Majestic Prince [Anime Review]

It has been a little while since I sat down and watched a Giant Robot anime.
It felt good. This one really felt like going back to the old school giant robot genre.

The five main mecha.

This about sums up the series.

I'm being serious. This really goes back to giant robot roots. If you think about a lot of giant robot series now days, the pilots all begin as either well experienced pilots, or genius pilots. Even the Macross anime have fallen to this direction, in Macross Frontier our pilots are all either geniuses, or experienced. 

4 out of 5 stars

Giant Robots - FIGHT!

Gundam went this way too... the later series all begin with experienced or genius pilots. Even Tenchi Muyo: War on Geminar essentially had Kenshi as an instinctual / natural genius. That gets closer to how this anime begins... but not quite.

Ah, war advertising.

This series has a start that is closer to the original Gundam or the first Macross series (Robotech). In those series the heroic pilot stumbles into their mecha and literal fumble their way through the controls. Amuro Rey is rather incompetent in the RX-78-2 when he starts out. Rick Hunter crashes into buildings the first time he sits in a VF-1. At first he is quite incompetent outside of his little stunt plane, the controls and variable forms are unknown.

Majestic Prince starts in a very similar fashion. Our group of five young pilot candidates are collectively known as the "Fail Five." They are also know as Team Rabbits, which is honestly no better, and does not alliterate.   

In space... gravity is not a burden.

 The "Fail Five" do not immediately get better when they get their specialized awesome mecha. They still suck at teamwork, do things that are 'stupid,' and in general perform less than spectacularly. It is one of the more endearing aspects of the show, that even when these losers get mecha specifically designed to improve upon their good piloting aspects, it does not come with an immediate change in their skills. They have to adapt into these machines.  

Again, gravity defying!

Do I have to repeat myself?

This anime hails back to it's giant robot fore-bearers in yet another way. If you go back to the older anime I was talking about, they kill characters off. However in the newer anime they give more time to the characters that are about to die. That I think is an improvement, you get to know the characters a lot more. They are more robust, more multifaceted. This of course leads to more unique main characters. Each main character has their own drives, quirks, and foibles. In fact all the main characters in Majestic Prince are more likable than Amuro Rei ever was... man could that kid whine, he could out whine Luke going on about power converters.

I do not really want to know what that thing is.

We have the manga drawing kid who wants to be a hero, the worry-wart who has ulcers, the gun-fanatic (popualr running character them) who is prude, the lovelorn hottie who has Weird habits, and the failed chef who can't express her love. Yes, there are some semi-common archetypes in there, but each is still special.



Now, with all the praise I've heaped upon this, there are certainly some unfortunate and obvious tropes. Some leap off the screen and slap you. Gravity defying anime boobs are not the kind of trope that bother me. The tropes that bother me are the ones that reveal an element of plot that is (obviously - due to trope) going to come up in the next few episodes. The nature of the invading space aliens was telegraphed so far out that Samuel Morse received it.

The stupid use of certain terms also drove me nuts. Lines like "Your genes are calling to me!" just do not work. Not in English at least. They sound really really silly. Even reading them subtitled just removes an element of interest from the story. Would it really hurt to take a little more time on the dialogue?

Still, all in all, a very fun series. I own the Blu-Rays but it is available to watch on Crunchy Roll. Take some time, and try a few episodes. It feels like good old school giant robot anime, with updates.  

This line brought to you by Sir Not-on-the-Screen.