I'm sure you've heard this a million times but I've just finished a rewatch of the series and I really hate the second installment. The first half is a great coming of age story, both very self contained and heavy on the irrevent action/comedy aspect. Yeah there's no deep lore or anything but there doesn't need to be. There's a Spiral King, he rules the world with an army of Beastmen who oppress humans, so our brave trio needs to go beat him up and make a life for themselves on the surface. Great stuff.
The second half slides into the same problem alot of Gainax and Trigger works do; they try to provide an explanation for the ridiculous bullshit that the eponymous robot and main characters can do. Then they try to attach a deeper meaning to those things even though anyone older than 12 would know that they're really just meant to be entertaining. They try to push a darker Gundam-esque story about the dark side of maintaining law and order, and what hope and despair means to humans. It's almost like pretending that the cast outside Simon Kittan, Rossiu and Yoko are actually established characters and not just a rotating set of faces used for gags. Dayakka and Makken are good examples, we get a peak of their personal lives and we get to hear the former's input on pretty much everything and we even get to see the Latter's shop and life with Leyte who also is a nothing. But all these weird attempts at development amount to nothing because the same Mauve shirts that barely get any lines all sacrifice themselves just before the end of the story for cheap emotional stings. When Kamina died, you felt like something was lost. Can you say the same about Jorgun and Balinbow?
Rossiu, Kinon and his subordinates feel like they walked in off the set of a completely different show, some kind of Cyberpunk Political Thriller. I tell ya, I feel bad for Rossiu because everything he says and does actually makes sense until we're all reminded that the show is goofy af. But as I said earlier, I don't like when goofy things are being played seriously. The dialogue took a serious nosedive too. The entire Space War arc thing and leadup to the finale was the actual worst in this regard because. All the smart characters said a bunch of buzzwords and overly complicated explanations for things like teleportation. Which was then made "funny" because our Caveman main characters couldn't understand basic concepts and had to have everything dumbed down for them. And I guess the audience of young teens.
The stakes pretty much stopped existing after a while because Spiral Energy can do literally anything if you yell loud enough, but that's enough to save Nia because there needs to be some kind of tragic ending....I guess. Simon's decision to leave his friends and wander the Earth as a hobo with a Rinnegan eye and a fucking drill spear was super rushed and made little sense. I thought it was funny how he claims to not be a god after all those amazing feats of yelling really passionately like creating teleportation and calling the soul of his dead best friend for help.
Another annoying thing was the overuse of Liberia Me From Hell. Yeah it's a cool song, but it was being used once per episode by the end. Part 1 used new songs just for the Teppelin battle so I was surprised.
Also what was the deal with Yoko? I feel like her storyline stopped after Part 1 and the character we saw in Part 2 was a caricature. She had the large chest and the gun but nothing she said felt like her old self.
In conclusion, Part 1 is a 9/10, Part 2 is a 4/10. It's not horrible but I'm not exactly so impressed by huge rainbow explosions that I don't notice problems.
Really should've stopped after Part 1.
I'm sure you've heard this a million times but I've just finished a rewatch of the series and I really hate the second installment. The first half is a great coming of age story, both very self contained and heavy on the irrevent action/comedy aspect. Yeah there's no deep lore or anything but there doesn't need to be. There's a Spiral King, he rules the world with an army of Beastmen who oppress humans, so our brave trio needs to go beat him up and make a life for themselves on the surface. Great stuff.
The second half slides into the same problem alot of Gainax and Trigger works do; they try to provide an explanation for the ridiculous bullshit that the eponymous robot and main characters can do. Then they try to attach a deeper meaning to those things even though anyone older than 12 would know that they're really just meant to be entertaining. They try to push a darker Gundam-esque story about the dark side of maintaining law and order, and what hope and despair means to humans. It's almost like pretending that the cast outside Simon Kittan, Rossiu and Yoko are actually established characters and not just a rotating set of faces used for gags. Dayakka and Makken are good examples, we get a peak of their personal lives and we get to hear the former's input on pretty much everything and we even get to see the Latter's shop and life with Leyte who also is a nothing. But all these weird attempts at development amount to nothing because the same Mauve shirts that barely get any lines all sacrifice themselves just before the end of the story for cheap emotional stings. When Kamina died, you felt like something was lost. Can you say the same about Jorgun and Balinbow?
Rossiu, Kinon and his subordinates feel like they walked in off the set of a completely different show, some kind of Cyberpunk Political Thriller. I tell ya, I feel bad for Rossiu because everything he says and does actually makes sense until we're all reminded that the show is goofy af. But as I said earlier, I don't like when goofy things are being played seriously. The dialogue took a serious nosedive too. The entire Space War arc thing and leadup to the finale was the actual worst in this regard because. All the smart characters said a bunch of buzzwords and overly complicated explanations for things like teleportation. Which was then made "funny" because our Caveman main characters couldn't understand basic concepts and had to have everything dumbed down for them. And I guess the audience of young teens.
The stakes pretty much stopped existing after a while because Spiral Energy can do literally anything if you yell loud enough, but that's enough to save Nia because there needs to be some kind of tragic ending....I guess. Simon's decision to leave his friends and wander the Earth as a hobo with a Rinnegan eye and a fucking drill spear was super rushed and made little sense. I thought it was funny how he claims to not be a god after all those amazing feats of yelling really passionately like creating teleportation and calling the soul of his dead best friend for help.
Another annoying thing was the overuse of Liberia Me From Hell. Yeah it's a cool song, but it was being used once per episode by the end. Part 1 used new songs just for the Teppelin battle so I was surprised.
Also what was the deal with Yoko? I feel like her storyline stopped after Part 1 and the character we saw in Part 2 was a caricature. She had the large chest and the gun but nothing she said felt like her old self.
In conclusion, Part 1 is a 9/10, Part 2 is a 4/10. It's not horrible but I'm not exactly so impressed by huge rainbow explosions that I don't notice problems.