Anime A Disappointment
When this first appeared, I tried it out to see what it was like.
Let me give out my "Gush" first. The first 3 episodes were a great set up to the series, setting up the characters, setting, and events. Ihano and his crew are all High School students in training Mecha facing the Martian Army, which at most comprises of a few Super Robots which each have a devastating special ability. The show makes good use of this in the first 3 episodes by having Ihano and Friends set up analysis of the enemy machine, logically sort out it's weakness and then execute a plan to defeat it. With Ihano swearing vengeance in the killing blow.
That was what drew me into the show, but sadly that didn't turn out anywhere. Ihano and Slaine's rivalry came out of left field, Ihano seemed to solve everything in a instant with SCIENCE and just generally the rest of the cast seemed not as important. This was prevalent in both Seasons and left this Troper without much to feel towards the show.
I praise the show for going to Real Robot with the mechs of the Earth forces, with no special units, and Ihano's being a training mech. It felt rather Armored Trooper VOTOMS, which I love. The designs were unique and even helped differentiate the Earth Forces from the Martian forces, where Earth's were blocky and mechanical, Mars had sleek almost artistic looking robots.
Sadly my praise is out, the series was a disappointment through and through, with Ihano and Slaine being the Spotlight stealers and a plot that made little sense in the end.
Anime Or how to not write a mecha anime 101
Aldnoah.Zero wants to be many things. It wants to be a Real robot anime, a super robot anime, and a war story all wrapped up in one, but it fails on all fronts. It borrows story elements from many different mecha anime and yet doesn't seem to understand what makes them work.
Well let's start with the main problem with A.Z, the characters. Inaho is boring as can be, you can tell that they wanted to borrow the silent and stoic ace pilot protagonist trope that's popular with mecha anime, but doesn't really understand what made those characters popular and interesting to viewers. He shows practically no emotions and reaction, and says everything with a deadpan expression. This makes it very hard to care for him. Literally a robot has more character than him. He's a character that is more in the same vein as Kirito from SAO, that is a plot device that viewers are meant to self insert into.
On the opposite end of the spectrum you have Slaine. While Slaine, unlike Inaho does have emotions and characterization, he is entirely directionless and makes no sense. He is whatever the story wants him to be at any given moment in time, and his biggest flaw is having laughably bad luck. He is whatever the story needs to be at any given moment in time. They wanted to make a Char clone but didn't understand what made Char such a good character.
In a similar vein you have the peace princess of the series Asseylum. She is a plot device, doesn't really have any characterization besides of generic nice girl, and she doesn't show that she cares about anyone or anything outside of her ideals. She doesn't ever grow as a character.
The main characters on their own are bad enough but what makes it worse is that everyone else around them is forced to be incompetent just so they can look good. This is a war story that doesn't allow the setting to effect the main characters, in fact nothing can really affect them outside of each other. With that being said that story really does bend over backwards just so that Inaho and Asseylum can save the day, even if it makes the entire second half of the series pointless. The story's very concept is terrible.
The visuals are nothing special, and neither is the music, this really isn't one of Sawano's best works.
I'm giving it a 3/10 It simply isn't worth it, there are much better mecha anime out there.
Anime Or how to not write a mecha anime 101
Aldnoah.Zero wants to be many things. It wants to be a Real robot anime, a super robot anime, and a war story all wrapped up in one, but it fails on all fronts. It borrows story elements from many different mecha anime and yet doesn't seem to understand what makes them work.
Well let's start with the main problem with A.Z, the characters. Inaho is boring as can be, you can tell that they wanted to borrow the silent and stoic ace pilot protagonist trope that's popular with mecha anime, but doesn't really understand what made those characters popular and interesting to viewers. He shows practically no emotions and reaction, and says everything with a deadpan expression. This makes it very hard to care for him. Literally a robot has more character than him. He's a character that is more in the same vein as Kirito from SAO, that is a plot device that viewers are meant to self insert into.
On the opposite end of the spectrum you have Slaine. While Slaine, unlike Inaho does have emotions and characterization, he is entirely directionless and makes no sense. He is whatever the story wants him to be at any given moment in time, and his biggest flaw is having laughably bad luck. He is whatever the story needs to be at any given moment in time. They wanted to make a Char clone but didn't understand what made Char such a good character.
