(Anime Review) Majestic Prince

I walked into this series with couple different biases.  As much as I have expanded out my taste for what I like to watch for a while now, but I consider mech series my comfort zone or my bread and butter.  Hence the name “Mechanical Anime Reviews”.  I can easily watch a bad mech series before I even touch something fantastic from any other genre.  My reasoning for this is that a mech series has a higher chance of being an original work instead of being based on any kind of source material, so the chance that the ending is going to be complete is high.  Still, this is something I’ve been trying my hardest to change, but it hasn’t been easy.  The other bias I have is, because I have watched a lot of mech series, my threshold for what I consider a good mech series is difficult to pass.  Nobody needs to worry about the later one though.  I liked Majestic Prince quite a lot, though I wish it could have been more fleshed out.

Story:

Majestic Prince has a classic science fiction premise for one of these kinds of shows.  An alien race with advanced technology slowly attacks the Earth sphere to invade.  Despite the Earth having superior numbers, mankind is slowly forced back.  To fight back against the invading menace, mankind builds advanced mech suits to have any sort of chance of survival.

That is the part where this anime has its original touches.  Humanity was in the middle of bioengineering people for extended space time anyway, so the switch over to get these people to be bioengineered for special mech suits was a quick one.  It seems like a lot of mech series feature special people, but these people are only special during a fight.  Still, a lot of things happen to these science experiments of human beings before they could be thrown into a cockpit.

Characters:

The characters of Majestic Prince start out with basic traits and grow as time goes on.  This makes sense story wise, because these kids have their memories completely erased before even making it to pilot school.  Still not sure if I like this fact.  Majestic Prince’s five main characters, or the failure five, follow the classic sentai team set up with the colors and everything.  The leader, Izuru, is a character that wants to become the perfect hero and draws bad hero comics.  Asagi, the second in command, always has stomach issues and takes plenty of antacids.  Kei, the onsite mission controller of the team, likes her sweet treats.  Next is the fanservice girl Tamaki, who pilots the largest mech of the series and is extremely bubbly and a hopeless romantic.  Last is Suruga, the team sniper who knows his weapons extremely well and tries to be a Casanova but fails.  These are the basic character traits, but they grow as individuals and together as time goes on.  Maybe not as fleshed out as they could be, but they are far from static characters.  Also, there are a lot of side characters that get decently fleshed out.  There are a lot of side characters to get attached to.

World Building:

This is the weakest part of Majestic Prince.  While the universe that Majestic Prince is explained, they could have expanded more on everything.  We know that the Earth is split into different trade zones and groups, but this isn’t as capitalized on as much as it could be.  There are instances of “this side is competing with that side” or “these two sides are pulling out to conserve their forces” or even “we need to get these guys to work together to win”, but these are only instances.  We don’t know representatives from either party or what makes one party different from the others.  This is something that could have made the story feel more complete

The same goes for the enemies, though this aspect was at least a little more explored.  There are various parties and clans that meet to decide their tactics or who should lead what aspect of their invasion.  There were even conflicts between each group of people that changed the name of the game against the Earthlings.  Too bad we never knew most of these people besides the basic traits they have shown the first time they met together.  Once again, this could have made Majestic Prince more cohesive and lived in.  Maybe I’ve seen to many series and expect all series to at least have a certain level of world building, so this could be my fault.  Still, it isn’t all that bad for a twenty-four-episode series.

Art and Animation:

The art is nothing special.  Especially character art.  It’s basically the Gundam Seed character designs in yet ANOTHER mech series.  I’ve forgiven this guy at because his designs have been in good shows, but his work is everywhere.  I wish the characters were more than just the same face and body types for the males.  While there was more variation for the females, but they were still either had large chests or were flat as a rail.  At least there are plenty of nice and unique locations to look at.

The battle art and animation was the shining point of the series.  It was all CG, but it was extremely good CG.  A lot of space battles were Legend of the Galactic Heroes sized, which means ridiculously large with tons of spaceships and mechs flying around.  Just beautiful.  While there were some repeated bits of animation that are used all the time, but it’s all made up for when the mechs go into battles with unique settings, choreography, and suit ability useage.  The battles are extremely hyped up and were a lot of fun to watch.

Verdict:

In the end, I would recommend this series.  I know that I was being tough on this series, but I still had a lot fun watching it.  The good characters and animation are what sell the series for me.  The story and plot are still basic, but that is in no way a bad thing.  There is a reason why the plot has been repeated multiple times with little variations that make it interesting here and there.  In the end, my only hang up is the world building.  It is in no way poor, but the universe feels incomplete for some reason.  Still, this is quite a good twenty-four-episode package and I would say that this is amongst the best mech series that I’ve seen from the past few years.   I can’t wait for the movie.