Quick Impressions – Aquarion Evol – 22 + 23

Episode 22 + 23-

…What in the world is going on in this series? Aquarion has never really been the epitome of storytelling, but the story is really going crazy with its plot twists and unexpected plot developments. I mean, Amata and Kagura being the reincarnations of an ancient dog? Zessica being taken over by Mikage, the ominous reappearance of the Golden Aquarion, and Schrade going nuts over music in the dimension gate? The story literally feels out of control, but perhaps it’s because it’s out of control that makes these episodes feel like an intense buildup story segment. The stakes are being raised to gargantuan proportions, where the balance between Altair and Vega is only part of the tremendous events that are taking place.

Well, at this point, I’m having serious doubts as to whether the series will be able to cover everything (there’s still the story with Andy and Mix”y”), the love triangle amongst the main cast, the fate of the world, and the issues with Amata’s mother. All in all, things are just getting crazy, and I guess we should just revel in this craziness and have fun with it. Geez, somehow this makes me think of Code Geass R2…

Screenshots are later in the post.

Quick Impressions – Aquarion Evol – 20 + 21

Episode 20 + 21 –

Aquarion seems to be getting rather serious in recent developments, with the revelations about Amata particularly significant (which admittingly wasn’t much of a surprise). There’s Amata’s mother issue, where her disappearance left behind a traumatized child that has yet to get over her. This issue eventually transitioned into the revelation that Amata and Kagura are the exact same being(?), where the link between the two is obviously much stronger than initially implied. If you think about it, Kagura and Amata had the exact same character designs (only with some stylistic differences), so this revelation wasn’t exactly a huge surprise.

What is required here now is clarification and refinement of the story. There are numerous details and ideas floating around in this series, ranging from the Amata-Kagura dynamic, to Mikono’s search for the legendary Aquarion, Mix’s gender swap, and the curse placed on Zessica. Let’s not forget the strange future foretold by Mikono’s brother, where he sees Mikono seemingly marry Kagura. There’s also the strange dream that Amata had where it looked like he was assaulting Mikono. Things are undoubtedly getting wild, with no answers in sight.

With the end of this series fast approaching, what I’m starting to fear is that this series has bit off far more than it can chew, with more and more added complexity to the plot making it more difficult to wrap up in a swift manner. There’s still time, of course, but hopefully it’s enough to wrap up all the remaining questions.

Screenshots are later in the post.

Quick Impressions – Aquarion Evol – 19

Episode 19 –

Hrm, well it looks like Aquarion is providing some actual reasons for the supposed lack of women on Altair, with something that seems to be akin to a disease that ravages all females that pop up on Altair. The “pain” that Zessica and Yunoha have in their throats are obviously signs of such, where the implication is that they’ll eventually get deeper voices and “turn into males”. It’s a really surreal conflict, but it sure would explain Mix’s apparent gender swap from female to male. As to how such a transformation happens? I’m guessing it’s something better left off to the imagination 😉

Surprisingly enough, it does seem that Zessica will be playing a more important role in the story than previously anticipated. Up until this point, her presence has pretty much been a plot device used to further the relationship between Amata and Mikono. Her rather prominent role in more recent episodes seem to be pointing towards otherwise, though with Mikono out of the picture for now, I guess I can’t say this with the utmost confidence. We’ll have to see where the plot goes from here, but with the final few episodes of this show fast approaching, it seems we’re finally going to see some patching up of plot holes.

Screenshots are later in the post.

Quick Impressions – Aquarion Evol – 18

Episode 18 –

Aquarion has really been a rather strange series to follow. It’s a series that loves to get absurdly silly and goofy, yet transitions to serious bits of plot that are overstuffed with heavy amounts of drama. It’s a combination that has worked well earlier, but now I can’t say I’m as thrilled with the combination. Perhaps it’s due to the sudden heavy emphasis on Zessica and her mixed feelings over Amata, which is a bit disconcerting considering how the main focus is supposed to be on Amata, Kagura, and Mikono.

To be fair, getting in some screentime for Zessica is nice in the sense that it allows us to get a better understanding of her character. What makes the focus on her a bit strange is how she is still undoubtedly a side character, and holds very little importance in the grand scheme of things as of now. While screentime is used up focusing in on her, the tensions in the Mikono x Amata x Kagura relationship continue to be sidelined. This could be disastrous in the future, where the show might have to rush character development towards the end of the series.

And personally speaking, I wasn’t really thrilled with the way in which Zessica was portrayed this week. Her actions made her seem extremely rash, ignorant, and borderline childish. Her knee-jerk reactions to her confused feelings led up to her foolishly deciding to ask for to be kidnapped, only for to get angry and feel responsible after Mix got taken away instead. Her characterization this week was terrible.

