes. The escort wasn't really very good at the escort thing. And the military-industrial complex is conspiring at something.

So Jamie isn't a Trail Krieger engineer, which brings up the question of what her training actually is.

Junior intern, it seems. She was just the only member of the team to survive the attack on their convoy at the start of the series - presumably, there were more senior engineers in that truck as well.

Specifically, she was apparently an assistant to the guy who was supposed to be both the pilot and main engineer of the Argevollen... Except said guy got killed in the chase in the first episode.

Watched episodes 7 & 8; Seagulls appear, blow my "planet with no flying" theory to bits. Now completely baffled as to why aircraft don't exist.

For a vacation destination, that island has terrible tourist service.

Last couple of minutes of 7 start the plot moving again, but you can get most of it recapped at the beginning of 8.

Go, Red Baron!

Kind of interesting how some of the Arandas higher ups have no illusions about how the war is going: their country is going to lose in the long run.

Also probably the ugliest production test model ever. Ugh.

Eps 9 & 10: So apparently this planet is Earth after something called an "axis inversion." Don't know how that equates to no aircraft. And a cabal of arms manufacturers are behind making the wars as bad as they are. Takes me back to the old Superman comics.

Well, this episode more or less reveals what happened to Tokimune's sister, except as told by Suzushiro. And yeah, like what people in other places predicted, Samonji was trying to get himself decked on purpose, to give him an excuse to get Tokimune out of Argevollen's cockpit... Except, like Cayenne said before, the 8th Independent Mechanized IS the place where soldiers with histories of insubordination end up. Heck, Samonji himself proved this during the flashback.

Despite how sad the following scene was, back handing his superior was .

Also for what follows, the first time we see samonji so worked up.

New trail krieger next episode.

I don't really feel like there's much to talk about this show really, it's just ok.

It has no flash compared to, say, Aldnoah, but what it has is consistency, at least as far as storytelling is concerned.

Yeah, it's very consistently good, the character beats are nice and there's some occasional nice touches of "Well, they thought about this, huh." going on.

@Skyjam. Well SOMETHING has to fly otherwise what would pollinate those huge sunflowers in episode 7? Guess the artists just didn't want to deal with flying creatures all the time. Still, considering how small the countries are where the fighting is taking place, it's a small wonder air-power was never considered.