Anime 820 Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu Reviews Filter Check 3

Legend of the galactic heroes (LotgH short) is a space opera with a big galactic war as its main theme, where 2 nations are facing each other, The republic side, a democratic nation and the imperial side, which is more of a monarchy. It focuses around the story of 2 young strategists who grew up in opposite nations, each being apparently a prodigy and each fighting for their nation to win.

The problem I have with this anime is that; on the one hand it seemed to focus on making its war story as realistic as possible, like a documentary in a way which makes it ... less exciting to watch and on the other hand, it is not an accurate representation of a war, which is the reason I couldn’t really take it any seriously.

I dropped this anime after watching 70 episodes since it takes forever to finish (ok for some people 110 episodes might not be so much) and I couldn’t endure this show any longer. I thought a break would help… Well it made me even less interested in going into it again.

-Story and characters

So what do I mean when I say they focused on making this war story as realistic as possible? Well the show spends a lot of time introducing new side characters, who are either military officials or politicians. A warstory can basically be presented through the eyes of the soldiers on the battle field, through the eyes of the civilians going through food shortages and suffering at home or through the military officials and politicians making the decisions. LotgH surely is the latter. The show doesn’t really establish any emotional connection with any of these characters. They are mostly standing around and talking about this war or something that is connected to it, kind of like a war documentary.

Let’s start by looking at the imperial side: Every character there seems like a typical military officer, an empty shell just there to take and give orders. Even one of the two main characters, Reinhard doesn’t really stick out of the crowd too much, except that his outfit is a bit fancier. The show later tries to make him more relatable with him having inner monologues, which was a nice effort but sadly a bit too late. They have a few characters who feel like they have some sort of plan and will get interesting at some point but that also happens too slowly.

Then we have the republic side. Here we have 2 character who somewhat stick out of the majority, Yung Wenli, the idealistic young strategist and Julian the kid who follows him around. Now my personal problem with Wenli, which also affects Julian is his never ending speeches about democracy. I heard that people like this show because they think it is “gray” in its depiction. So it isn’t “good vs evil” like many other shows but rather 2 sides which both have their reasons. But Wenli is a contradiction to that. You have an obvious attempt of the author to favor the republic side in a moral manner since the show never brings up arguments for the imperial side. It only tells you how awesome democracy is. This is basically the personality of Wenli, he loves democracy and hates to kill people, which doesn’t prevent him from becoming a commander in war ordering the death of millions. But according to him the death of all the people is always the wars fault, not his, not anyone else of the commanders, but always war. The lack of self-awareness this guy has is astonishing. There are even cases where he orders to destroy millions of ships, possibly carrying billions of people with a recently captured super canon, because their commander didn’t want to retread. Firing a warning shot or only destroying a quarter of their fleet didn’t even occur to him, he just killed them all, without really thinking about all the option he got. Yeah… it’s all wars fault.
I think Wenli as a character is pretty shallow as well, yeah he gives his speeches but there isn’t really anything more to his character. He seems to lack any relatable emotion as well. He is in his constant Wenli phase, which is a combination of mild happiness, mild concern and mild sadness.

The show covers a lot of side details and backstories of characters, but for a reason unknown to me they never mentioned how and where the 2 main characters, Wenli from the republic and Reinhard from the imperials, became such good strategist. That was another reason why I couldn’t relate to them, because I didn't know them. Reinhard had a little bit of a backstory, but that only revolved around his relationship with his sister and I don’t really see his motivation he gets from that throughout the show.

Now let’s talk about why I think the war in this anime wasn’t really well done. First of all the battle are very dry. The battle scenes focused rather on showing you the back and forth of the command of each side, giving orders and then you see some ships shooting at other ships, some ships explode and one side wins. The show constantly praises the main character for being such good strategist, but the audience can’t really experience that by its own. We don’t really have an idea how the battle is set up, what the numbers and the position of the ships are and all the other factors that play key role in the outcome of a battle. It would have been nice if they presented it more like a real documentary, or a game of chess. You get to know the set up and maybe get time to think for yourself how you would win a battle and then see how the geniuses of history made it. Of course are the writers of the show no genius strategic, I don’t expect them to be, but if you have some sort of interest in actual battles you can include some tactics here and there that reminds one of history. But little is seen in this anime. You don’t SEE any kind of great tactics in this ainime, you just see some people shouting some commands, ships explode and then you are told how great of a strategist this one guy is. That’s why the characters don’t feel like geniuses to me. They never show that they are smart in solving a problem. Well there are a few cases where you see some strategy. One case, which I want to analyze a little bit more is the time when Wenli puts half his fleet in an asteroid field to trick his enemies to think its the whole fleet, while outflanking them at the same time. Now I got a few problems with this tactic, first off, why do the sensors of the imperial side only track the number of objects, not the shape or any other important information to distinguish astroids from ships? In space without any pollution that hinders visibility that information can basically be gotten by looking though a binocular. So the writers completely ignored that possibilty and didnt really give a reason why the imperial side should think the astroids are ships as well, so its already pretty stupid from the start. This is a common example of using a thing that maybe works on earth in the past (where battles are fought in fog and so), but which would completely fail in the future in space, which the show is full of. You could say that they used some sort of invisibility (which was never said in the anime) but then again, how can he track down their numbers?
And what would putting your fleet inside an asteroid fleet accomplish?
1. Your ships getting randomly hit by asteroids (unless you can control them ALL, which the show didn’t manage to explain how)
2. By asteroids getting blown up next to you and shattered they would also disable your vision or crucial points of your ship may be hit by asteroid parts.
I think this tactic gives more disadvantages than advantages. Anyways, they used the asteroids to quickly hide behind them when they are being fired at by LASER guns, it’s not like these shots travel with light speed or something. The amount of face palms that scene gave me is indescribable. So this should illustrate that in the few cases the show actually shows some tactitcs, they are quite mind-boggeling and not in a good way.