While I personally wasn’t a fan of this week’s showing, there is one interesting observation to make here; that is, we actually know very little about Zessica as a character. We don’t know anything about her past, only that she’s a girl with a lot of spunk and self-confidence. And yet, it seems that her self-confidence is slowly eroding away, and it’s scaring her. Perhaps there’s a reason rooted in her past for her fear of “losing confidence”, though this is all just pure speculation on my part.

Screenshots are later in the post.

Quick Impressions – Aquarion Evol – 17

Episode 17 –

Lol, well once again, Aquarion decided to go all out with being super weird. This time around, this episode had a strange combination of bikinis, bananas, onsen hot springs digging, and random onsen-milk-banana Aquarion Unions. Seriously speaking, the episode turned super strange over the span of about 30 seconds, and was pretty darn hilarious.

Anyways, I mentioned last week that Zessica was getting sidelined due to the focus on the Amata x Mikono relationship. Well, it seems that I may have made that statement a bit too soon, where the creators of this show are now going through the trouble of focusing in a bit on her, and her own conflicted feelings over Amata. She realizes her love for him is never going to be requited, yet she seems to get over it and refuses to give up. It’s a cliche plot direction eerily familiar for those that are familiar with love triangles in Anime, and it looks like Zessica will have even more screentime in next week’s episode. On an unrelated note, I seem to have this peculiar feeling that something horrific will happen to Zessica in the near future; I guess it’s just that her confession last week felt like a death flag of sorts. Hopefully I’m just imagining things.

Aside from touching on Zessica’s feelings, this entire episode felt like filler, mainly because of the plethora of fanservice and some really weird fight scenes. The fight scenes were absolutely hilarious, mind you, but it still felt a bit random and pointless. There are some definite hints towards an overarching goal of sorts though, particularly the search for the “Golden Wings”. As to how our cast (Amata in particular) relate to the wings still remains to be seen.

In the end, there really didn’t seem to be any sort of meaningful purpose for this episode. Perhaps it was meant to be a simple breather from the super-dramatic episodes in recent memory; it certainly accomplished that with flying colors. On a side note, I would like to mention how there are strong sexual connotations to this episode, along with some rather sexists lines of dialogue that are somewhat derogatory of women. However, I’d prefer to not to have a discussion over such a complex matter, because then we’d be wandering outside of anime territory and would be discussing the structural problems and complexities to Japanese society, the still male-dominated culture, etc.

Screenshots are later in the post.

P.S. Zessica’s new dress looks plain awkward…

Quick Impressions – Aquarion Evol – 15

Episode 15 –

I’m not quite sure what to think of this episode, but it did do one thing I had never quite expected; brought in a tad bit of character development for Kagura. The development was rather weak, sure, but this was probably the first time we saw something from him other than wildly rampaging like a mad beast. Instead we saw that he does seem to have a rational, more sensitive side, it’s just masked away by the wild personality that he tends to show.

One curious little thing about Kagura is that he has the power of “reversal”, which allows him to reverse/bounce away any sort of potential danger. I guess it makes sense, then, that Kagura’s speech patterns are also backwards ( kill = love, stop = start, etc). What I’m wondering about this “reverse” trend in Kagura is whether the writers to Aquarion meant for this to be a sign that he is a “backwards” character. We don’t know if he’s good or bad, and heck, we don’t even know as to what his significance in the story is. He is a huge enigma of a presence, one that is further complicated by the feather dude in the alternate dimension.

The episode itself was pretty much just all setup, where now we have a ton of love triangles amongst the cast. Yea, I guess I should’ve expected such after seeing the hints of a Mikono x Kagura relationship, but this episode fully exposed the somewhat complex web of romantic relationships that are brewing. Aquarion has been all about these relationships in the first place; there’s not much you can do about something that was this blatantly inevitable.

Screenshots are later in the post.

Quick Impressions – Aquarion Evol – 14

Episode 14 –

…What in the world did I just watch? O_o;;

This episode was fairly normal until about halfway in, then it went all Nisiosin-style with some wordplay, a bunch of rather awkward (and strange) situations, and finally, a weird “rebirthing” after burying people alive in a graveyard. Seriously, I have no idea what the heck the creators were aiming for with this episode.

But yea, this episode was quite strange in what it tried to do; it attempted to give the main cast an intimate understanding of death, mainly by burying every single student underground as if they were corpses. Then there was the added commentary on the “sound of worms”, decaying and disappearing, and a bunch of talking about all the main character’s insecurities. The conclusion, in it’s simplest form, was simply trying to say that “you are not alone”, and that everybody is part of a greater whole that moves forward with time. Mikono’s presence emphasized such, with her “power to connect” and all.

The most surreal part of all this was how everybody appeared in eggs on the ground, and Mikono wished them “Happy Birthday” once the cast hatched out of their eggs. What the…? I seriously think I missed soemthing here.

