Meta-Episode One, Macross Delta AKA I Finally Found a Place Where I Can Be a Girl (amended)

Good evening, as applicable.

I am Bland. By request of a friend thus credited as "My Buddy Cray" I have undertaken to review things. Primarily Anime. It should be noted I am not by any stretch of the imagination a die-hard fan of Anime. Indeed I often have... issues with it.

If you should happen to like a given review or hate a given review or perhaps wish to have something else to be reviewed for some reason, please note such in the comments. Otherwise please consider each review to have a measure of spoiler risk, though I will try to avoid anything critical.

At the end of review I will be providing a rating not in numerical value so much as a recommendation of how much alcohol it may take to appreciate fully. If you are not of legal age to drink, it's probably good enough for you anyway.

It's not like you know any better really, is it?

So, let us begin with Macross Delta.

Macross Delta is the latest in a series of Macross Anime- I am told by various Wikis- and initially revolved around a ship named Macbeth- solely because one of the sponsors of the original series was a big fan of Shakespeare.

 For those of you like me who were largely ignorant of the original series there is an expertly written abbreviated summary provided by the requester of this particular review, "My Buddy Cray". The extra-short summary is below.

"A brief synopsis. Alien ship crashes on earth. Humanity, faced with realization that they're not alone, decide to start up a world government and move on. Only some countries didn't like that and Unification wars ensued. While the guys that didn't like it lost the war, the ship was being slowly rebuilt by brilliant minds from all over. THere were no aliens inside, y'see. At least, public didn't know about any. Anyhow, on the day rebuilt Macross is to be launched, an alien fleet, just one of thousands, arrives in system and sends scout ships

These Zentradi are giants without culture, bred for war, with men and women kept separate. They have separate fleets and wage wars on one another. Anyhow, the Macross was actually a booby trap. Moment it detected these scout ships, it shoots them down. We end up in a war, ship captain tries to get the hell out before everyone dies by doing a Fold, which is a hyperdrive sort of jump. He wanted to jump behind the Moon.

He jumped to Pluto. Took the island with him too. Luckily, population was in shelters already, so they didn't die immediately, so they packed 'em in. From then on, it's a trip home while being harrased by Zentradi, who are perplexed to no end with how male and female 'miclones' are living together. Then Lynn Minmay becomes a songstress and sings. She sang the love songs and such, songs being one of staples of Macross, but plot wise, it had a huge impact as songs resonated especially well with Zentradi, who found themselves feeling these things that they usually didn't.

It came to a head eventually, when the Big Honcho of that and number of other zentradi fleets shows up and bombs the fuck outta earth. They bascially kill off all humanity aside from 100k people living on Macross. Female Zentradi fleet also shows up, and they all duke it out, but the crux of it is when Macross comes swinging in with the support of the fleet that has been chasing them, who decided they'd rather take a bit of culture and keep it, instead of destroying it. So they have Lynn sing and play it all across military frequencies. Which is kind of brilliant, as all enemy zentradi are now scared shitless of this new thing they're seeing and hearing. Somehow they pull out a win and over next 40 years, Earth is somewhat rebuilt with new allies. However a new plan is put in motion, to spread humanity to the stars so that if Earth does die, our culture doesn't.

That's where you have sequels. Where these fleets roam the galaxy looking for suitable planets, encountering friendly and unfriendly aliens. Protoculture is the original creator of all of races, so that explains the visual similarity and even though they're gone, a lot of others are in the stars." - "My Buddy Cray"

So, for those who responded to the sight of that as TLDR but are otherwise strategy game nerds the original Super Dimensional Fortress Macbeth describes what a 4X culture win would look like. War resolved ultimately via love songs.

Macross Delta continues this noble legacy of victory through music, only with a twist.

AD 2067, on a planet somewhere in space, wind is made. The tactical gaseous squad counters... roid-rage consuming the galaxy. the legacy of first aliens. Gaseous knights of the windy kingdom. Musical Girl Squad. Credits.

If that made any sense to you whatsover, you are probably already fan and/or asian- which is fine, but for those of us who are neither you can trust there is a measure of bewilderment.

Having seen the first episode though, I can roughly summarize.

Since the events of Super Dimensional Fortress Macbeth Human culture has spread through the galaxy and grudgingly taken humans with it. The galaxy is, thus far seemingly more or less at peace save for one terrible problem. Roid Rage. Or Var Syndrome, as it is called in this series.

Var Syndrome, at this beginning, is a mysterious illness caused by sci fi rubbish about metafolding biojissures. Basically the afflicted individuals hulk out, waste any apples they happen to be eating at the time with squishing and then set about killing as many non-afflicted as possible as if they were promised 72 virgins on death.
                                                                              . .
Fortunately there is a cure in the form of  WALKURE. This Musical Girl Squad, defended by an elite squadron of jet-mech pilots, sings until people stop killing each other as they sooth the afflicted.

So basically they are the antithesis of Dethklok.