I think that the writers are way more inspired by medieval war, with horse formations and these sorts of things than recent wars, which in my opinion would give a better idea of how war would be fought in space in the future. They also use battle axes and crossbows some times and carry their orders out with good old white paper. It just shows that the script is not well thought through.

And to be honest I think the battles are not really creative as well. In real war you have lots of different tools and weapons that can give you tactical advantages. Artillery, tanks, airplanes, ships, submarines, mines, spies and a whole lot of other things. In LotgH they basically ALL use the same ships, since it is never said that either side has better ships, which all use the same kind of laser to shoot at each other. There are a few rare anomalies but the show is 110 episodes long, so those don’t justify the laziness. They could have used different ship types, which would have made the battles more interesting, some kind of blockades of supply lines or so many other things. They used a black hole once In their battles which I found to be a nice idea but that’s basically it. There was even one scene where they could have used this giant defense canon I previously mentioned, but instead retreaded from it, because they thought that the enemies can’t use it in their attacks anyways (one of the many great plans of Wenli). They maybe can’t use the canon but they surely can use the planet as a defense line themselves and as a station to operate from and to get reinforcement themselves. This, for example is one of many moments when I questioned the capability of the strategists in this show.

I also find this anime to be highly unrealistic. In the already mentioned occupation of this defense canon, apparently not a single one of the republic side dies, which they made a big deal about, well I would too if something so improbable would happen. Such a thing is so far attached from reality that I highly doubt the writers ever opened a history book and rather got their inspiration from TV shows about historic events. I mean even when Nazi Germany marched through Belgium to get to France, a couple of German soldiers died, that’s just normal in a war. Another unrealistic thing about LotgH is that it seems without the main characters either side would be pretty much screwed. War is not decided by one smart guy who is just better than everyone else, it’s a combined effort where many very smart people put their minds together. This idea that one guy is such a good strategist and everyone else is just a pleb that stands no chance is such a typical anime trope. And people kinda make this anime out to be more than just a typical anime.

Visuals-

The show looks great. It got nice detailed drawings of futuristic ships which were surely great for their time. Ofc they could have made better, but it’s a 110 episode long ova afterall. You will get used to the characterdesign, which looks nice as well. Animation isn’t that great. The show most of the time consist of limited animated standing scenes with flappingmouths.

Soundtrack-

LotgH mainly uses calm orchestra music with many long notes. I didn’t like the soundtrack that much. I found the battle music to be out of place which made the battles less exiting. They could have used more fitting classical music for the battles. It may be overused but something like “Ride of the Valkyries” from Richard Wagner would fit into these scenes.

Overall

I gave this anime such a low score since I couldn’t finish it.(and for the record: I was watching with twice the normal speed after episode 20, so I tried my best) A show which can’t keep my interests, even though I try to watch through it fails the most and deserves the lowest score possible. There are surely some nice aspects around the show, and maybe you will find some of those so interesting that you will like this anime, but for me they weren’t enough to endure this one. Overall I can just repeat myself: This show was boring for focusing so hard on the characters and their relations in this war but failing to make this war engaging or the characters relatable and interesting. That’s the main problem and when you think about it, it shreds apart everything this show is about.

Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu is a somewhat odd series, in anime terms. It began as a series of novels in the 80s, got adapted into a manga and, over the course of the late 80s to late 90s, it was turned into a 110 episode OVA. The odd part being that it was released as an OVA. For those of you who don't know, an OVA is a direct to video/ DVD release rather than one that runs on a televised network. Usually OVAs are pretty short, running somewhere from an episode to maybe a dozen. A hundred and ten episodes is virtually unheard of from ... an OVA. Why was it an OVA? I have no idea. It's possible that its content was deemed unbroadcastable at the time but I really don't know. Let's take a look at this insanely long OVA.

The basic story is that two forces, the Imperial Empire and the Free Planets Alliance, have been at war for centuries and the plot follows their conflict and struggles with a focus on the politics and stratagems. So, how competent is the execution? The short answer is it's not but allow me to extrapolate. The first issue is that the strategies used in this shouldn't work. They're really basic and rely on the other side being incompetent. The first strategy you see is “get all our ships together and hope that their fleets are far enough apart that we can take each one out individually before they can meet up.” It only works because the enemy is stupid enough to disperse their units far enough that it can work. There's another strategy that basically comes down to putting on enemy uniforms and using one of their ships. So, these guys have been at war for centuries and no one has ever tried disguising themselves before? For that matter, they don't keep track of their lost ships or have any kind of code words to identify their own soldiers? The future is dumb. That leads to another issue, since the strategies are pretty much all ones that shouldn't work you can usually tell which ones will or won't based entirely on whether it was one of the main characters who came up with it rather than based on any merit in the strategy itself. If either side had a single person who had read and understood Sun Tzu's Art of War this would be over in five episodes.

The political “intrigue” also falls pretty flat. Its big downfall is the narrator. Yes, this series has a narrator. The narrator likes to tell you what the impact of any political discussion is going to be and even spoils death scenes. Just to make sure they leave as little impact as possible. Even putting the narrator aside, a lot of the political points they make are either stupid or get contradicted by the series. To give an example of the first, they have a criticism of the Alliance's leaders that “they aren't going out and fighting” and the series acts like it's a brilliant and poignant point, but it's not. Any war effort needs people to take care of getting resources, oversee distribution and hundreds of other administrative details that you couldn't do while also fighting. Furthermore, you don't want your leaders going into the fray because of the potential for social disarray if a bunch of those leaders were to just get killed all at once. Do they really think that social chaos would be good for the war effort? The future is dumb. This series also advocates the idea that war leads to societal advancement and society stagnates under peace. That's another particularly stupid one. Society doesn't stagnate in times of peace. It advances technologically and socially. Quality of life goes up and social problems are gradually taken care of. Frankly, the societies presented in this series could use some social justice advancements given that their gender roles have regressed back to roughly the 1950s. The future is stupid. Moving onto a contradiction, towards the end when it looks like peace is coming one of the characters discusses how “if only they'd been able to just talk so many lives could have been spared” which is fair enough but not even five minutes later he says that he's going to return to being a soldier and fighting. Yes, if only your sides could just talk, you know, rather than planning for the conflict to resume. Why is the future so stupid? Even putting the major issues with the politics aside, it's just dull. The scenes drag on far longer than they need to, especially since the narrator has already told you how it's going to turn out in most cases.