In a similar vein you have the peace princess of the series Asseylum. She is a plot device, doesn't really have any characterization besides of generic nice girl, and she doesn't show that she cares about anyone or anything outside of her ideals. She doesn't ever grow as a character.
The main characters on their own are bad enough but what makes it worse is that everyone else around them is forced to be incompetent just so they can look good. This is a war story that doesn't allow the setting to effect the main characters, in fact nothing can really affect them outside of each other. With that being said that story really does bend over backwards just so that Inaho and Asseylum can save the day, even if it makes the entire second half of the series pointless. The story's very concept is terrible.
The visuals are nothing special, and neither is the music, this really isn't one of Sawano's best works.
I'm giving it a 3/10 It simply isn't worth it, there are much better mecha anime out there.
Anime The kind of anime I would love to be able to hate
While you can feel the enthusiasm in its production, Aldnoah.Zero suffers from the same problem which plagued and made so great Guilty Crown: misguided, erratic quality.
The biggest fault of the anime is the sheer outdated of his premise. The timetested plot of the mecha show with space princesses and Earth invasions is something you have seen a million times with Mobile Suit Gundam SEED or Code Geass, while its characters are also archetypes of the genre: Inaho, the Kelvin 0-blooded, strategist hero who defends Japanese society; Slaine, the traitorous native who turns towards the Victorian-looking invasive empire; Asseylum, the pure and naive imperial princess who desires the good for everybody and is forced to face the cruelty of the world. Their fates are set to clash, very much like the exotic Kataphraktos collide in old school space battles.
However, the way those faces are handed lacks success. Though not unlikable, the crowd has it difficult to relate to Inaho due to his unexplained, plain weird emotional hermetism, and his perhaps too impeccable battle plans. The hammy Vers villains's vicious, feudal ideals make them desirable to punch by this Spanish troper, if just a punch could make them more credibily conceived antagonists. The one who makes the difference with her pals, Asseylum, is another character who barely saves herself to be an one-dimensional stereotype - she is the cute narrative device that happens to have a mind, getting eventually redefined by her relationship with Inaho. Her marriage with Newguy-san at the finale stands clearly as a middle finger to the audience. Slaine, however, fails in attracting both love and hate from the audience: his motivations are too valid to dismiss and too flimsy to sympathize. The rest of characters have some color, but are mostly anime cliches, like the drunken veteran Marito, Inko and her classmates, and the troubled loner Rayet, whose art design, by the way, I found fascinating.
Aldnoah's soundtrack is for me its greatest point: Sawano and Kalafina bring here a solid contender for the Cieloazul Award to the Best Soundtrack of 2015. It uprises the adrenaline during the battles and manages to save narmy moments through tracks you'll immediately will look for.
In short, if you are looking for some frustrating awesomeness, Aldnoah.Zero is must see for you.
Anime Could count as a Gundam AU
Well, it does have its unique charm, but I kind of noticed from the very beginning that it wouldn't look out of place as a Gundam series from Sunrise, with Inaho being like Amuro, Slaine being a Char Clone, and Asseylum as Sayla. And that's saying a lot, already. Aside from that, the First Season was So Okay, It's Average, while the second season was more "meh" to me (nothing special). The ending was okay, but a tad bit disappointing for some obvious reasons. Overall, I think the series deserves a 6/10 for trying. If it wasn't trying to be like a Gundam series, I'd probably have given it a 7.
Anime A Letdown
This show is really just a generic Mobile Suit Gundam clone with a gimmick: one side has access to alien technology.
The few things I did like was the concept of Inaho being a Science Hero instead of a typical anime protagonist and that he doesn't use a Super Prototype (I think the mecha genre as a whole is too dependent on that trope). Unfortunately, that was marred by execution, as Inaho was quickly turned into a Mary Sue; while he was wrong a few times, he never suffers any serious defeats. I contrast him with Lelouch from Code Geass, who was a Mary Tzu himself, but had as many defeats as he did victories.
The series starts off with a bang in the first three episodes, but quickly devolves into a Kataphraktos of the week format. Then season 1 ends with perhaps the greatest Wham Episode in recent anime history, only to show most of it undone the first episode of season 2. The rest of season 2 has Slaine oddly join the side that used to hate him, and the finale completely reverses the season 1 finale and ends the conflict in a way that the season 1 finale should have rendered impossible, leading to an ending that feels rather rushed. Also, we never really find out who Dr. Troyard was and how he and Saline came to be on Vers, a flashback would have been nice.