In my personal opinion, this episode felt kind of like a filler episode, where nothing really noteworthy happens aside from Kagura magically transporting himself into the ground in a different dimension. I also have a hard time buying that Yunoha was depressed enough to wish herself to die; her relationship with Jin did not get enough development for her to not want to live without him.

The only possible reasoning behind this episode I could think of is that it was trying to show us, the audience, where everybody stands as a character. Mikono worries about others, Amata has issues with what happened to his mother, Zessica is trying to rationalize her anti-Mikono feelings, and Yunoha is just being overly dramatic and depressed. In that sense I guess this episode did well, but consequently there was a noticeable lack of action.

Screenshots are later in the post.

Quick Impressions – Aquarion Evol – 13

Episode 13 –

I recall that a fellow blogger on twitter mentioned a few weeks ago that Jin probably triggered a death flag. I had never suspected her to be correct. o_o;

This episode had a mix of emotions involved. It had a tad bit of romance, mixed in with a strange yet intense confrontation between the good and bad guys, and of course, your typical awkward-naked-bodies-floating-in-the-air while yelling attack names. In other words, yea, this was your typical episode of Aquarion in many ways.

Yet this is also the first time that I’ve seen the series get this serious, to the point of actually including a death of a character. Sure, there have been serious moments before, but they’ve often had their fair share of silly moments. This episode, on the other hand, was an episode that had buildup for weeks, and went all out with some great action.

This episode does have me wondering exactly what the nature behind all these relationships are though. Mikono is obviously meant to be similar to Sylvie (if not her reincarnation), where as Kagura is supposed to be the incarnation of Sylvie’s lover. But then, why the heck is Kagura out to destroy and kill her? It was bizarre seeing Kagura holding up Mikono like a trophy, proclaiming that he would crush her and let her die. And then there’s the issue with the Solar wings, something that Amata seems to have but should have been associated with Kagura if he was really Sylvie’s reincarnated lover).

Meh, All I can say is that this episode had lots of good action scenes, coupled with the usual craziness of Aquarion with some major plot twists.

Screenshots are later in the post.

Quick Impressions – Aquarion Evol – 12

Episode 12 –

Hoho, it seems that Amata finally worked up the guts to make a move on Mikono. Shame that Kagura had to come and crash the party. On top of the bold (but cheesy) moves by Amata, it seems that Jin is plotting to kidnap Yunoha, no doubt because he has developed a strong crush on the frog-doll-holding girl.

With that being said, aside from the romance there were actually some rather peculiar little hints and details that prompt some questions. The most noticeable detail would be an extension from something we saw last week; where Zessica saw “Mikono” and “Kagura” embracing each other in a mirror. Why she was able to see such a vision, and associate it with Mikono, prompts me to wonder if her existence is special in some way as well. There have always been strong hints at Mikono having a strong connection to Amata and Kagura, but now it seems that Zessica is somehow involved.

On top of that, there’s the revelations about Amata’s mother being Sylvie, and as we all know, Sylvie was kidnapped and taken through the interdimensional gates. The significance to Sylvie’s presence isn’t quite clear as of now, but I do suspect she will play a bigger role in all of this in the future. Yunoha’s hesitance in doubting Jin is also a curious little detail that will produce a conflict in the near future.

In the end, this week’s episode was both goofy with some romance, yet had some hints about character relationships, as well as potential future conflicts. There was one other thing noticeable about this episode; there were no Aquarion transformations, which felt slightly surreal 😛

Screenshots are later in the post.

Quick Impressions – Aquarion EVOL – 11

Episode 11 –

It seems that this week’s episode of Evol finally linked the ongoing events back to the first season, though it’s not exactly clear as to what exactly the link means. One thing that seems certain is that fun time is over, and that things are going to get quite serious in the next couple of weeks. There has been a ton of foreshadowing and buildup with regards to the strange relationship between Amata, Kagura, and Mikono, and that continues to play a major role in the ongoing events of this series. With the mysterious Mikage also plotting something in the shadows, obviously something is amiss.

The connections to the first season mainly have to deal with how Kagura and Mikono seem to be the reincarnations of the main couple from the 1st season of Aquarion, and yet, it seems that Amata is the bearer of the Solar Wings that only the main hero from the 1st season had. The situation is quite difficult to fully comprehend, and gets even more complicated when you consider how Mikage seems to be interfering in all of this somehow. Mikage is seeking the original Aquarion from the 1st season, yet as of now I don’t quite see why. And let’s not forget that Amata is implied to be Eve’s relative (son or some other relation). There’s a bunch of huge questions that the series has brought up with this episode, and I get the feeling the implications from these turn of events can be devastating (especially for Amata).

With that being said, with this series being a 2-cour series, there’s still plenty of time for the series to answer these questions. I do wonder if the rest of Aquarion will be serious and drama heavy like this week’s episode, or if it will have interludes of silly fun similar to what we’ve seen in the first half of this show.

Screenshots are later in the post.