The characters in this are pretty flat. Most of them are defined by a couple basic traits or an archetype. Like the guy who doesn't talk or the aggressive guy. Even with over a hundred episodes to work with, none of them ever get around to becoming fleshed out or developed in any substantial way. The female characters have it even worse since they get to be defined by their relationships to the men around them, usually their love interests. If the characters were compelling the series could have at least had some emotional investment but they aren't. They're boring.

The art in this is really badly done. The characters tend to have these flat, emotionless expressions or look dully surprised. I remember one death scene in particular where one of the characters was looking at a dying loved one and their facial expression was what you'd expect from someone who had been staring at a computer screen too long and was tired, not the expression of someone losing a loved one. The action scenes are really bad too. The space combat scenes can be summed up as “phallic ships fire at each other. Some get destroyed. Cut to one of the major characters standing in their bridge and either giving orders or reacting while looking strangely emotionless.” After a while they all start to look the same and kind of blend together. The land-based battles are even worse, somehow. You get a lot of scenes where soldiers are firing shots at people who are charging with melee weapons and somehow miss every single shot. Cobra soldiers are better marksmen than these clowns. Making one side incompetent because you want the soldiers on the other to survive doesn't make the surviving squad look bad-ass. It just makes the action sequence look lazy. Characters will also go cross-eyed for no reason and a lot of the movements just end up looking stilted and unnatural. The art is also a problem when it comes to death scenes. There are quite a few that are supposed to be dramatic but end up being done in such an over the top way that they end up being humorous instead. Like Toga Guy's. (That isn't a spoiler. He dies very shortly after showing up and it's obvious from the moment he appears that he won't survive.)

The voice acting is the best part of the series. It's not the best, but the actors do a good job of emoting and delivering their lines. If the art actually gave the characters expressions that matched the dialogue it would be far more effective, but at least the actors were putting an effort into it, even if they were the only ones involved in the OVA who were. The music is pretty mediocre. It's not bad, but it's not good either.

The ho-yay factor is a 2/10. There are some scenes where Kircheis and Reinhard look like they're more than friends. There's also a scene about the Empire's history that involves a gay Kaiser, but that's the extent of the homo-eroticism. There really isn't much.

That's Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu. It's actually pretty painful. Sure, you get the occasional scene that's over the top in a funny way, but most of the time it's just slow and boring. Any potential for dramatic tension is lost thanks to the narrator, the strategies are idiotic. The politics are asinine. The characters are flat and the art is really bad. My final rating for this is a 2/10. I would not recommend slogging through this one. Well, that's the last review of March. The request queue going into April is: Shinsekai Yori, One Outs, Doki Doki Precure, Sword Art Online and Shingeki No Kyojin. Next week I'll look at none of the above and check out Muteki Kanban Musume instead because I really need a laugh. I'll get back to the queue after that.

Often times, we end up with shows that are praised merely for attempting what they attempt, and not for what they actually execute in practice. Legend of the Galactic Heroes (from here on out shortened to LotGH) is one such show - while the show has an incredibly niche following and is a cult classic of sorts, it's beloved for supposedly being a hyper-realistic story about a clash of ideologies, military might and will, with a fanbase that'd religiously defend it - to the point where almost every time I'd update my progress with the show, chances are some fan would either PM me or ... write an angry comment on my wall, asking why I gave the show a low score.

So, my curiosity over its insanely high rating and cult following drove me to try and experience the show. On my first two viewings, I'll readily admit that I actually fast-forwarded the show - I couldn't handle its slow, bland presentation and incredibly choppy pacing. I tried to give it an above average score and convince myself that maybe something about the show wasn't to my liking, maybe I didn't understand it. In the time between my second and third (and proper) viewing, I started a Masters degree in International Relations, got my best friend - a Biology graduate - and finally decided to sit down and experience the show for what it is.

What I found blew my expectations to pieces. The show isn't bad. It's straight up one of the worst pieces of fiction I have ever seen, and fails on so many basic levels it's astounding.

The story essentially is a clash of ideologies between republican democracy and authoritarian (it's implied that it's theocratic but this never gets addressed in clear terms) monarchy. Both empires are inspired by French and Prussian ideals respectively, which due to how much Germanophile sentiment exists in Japanese society in general (most probably due to the alliance between the Axis powers in World War 2), has the narrative obviously side with the Prussian authoritarian monarchy. While I do say this, flaws in both systems are frequently addressed and discussed, but never genuinely resolved in a meaningful way. This is part of what the narrative tries to do - instead of end things on a positive note leaving the future up to interpretation, it tries to portray the cyclical nature of history, and how inevitably, conflict will start anew, and whether said conflict is good or bad is left up to the interpretation of the viewer. I can admire this kind of theme presentation if it weren't for a certain flaw in the narrative.

The show leaves absolutely nothing to the viewer's interpretation, and I mean that in the worst way imaginable. Long, drawn out narrations about the history of this and that region, location or conflict. Entire episodes that are literally mini-documentaries about the backdrop behind this or that event. Conversations where the exact same bloody point about the cyclical nature of history and how democracy despite its flaws is better than dictatorship are repeated ad nauseum. Characters often speak information to each other that they already know only so that the audience would know in ways no human beings would speak like - this is an issue in Japanese media in general (and I'd happily admit plenty of things I love also do this), but never have I seen any work of fiction abuse it to the same extent as this show.