Anime A look upon Aldnoah.Zero Season 1
Aldnoah.Zero was a really frustrating show for me to watch, it's setting and story are really interesting and compelling, but the sheer weight of mediocrity and badness surrounding it really hampered my enjoyment of the series. While I do think the plot is really good, the narrative is slower then molasses travelling down sandpaper, and the CG animation for the mecha so plastic looking I had to blink my eyes and remember I wasn't watching a toy commercial.
The problem with the narrative is the insane amount of padding it has, it feels like this first season of Aldnoah was originally a nicely paced hour and a half movie that got stretched to a punishing twelve episode run. The other big problem I have is with the animation, the CG used to animate the mecha as I stated is really bad. Obnoxious CG is already a problem I have with a lot of anime but here it's compounded by the action itself being really dull to watch. I get that this show is really going to a more realistic protrayal of how Humongous Mecha would work, but all pretense toward believable realism is thrown out when the otherwise big bulky mecha start hoping around like the Knightmares from Code Geass.
And really that might be part of the problem it's really clear that Aldnoah.Zero really, really just wants to just be Code Geass, the plot's are basically the same and they're both primarily mecha show and by the end the Mecha fighting is ripped pretty much straught from Code Geass. Aldnoah however wants to try to be much more personal with the horrors of war, but it's done almost exclusively contrary to Show, Don't Tell, which also comes at the cost of the show's pacing which as I've mentioned is dreadfully slow and just made me beg for stuff to happen already.
The last two episodes forming the finale are pretty awesome and I almost want to recommend it for that, but the ten episodes of tediousness required to reach it are a big enough turn off for me, maybe things will get better in Season 2, but Season 1 of Aldnoah.Zero is overall below average, and I have the feeling that this will probably be a Love It or Hate It show. I would only suggest Aldnoah to diehard Anime fans that really do not have another Mecha show to watch.
Rating: 2/5, Skip, unless Season 2 turns out to be awesome.
Anime Best to make your own decision
I know that title is a cop out, but I feel too torn on this to really fit it in there.
I always saw this on the Netflix anime queue, but never really watched it. One day I had nothing really to do, so I decided to give it a look, where I noticed that while the reviews were generally scathing, it had a score of 4.5/5, so I decided to give it watch as well. After binge watching it, I'm left with this question: what the heck was that?
Its not an exaggeration to say that almost every mecha trope one can think of, is in this story. The characters are pretty much just blank slates to push those cliches onto. The idealistic princess is the idealistic princess, the hard logic soldier is the hard logic soldier, and the disillusioned soldier is the disillusioned soldier. Inaho almost never expresses emotion, and while usually anime give reasons as to why their acting like that, this one doesn't, he's just completely emotionless. As for Slain, this guy's motivations and characteristics change so abruptly multiple times, its almost impossible to get invested him; not to mention what motivations he has are very thin and confusing. If I had to choose, I guess one could say Asseylum was the best character, but even she is somewhat of a blank slate; there's no character beyond her idealism, and her guilt. The series also really wants us to believe there is a great rivalry between Inaho and Slain, but in all seriousness there isn't any at all. They only really interact a couple of times, and I think only really speak once or twice. Even Asseylum and the boys don't have that much time together. The only relationship I think is really believable is the one with the secondary characters, and I often found myself think why couldn't they be the leads?
That all said, one thing I will argue is good, is the story. While it takes a moment or so to really understand the conflict (and the exposition is clumsy), when I did get a grasp, it was surprisingly engrossing, making me want to keep watching the series. Sadly, it doesn't have the characters to back it up. The Vers Empire is completely one dimensionally evil, with characters who exist for about one episode, before being destroyed by our Mary Tzu of a protagonist. I figure that the point was to really make the audience hate them seeing as how they're all just racist douchebags, and I suppose in that way it succeeds, but they have no character or personality beyond that. Aldnoah itself was an interesting idea, but all we really get of it is how amazing it is, and some of the abilities are so bizarre, that they borderline on being just plain magic.
That all said, I can't find it in me to say I hated this show. Much to the contrary, something kept me engrossed. Not sure what it is, but I kept wanting to move onto the next episode, and I even find myself wanting to rewatch some. I don't what's wrong with me, but perhaps its best for you to make your own choice about it.