For whom the death-toll is generally a direct result of their performances.

Moving on to the episode proper!

A fan of schlocky american date movies will recognize the overarching story in this first episode. Workaday shlub bored with life meets a manic pixie dream girl whose irrepressible energy and optimism leads him to find new meaning in life. With the asian twist that said schlub is in fact a supertalented ace robopilot who is simply too devoid of purpose to put that talent to any noteworthy use.

Which, as it happens is why the story starts with him being fired. He uses his last day to make his improbably agile cargo loader dance cargo crates back and forth to what I presume is only the manliest of J-pop. In the process he discovers the manic pixie dream girl stowaway in a crate when she starts singing along to the music he's making his utility mech dance to.

Since it's his last day and it's been established he has precious few fucks to give on a good one he of course lets her go. They then depart to have a chat in which it is revealed the 14-year-old stowaway (she's not underage, I am informed, because her particular breed of not-humanity has a max lifespan of around 30 years) explains that she, a mayor's daughter, snuck off of her home planet to join Musical Girl Squad. Because she loves it and loves singing. It makes her rune all shiny. (her species has shapes- runes- stuck to their head that blink in reflection of their mental state- perhaps the cause of their short lifespans.) Unfortunately she has perilously shipped herself to the wrong planet entirely.

Shlub advises giving up and reveals that he loves nothing.

For the first time, Freya the 14 year old aspiring musical girl, demonstrates sarcasm in the form of noting that sounds like a 'fun life'.

Schlub's recriminations are interrupted by a her being spotted by another employee controlling some manner of drone. She flees while Shlub grumbles about her sarcasm, until spontaneously deciding to burn his bridges with napalm by rescuing her from his now surely former coworkers.

Meanwhile it turns out Musical Girl Squad is undercover on this planet due to an anticipated Roidrage attack. There had apparently been ten cases in the past month, some of them with folded biowaves. Attention spans likely wane at this point, so in short a Var syndrome outbreak takes place at the Zentradi Green Giant base. Singing from a mysterious source infects them and makes their brains red, causing them to go on a rampage in their chicken walker mechs.

Musical Girl Squad reveals their prescence and does their best to resolve the conflict by singing J-pop with gratuitous special effects which I assume are likewise transdimensional.

Success is had, until the Windy Knights turn up and start blowing spaceships in orbit to smithereens. Fortunately the commander of the defense forces recognizes that the Windy Knights are, in fact, hostile.

Unfortunately this unexplained assault by the Windy ones causes Roidrage to flare up again as Musical Girl Squad is attacked.

Freyja is on the case though and joins the Musical Girl Squad chorus as Schlub hops into a downed yet perfectly functional jetmech without a corpse in it to prove he can indeed make it dance as well as a cargo mech in his Dreamgirl's defense. At least until he and Freyja experience some sort of brain stroke in which they find themselves glittery and flying, leading to the enemy to shoot them down.

Roll credits!

If you are a fan of J-pop, this series is likely to be perfect for you. If you are indifferent to J-pop, you may quite reasonably get by on enjoying the siezure-inducing jet-mech-fights. If you are like me however the chirpy and baffling lyrics of happy happy fun go love songs then there is only a certain measure of such one can endure before one is tempted to hulk out, crush an apple in hand and if possible take a mech out on a rampage.

For my part I wonder what relevance holographic backup dancers and other flashy pretty lights are having on the Var Syndrome afflicted. If it's their voices doing the curing, why do they need the transforming dresses? Or to touch the enemy mechs? Meanwhile intergalactic record sales must make for a hell of a budget allowing for excess.

Macbeth Delta is expertly animated and the transitions from 2d animation to 3d computer animation are not especially jarring. I do note that some of the mech-jet fights are a bit too easily replicated with a pair of laser pointers pointed at a wall and wielded with the intent of giving a cat a brain stroke.

At least in this first episode.

The characters of this series thus far seem to be entirely likeable, even manic pixie dreamgirl Mayor's Daughter stowaway and their heart-shaped fancy emotionally-triggered flashing fancy head-tentacle.

In conclusion I anticipate a non-anime enthusiast would need roughly one-quarter of a bottle of brandy-derived  Beehive Honey alchohol to appreciate properly.

I am also left with the novelty of the concept of resolving conflict via music and rest assured that if we lived in a universe where this was remotely applicable...

This would have brought us world peace.

- Bland

Addendum :

I have on request watched more shows and would furthermore recommend this series primarily for the J-Pop Lyrics. Not the music, but the lyrics. I somehow initially missed such gems as the opening theme features- "We only have one shot at love, so let's have fun inside you."

I have also come into a realization that this series primarily exists to give men plausible deniability for listening extensively to J-Pop love songs. Sort of an anti-'I read it for the articles' Playboy.

If this is the case, I encourage all such fans to understand it is OK to like J-Pop and/or love songs. I personally don't, but that could be because my heart is full of bile. There is an exception, however.

I appreciate it's civic-minded encouragement to combat littering.