The worst part of it is that the potential for interesting, exciting moments are there. Plenty of scenes have these dramatic instances with classical music blaring in the background with characters that have been around for a long time dying - and then promptly this gets interrupted by the narration, explaining how this or that character is feeling, making any emotional investment impossible due to the show being absolutely incapable of presenting a story in any meaningful way. Several scenes come to mind that I won't mention due to them being heavy spoilers, but I find it difficult to believe that even the most diehard fans of this show didn't find this at least somewhat grating.

Another major problem is the show's pacing. The show is not entirely sure if it wants to tell things in a linear or non-linear fashion, and this makes it unwieldy and unfocused. Often times, important events happen but aren't addressed until later, and the narration would stress how important they are despite no tangible impact having been felt in earlier parts. This particularly becomes a problem in the last stretch of the show, where the pacing slows down to a crawl and it becomes clear that both scriptwriting and production - already absolutely abysmal as they are - decline even further. Uprisings happen, for example, but the narrator stresses their historic importance to the narrative - even though we as the audience have already seen what happens in the aftermath of these events and no real impact was felt.

This leads into the show's editing and direction, which is astonishingly bad - scenes are just edited together with no real flow, so often times you'd watch the show and the show'd randomly switch focus in the middle of a conversation for no reason. At first I thought this was the show trying to raise suspense or build up tension, or even maybe leave something to the audience's interpretation. This is anything but the case - the show's pacing is just that atrocious and poorly edited together, and the direction makes any attempt to invest in the show worthless. This applies to everything from random closeups to characters' faces and endlessly repeated frames in order to pad out screen time - while this is a normal tactic in anime, generally speaking especially the further back you go, the show completely abuses it and it ends up ruining the pacing further.

OK, so the budget is unimpressive, the direction is choppy, the editing is questionable and the narration is the worst thing ever. What about the more superficial aspects? Are the battles tense or interesting, or hell even just fun on a basic level?

The answer is no. The battles are usually these still images of spaceships with terrible flash effects, with the occasional spaceship moving slowly and awkwardly the later the show goes on - this means that the focus is not really on the spaceships' action, but rather on the monologues and strategies between these commanders shooting at each other. This is where a big part of the show's renown comes from - it's often praised for this instead of putting substance aside and letting the superficial aspects came over.

OK, no problem. So how does the show portray these monologues or battles then?

By having these drawn out simplistic as hell tactics involving surrounding enemy forces using basic as hell pincer attacks, and with every tactic being extremely obvious to the audience. What makes things worse is that almost every enemy to the main character(s) that isn't another main character(s) is dull, generic mook who's making dumb decisions and refuses to listen to their soldiers about the obviously dumb decisions they're making. This flanderization never genuinely stops throughout the whole show and gets worse the longer the show goes on - the show is unbelievably formulaic after a time and loses the ability to surprise the audience very quickly because of this.

This extends to how the show sees spoilers - there's no real point to not spoiling LotGH to anyone who hasn't seen it yet, and the reason is because the show is both incredibly obvious with red flags and incapable of having its narrator shut up and not spoil the audience on events that are about to happen. You know that infamous meme title episode everyone makes fun of with the title "X dies?" Now imagine that every few episodes being done again and again and again. It's boring, tedious and grating, and since the show already fails on so many levels outside of this, makes the watcher incapable of enjoying it even on a superficial level.

This drags me to yet another issue with the show - the extremely obvious plot armor. And look, I can enjoy shows with more plot armor than a piece of Swiss cheese the size of Mount Everest, but here it gets even worse because the show already fails at being suspenseful or engaging on a basic level. With some exceptions that only happen in order to force the plot to progress in a supposedly meaningful way, LotGH's main cast have some of the most ridiculous plot armor I've ever seen. Soldiers often have their guns pointed in the general direction of this or that important character but randomly change their mind and shoot elsewhere instead of just killing them. Characters lose an entire tank worth of blood but somehow are still walking and fine the next day, and the show often has characters catch fatal diseases that should have them be impossible to move, except somehow one character later on somehow manages to knock up his wife, go to battle, act around as if he's only slightly exhausted and only has a fever. To call this absurd is to be a comedian; the show lacks self-awareness of just how ridiculous this is, and due to most audience members not being educated on basic scientific facts (which clash directly with the show, in most cases being common knowledge even in the 60s) this flaw gets overlooked.

What the show is absurdly terrible at, more than any other show, is having any kind of meaningful climax; important events sometimes happen with no meaningful payoff or self-reflection, and this makes this show in a certain sense quite literally talking the talk but refusing to walk the walk - characters sometimes say absurd things like willing to abandon the military and not minding if their comrades die, or casually joke about having an entire population below a certain age die, or characters straight up joke at their superiors in the middle of battle with their superiors promising to punish them once the battle ends. Nothing comes of any of this - there's no meaningful conflict in the show, and characters often speak what they want to speak in ways that no one in an actual military or especially in the middle of battle would, let alone any actual likable human being. I'll get back to this point later on.

The show doesn't stop there but also is thematically incoherent; it wants to talk about the cyclical nature of history and conflict, but also stubbornly refuses to avoid the pitfalls of classical realist approaches to both history and politics. This means that the show's assertions are extremely securitized and always top-bottom rather than bottom-up, meaning that if you don't view things from those lens you're immediately alienated from how the show's portrayal of politics is soulless and humanless. Very little is shown of how society changes under Reinhard's rule beyond simply assertions by the narrator - with nothing to show for it most of the time - and this is more grating when looking at the Free Planets Alliance, where politicians are shown to be nothing but incompetent buffoons who have no idea how politics or the military works and on several occasions running straight into bullets when cornered by enemy soldiers in a blind panic. This extends to the judicial system, police institutions and everything else in the show - despite this being supposedly a democratic state where individual civil liberties are protected, it takes the classical realist approach that democracy is irrelevant and all states are these hyper-rational actors that only care about security and nothing else (despite very little rationality actually existing in these characters' actions, but we'll get to that later) and as such, equates an authoritarian state where people are murdered for being disabled or impaired with impunity with a state where civil liberties are protected. While this hypocrisy is addressed, it never goes into a meaningful thematic point. The show ironically also kind of self-proves it being dated as hell by never really stepping out of this theoretical framework; in many ways it feels like an academic wannabe wrote a political drama with how he thinks people act from a theoretical approach rather than start actually see how people act, making the show both irrational and theoretically inconsistent as well as laughably dated and unrealistic.

I'm not the kind of person to care about realism in my fiction. But the show fails on such a basic level at researching basic theories and facts it's actually astounding. This brings us back to an earlier aspect involving the show; its insistence to end significant plot points with anticlimaxes. Major events often just happen involving major characters and development either is minor or negligible, and this easily adds to the increasing apathy and disillusionment involving watching this. An easy example is how on one particular occasion, a character almost gets assassinated for his abysmal policies and there are traces of an internal conflict that starts to brew, contradicting that character's policies and slowly altering his relationship with another character. This never leads to meaningful drama, and aside from one passive-aggressive stance against that character is never mentioned again - the empire continues its horrific policies and nothing changes. This kind of writing is spread all across the series, and it makes trying to care for the show's piss poor attempt at raising stakes insanely difficult when the show keeps resolving plot points left, right and center like this.

A minor point to make as well is the subtitles; it's clear after a certain point that if you as an audience member has seen more than a handful of shows that at times the subtitles used for this show are desperately trying to make its boring as hell script more engaging and interesting. Characters repeat sentences across the show so it's not hard to instantly catch when the subtitles aren't meshing with what the cast or narrator is actually saying, and a lot of the script is generic fare otherwise. This ultimately adds to an extent to the non-existent enjoyment of the show, especially during the hilariously edgy ax battles where characters would scream words that they're clearly not actually saying - but your milage may vary on whether this is a good or a bad thing.

So alright, the plot isn't competent, the battles are anticlimactic and dull as hell, themes are incoherent and nonsensical, it's anticlimactic even with its characterization, its direction and editing is abysmal and it's dull and predictable due to the narrator refusing to shut up and let any kind of atmosphere within the show exist or leave anything to the viewer's interpretation (despite the narrative attempting to do just that). OK, so now let's finally move past the terrible story and plot and onto the artwork and animation quality; is the show at least pleasant to look at?

The answer to this question is still a firm no. Even by the standards of its time, animation is extremely muted and often entire stretches of dialogue that can last for most of an episode happen with talking heads sitting on a table and repeating information and questions that the audience have more or less memorized, while the same handful of frames are repeated over and over. The show disgraces the medium of animation by literally having no point in being animated; I can't think of any moment where the show's visuals ever showed something the audience that the show wasn't already literally telling, minus a few glances or body movements but then again most anime have the basic decency to have that kind of body language, so we're scrapping the bottom of the barrel here.

There was never a moment where I particularly thought the show looked good; while the backgrounds are decently-drawn, the muted colors and often unremarkable as hell shading made it difficult to pay attention at times, and this isn't a problem limited to the show - but coupled with all the flaws addressed previously, it made the show unpleasant to look at. This brings me to an aspect the show gets praised for; the artwork.

LotGH's base character designs look strangely repetitive and often character faces are copied and pasted ad nauseum. This isn't necessarily a problem for me - most artists in the medium copy and paste the same exact face on every character, and the fact this show has characters that have extremely distinct designs should award it points in its favor. Where they compensate for this, however, is having digital coloring take over in order to make characters look more distinct to an amatuer while in reality it's the same face over and over - LotGH's digital coloring absolutely blows and it made telling characters apart (especially in the first season of the show) an absolute headache. In a certain sense, despite clear effort by whoever did the character designs for this show, the show looks even worse than your standard same face syndrome template anime because its coloring is insanely dull to look at. I don't mean that to mean that I want your standard brightly colored anime hair everywhere; what I'm referring to is the way the show is shaded is strangely mute and uninteresting, making the show extremely unpleasant to look at in general. This doesn't just apply to the characters - even when visiting all these varied locations that could be interested there's this strange feeling that whatever cities you're looking at look jarringly similar because there's no attempt at making them distinct culturally or socially - this kind of approach is consistent with the show's securitized approach to history and politics, but also helps - in addition to everything else - make the show absolutely lifeless and a pain to look at.

Alright then, the show's plot, artwork and animation are all terrible. What about the sound design and the soundtrack choice for this show? Surely at least those are competent.

You may have predicted this, but those are also poor. The actual soundtrack behind this show is actually pretty great - ranging from soothing violin riffs to classical music to piano pieces to these great orchestral tracks. It easily could've been one of my favorite soundtracks in anime if it weren't for just one thing.

The sound design is absolute garbage; tracks would randomly start playing with no semblance of coherence about the context of a scene, making watching the show bizarrely trippy and had even the few moments where the narrator or characters stopped talking and didn't ruin a scene feel strangely unfitting. This made watching the show a pain, and unless you're a complete diehard fan of classical music and the likes you're not going to appreciate this. This isn't to say that I think classical music or music that's like it can't fit a scene in anime, because plenty of shows have done that and magnificently succeeded in doing so. The show doesn't really try to make the tracks playing fit the scene; they're just slapped on with no real consideration about what's going on on screen.

This isn't where I stop, unfortunately; voice-acting is also astonishingly poor and no real performance particularly stands out, despite an abundance of excellent VAs being in the show. This makes any engagement even harder, since while discussing important events characters sound dull and soulless, and even in the middle of battle screams feel strangely muted, as if someone was lowering the volume of the characters. For some reason, a lot of the time during battle characters would start yelling something and somehow - while screaming - the soundtrack would blare louder than their screams, which I found obnoxious. This gets repeated a lot and was a major reason why I found it difficult to take the battles seriously - the characters simply don't sound like they're in a battle with anything at stake, and everything feels half-assed, like the crew were just thrown into a room, made to voice a line with just one take and promptly leave so that the staff would get the OVA of the month over with.

It's impossible to mention the sound design without mentioning yet another issue with this show; for some reason, the sound in this show'd sometimes spectacularly flare up and decline for no real reason, and on numerous occasions I straight up wondered if my headphones were going bad, a concern that I realized was shared when my friend started saying the exact same thing and wondered what was going on. My friend has a hearing impairment in an ear and she started wondering if she was going deaf - according to her, this is the first and only show that made her wonder this. If that doesn't give a decent idea about how bad the sound design is, I don't know what will - I highly recommend playing this show at a lower volume if you watch it, because playing it at a higher volume makes it absolutely grating when inevitably the volume starts dipping in quality in the show on its own.

Alright, the story, artwork/animation and sound are unimpressive at best. What about the characters? Surely a show of such renown would have likable, complex, extremely well-developed characters that aren't single-note or defined by the themes of the show rather than having any personality of their own, right?

No, they're terrible. All of them are complete garbage. Characters are extremely boring and uninteresting to watch and follow, and they're completely unlikable. Some would argue the show isn't aiming to write characters that are necessarily likable, and I'm going to magically assume this is true (the show isn't really interested in making a moral argument nor is it aiming to do so, so it goes without saying they're certainly not moral). Then the question becomes...why should I care about this? Why does any of this matter? This show never genuinely does anything to settle this.

What's worse is the characterization and how the show is unable to separate who the characters are from the exposition the show gives out. Very little of the show has characters simply doing their own thing, away from the action or politics; instead, it feels like the show is just bombarded non-stop by these characters injecting the plot everywhere to the point where it stops being human. This even applies to personal conversations, where characters would almost never talk about their personal lives but always repeat the same points about democracy and military dictatorship ad nauseam in ways that human beings simply don't do.

What's worse is how the show perceives personality traits; the cast is essentially an ensemble of 80s tropes that may or may not be married, have a lover or have kids. I really hope you're thick enough to think that marital status or how many children you have is a personality trait, because the show is dumb enough to think that. If anyone wants to kickstart a drinking game for this show I absolutely highly recommend taking a sip every time characters mention or allude to having a lover or having kids, you'll be wasted in no time. Who knows, maybe the show'd actually be remotely entertaining to watch if you did that.

But nothing, nothing compensates for the soulless robots that are the main characters of this show. They're complete, absolute Gary Stus with character flaws that never genuinely get in the way of anything they do - and who interject this and that oh so intelligent wisdom about pessimism involving the state of politics in their world. If you don't agree with them then good luck finding anything else to like about them, because the show expects you to agree with one of them and interject yourself into them, essentially turning the show into this bizarre wish fulfillment for hipsters who think being pessimistic about the state of politics is a personality trait. Not a single conversation in this whole show feels like human beings talking to each other. Some particularly jarring moments are when characters are cracking jokes and laughing together, and not a single one of them are funny. If you like sitting awkwardly about characters saying unfunny things to each other, you'll probably love this show because it's filled with characters laughing at jokes that are thoroughly unfunny.

Essentially, this was my reaction every time that happened:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUh2DuXKOkc

This brings me to the "villains" or mooks behind this show, if you can call them that. There are plenty of shows where generic villains do dumb shit, but it's fine because it happens once in a while and isn't just the whole thing. Now, outside of a handful of characters, every single villain in this show is somehow that generic stereotype. Imagine how fucking grating that is, to consistently watch one of the main characters face off some forgettable, generic mook and take him down. And that happens again. And again. And again. This is not good or exciting. This is tedious. Near the end of the show, the show decides to spice things up by making main characters have a go at each other formally in battle, but at this point any investment had is gone and some mooks are actually still around to ruin this. A moment that particularly comes to mind is in a character's flashback when he's about to get tortured and his torturer comes, and instead of just torturing him he just starts talking for around 3 minutes and the character dodging. I am not joking, that is an honest to heavens actual scene in this show and I couldn't stop laughing at how stupid it was.

So, let's wrap this up and get to my impressions. The show is disappointing in every sense of the word - and the fact it receives such critical acclaim honestly baffles me. I can rag on yet even more flaws - the show's approach to futuristic technology is completely uninspired and generic, and the show doesn't say something about politics that you don't already know from either reading politics, current affairs and the ongoing state of international relations. I'm not even particularly angry about this show despite it being one of my least favorite things in existence - the show doesn't inspire any particular deep emotions, it's just so utterly bland and dry that it kind of becomes memorable in its own right for that reason alone.

I notice the show is approximately 110 episodes with a runtime that varies from 25 to 33 minutes, aka around 47 to 52 hours long. You can do many things in that time.

You can:
- Watch something you actually like and isn't a complete waste of time.
- Watch several documentary series that'd lecture you on history and politics more than this show ever would.
- Read a few books on politics or international relations, which are more interesting than watching two empires and a cult have a go at each other in basic, simplistic as hell ways with boring mooks everywhere.
- Read countless news articles.
- Ponder the state of the world and think about differing perspectives and your own place in them, if you feel like procrastinating.

What you can also do is not waste your precious time on this show, because you're better than that and you deserve better than that.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes is an old ass OVA series spanning 110 episodes which elitists or 'cultured' anime fans deem to be the greatest anime of all time.
The hype surrounding this series is silly, the way fans rave about it especially.

Many viewers about the series complain that the first 20 episodes or so are boring. It is mainly build up yes but that's not what I had a major problem with. Even from episode 1 or 2 you get too much exposition and detail from the narrator. I'm all for having a narrator, shows such as Kaiji and Hunter x Hunter use narration ... to produce an effect that works and isn't boring. Thankfully there is less info-dumping from the narrator as LOTGH runs it's course. The director of this series doesn't know the meaning of "show don't tell" at times. This isn't supposed to be a book, yes it was based off a novel series but this is an animation where we are meant to see characters talking and performing. You could slip any necessary information in the characters' conversation, that way it would be much more interesting than a narrator reading sentences of information. You might think I'm being a bit harsh in criticising this, I disagree. The narrator doesn't just explain there is a war going on, he explains every little circumstance that is troubling the FPA and the Galactic Empire. It is just lazy and would be far more interesting to show these problems than to tell them us. Thankfully not every episode has infodumping....but when it does it gets even worse than the first two episodes. We'll come back to this later.

At the start of the series and for a while commanders that aren't the MCs (basically not Reinhard or Yang) are inept at commanding an army and make dumbass mistakes. You basically know the winner if Yang or Reinhard fights one of these cretins. Under the Goldenbaum empire you can understand it to an extent since the commanders are there because of their aristocratic blood, not prestige but the FPA has no excuse. And it's not once or twice, for about 30 episodes anyone who isn't Yang or Reinhard will make a shitty mistake and they will capitalise off it. The formula for each battle doesn't make it interesting despite the 'clever tactics'.

Something that doesn't change throughout the series are the lame side characters and minor villains. The minor villains only appear near the beginning but they are boring and are one dimensional villains. No doubt some arse-licker of the series will say that "it is supposed to resemble history because that's how people were", that's just bullshit. With that logic you can excuse almost anything in the series and say it's historical symbolism. Plot armour? Historical symbolism at it's finest! It took a while for me to like characters such as Julian whose personality seemed to be non-existent in the first 40 episodes of the series. He likes talking about politics. That's his character. Thankfully this changes later but the point is that other side characters are just as boring as this.

The plot armour of Yang is also very irritating. After the 1st act Yang never strategically loses a battle (the one where he 'loses' because Heinessein doesn't count since he won strategically). Despite Reinhard having a much bigger army when he was successful he is bullied by Yang on every occasion. Yang's tactics are good don't get me wrong but Reinhard seems to fall way too easily for someone who is supposed to be a tactical genius also, Reinhard uses the former finesse he had and rarely uses tactics other than send a shit tonne of ships to attack. Yang too OP. If this was any other anime where a character would be continuously undefeated they would be criticised but not in LOTGH (until now). Yang isn't the only one, many characters are saved in the nick of time such as Reinhard when he is about to lose to Yang.

Now let's talk about the history lesson episodes....the joy. There are multiple episodes that have no plot progression at all and just talk about a fictional history that you couldn't care less about. Again as I mentioned with the info dumping, there are many better ways to tell part of the history of this universe without a f**king history lesson. LOTGH forgets it's trying to tell a story with a plot and characters and focuses way too much on exposition. The reason why people drop this series is mainly due to this I believe.

Obvious death flags are also a thing in this series. As soon as we see a character starts showing affection for their family they will die sooner or later. A prime example of this is the fat Galactic Empire commander who attacked Iserlohn. He has a moment with his family before he goes to war and dies. Not only is this cliche as hell, it is a cheap effort to make the audience feel sympathy for a character that has no personality or nothing remotely interesting. He was so sh*t that I can't remember his name, all I can remember is that he had a massive head.

The drama at times is also pathetic and cringy. It's like in the LOTGH universe (which is set in the future) has Victorian Era standards of relationships. When Reinhard asked Hilda to marry him it was so unpleasant to watch, and her father says something like "I wonder if they did it right". I don't think that was a line that was intended to be funny, like who's father would say that about their daughter lmao? Okay this is nitpick territory I know but it doesn't change the fact most of the women in this series are only good at making sandwiches

I do not consider it a true masterpiece but I can see why people can overlook the flaws to do so. The themes are simply amazing. So it is fine to call LOTGH a masterpiece but please be aware of the flaws and tone down the hype for this series. This anime is certainly not for everyone, perhaps for a cultured few. Oh and Index is better. True masterpiece.

TL;DR Nothing more than two garystu characters spreading toxic masculinity in space.

"Trust me it gets good like 25 episodes in". Reading reviews like that was the first sign for me that I knew I would not like this show. First off, I would like to say that I'm not trying to hate on this show, in fact I strongly encourage everyone to give it a shot as they might see something I did not see in it. But when I look at a great show, there are two things that are most important to think about. A strong beginning and a strong ending. Its absolutely required you draw watchers in and lay the ground work and ... foundation early on for maximum payoff and resolution in the end. So when people say that this show is not enjoyable until about a fourth of the way through then that's a massive problem. I made it 25 episodes into this show and I hated nearly every minute of it. I seriously struggled to keep my eyes open and whenever I watched it on my phone I was always blinks away from passing out half way through. I don't know if it was the shows aesthetic or maybe the bland art coupled with that soundtrack that's like a lullaby for some old ass 17th century king going to bed, and I completely recognize that since this is an older show its going to have outdated features to it. So again, 25 episodes in and I cannot remember a single characters name, and I really tried extremely hard to pay attention. If I had a short 5 question quiz given to me after every episode on what happened, I would most definitely fail. Seriously the most fun I had watching this show was playing a memory game after every episode of trying to remember what the hell even happened. If only about 3/4th of a show is worth watching then whats even the point huh? Maybe I failed to pick up on some subtle nuances or something I don't know. Another huge problem I had was the characters. THERE'S LIKE 200 OF THEM AND THEY ALL LOOK THE SAME AND HAVE THE SAME NAMES!! The resistance members all dress the same and wear the same stupid berets and it makes it even harder to distinguish enemy from villain when the people on the same side start to fight each other. It's also incredibly confusing when 20 new characters are introduced every episode and their names pop up on screen like only once. Watching a show should not be hard work 95% of the time, there needs to be payoff and enjoyment. I think that is all I have and if you read this than thank you.

There are some major positives to this show The dialogue is flowery and based in philosophy and history. At times it is compelling. The animation is good (not stellar) for the period (especially toward the beginning). It has some of the largest-scale space battles conceived of in an anime, which is cool in a sense. The best part is probably the unique personalities and philosophies of many of the characters, and their generally strong characterizations.

However, the show is also pretty boring. It is overwrought and pompous. It does a poor job of portraying what is actually going on in such large-scale battles (perhaps until ... much later sections of the show). The dialogue is too dense and doesn't actually make too much sense once you start delving into it. The attempt to fit so much into such short periods of time often throws off the pacing. There are also some repeated animations sequences. During giant battles, it can feel like nothing is happening at all for long periods of time.

Worse, this show has explicit pro-fascist sentiment. The fascist characters are portrayed as heroic, and as reformers who are better than a Hitler analogue from the past. They are less elitist and are not supportive of eugenics. But, the author still portrays Jews (via an actual merchant planet run by a guy named Rubinsky who funds both opposing militaries, and the Hitler analogue named Goldenbaum) and religion (through a Catholic Church analogue) as the true villains. Even the portrayal of the Hitler analogue is still hedged. His decaying empire is still said to be more powerful than the democratic republic opposing it. He is portrayed as well as having at first been a reformer himself that improved upon the failing democratic republic he became the dictator of. It is said that the new fascist government could eventually go down a similar path as the old one, but that does little to slow down the positive portrayal of it, especially toward the end of the show. This prognostication is averted only somewhat by the death of the new dictator, the death of some of the major figures that would make his empire great, and the fact that a pro-republican faction is waiting in the wings. But his empire marches on. Most of the history and philosophy in the dialogue serve the end of fascism as well, and are not in line with more modern historiographies.

If not for this constrained, evil perspective, this show might otherwise be forgiveable for its flaws.

Heavily over-rated show due to nostalgia bias and the fact that most people haven't even seen this show. This is an old-old ancient show and has not grown well with age. Such a show might not get made in today's day and age.

Story: Convoluted story about two "legends" of war between Alliance and Imperials. The two "legends" are super-geniuses and the plot always proceeds as they plan because of plot armor. Everything conveniently falls into their hands at the right time on their predetermined journey to become "legends". Some scenes are so dumb, you see a man with an axe chopping down and entire ... group of soldiers armed to the teeth with guns and they just stand around.

Art: Art is pretty good for an old anime. The depiction of space fleets, inter-galactic battles etc is pretty good. I see this as the main attraction to the show for most people.

Sound: It's pretty decent, there are some classical music pieces used in key scenes. Otherwise there's nothing much to talk about.

Character: The main characters run around with heavy plot armor. Some of them have no personalities.

Enjoyment: This is for the oldies to enjoy with nostalgia bias. It wouldn't interest most people.

Overall: You can skip this and not miss much in the anime world.

This is an interesting story, but to be perfectly honest even the story is not quite what I would say is the greatest thing of all time. Like the pacing of One Piece butchers that anime the presentation does the same here. They hire a narrator to read episode long info dumps at you and call it lore. This is maybe the best example in all of existence that shows a good story and even well written characters are not everything. The directing for this show seems to be comprised of hiring people to read things at the audience for the sake of only ... transmitting information from the source material (which to be fair I assume is also quite bland, but don't know). It could be a show with much potential if it was very heavily condensed and had more engaging presentation. Oh there's a remake? Guess that might be up on the chopping block eventually if I ever get over the trauma of this version. Who knew boredom could actually result in trauma?

I have never written a review, but this anime just blew me away so much, I think it's finally time.

TL;DR It was bad.

It was in fact so bad, it almost cured my crippling anime addiction.

I, like many others, was drawn to this anime due to its high rating, and equally high praise. I was in the mood for something a bit more serious, with clever writing, smart characters, political intrigues and conspiracies. I was disappointed in every aspect.

Obligatory "no, it did not get better after 20/60/109 episodes".

At the risk of beating a dead horse, The first sign that something is off was that the battles ... in 3D space were in 2D. Now, sure, it would be hard to write and show these to the reader/audience - but if it that's the case, do not write your epic in a space setting. Heck, I would even ignore it had it not been for the fact that "Oh no, we are surrounded!" is usually a major turning point in the battles.

This show seems to practice the famous doctrine of "tell, not show". There also seems to be an issue with the show runners misunderstanding what "foreshadowing" is. Hint: It is not when the narrator blatantly tells us a fact in an ominous manner, as he tends to do at the end of every second episode.

Then, there were the Replicants. Oh I'm sorry, I mean the Alliance. Long story short, at one point in the story they get defeated multiple times, left with measly numbers, and keep engaging the Empire and winning. This seems ridiculous, as it seems they always have the exact same number of ships left as they had a few battles ago, but we know they have no means of getting new units. Full disclosure, I haven't done the math on that - frankly, because I don't think it's worth my, or anyone's time.

The senior staff of the empire are mostly a bunch of half-wits. Probably the only character I looked up to was Mittermeyer, who actually was mostly reasonable. Some of the major offenders in the idiot department include Bittenfeld and Reuenthal (in the latter part of the series). Oberstein's character also makes no sense. He is portrayed as being a cold-hearted pragmatist. But the problem here is he takes it to the extreme. No compromises whatsoever. Oberstein is implied to be very smart and, being a trickster and manipulator, familiar with human psychology. As such, he should be too smart not to know that his approach will hinder the efficiency of the army. What is more, he knows full well that it will earn him resentment from other senior officers, yet for some reason, he tends to wear this as a badge of honor.

My final gripe is with Reinhard. At first, he is an in-universe tactical mastermind. But then, for no reason, he suddenly isn't? It's not even that he stopped taking active part in battles. He just asks the people around him for advice, and then says "Indeed, please do that". No mention of his own thought process - he just parrots his advisors' orders to the fleet.

To conclude, I did not like this series. There were moments when I had hope and thought to myself "Is this finally when it gets better?" only to be disappointed.

Go watch something else.