Crest of the Stars (Sekai no Monshou)
Episode 1
I'm not watching this because of the idea of the current season being a "backlog season" but I just wanted to take a look at this show anyway and it's happening to coincide with that popular idea.
Who is this mysterious maiden? I just love this shot and I actually liked the lighting in this here and the colour of blue of her hair. Any anime where the characters have nice detailed or animated hair is great in my book.
Anyway, I've never seen the show before and I don't know anything about it but I really liked this first episode. It definitely had a hook to it that I found to be pretty interesting. The show seems to use it's own calendar system and while in the end some might view it as adding an slight unnecessary complication, I personally always really love that kind of thing and it's little details like that that I think help with world building and help bring the story into it's own. The whole brief history that was introduced so far I'm really liking.
Haha, speaking of world building, the very first spoken lines I thought I recognized as English but then I figured the characters were speaking Japanese and maybe some "Engrish" and I was just missing some words but then I couldn't understand anything at all. That's when I realized that the show seems to have invented a language,for part of it anyway, which I thought was pretty neat.
I'm not sure on the character designs yet. At times I actually quite like them as they have that slightly older look to them but other times I'm not sure on the facial outlines. I'd have to double check but I think that I read the show originally came out in the late nineties in Japan.
The first episode seems to have this almost weirdly pervasive thing with the lighting though where there is an extreme amount of glaring in the picture. I have a couple of examples here where in the first there are a couple of characters in a park or courtyard type area and the streetlamps I suppose it is are lighting up the top left quite a bit.
In the second picture you see on of those characters now inside and upset at the currently developing plot points at that current point in the episode and the internal lights just seem way too bright.
There are many more examples all throughout the episode but I only chose these two. That would probably be my only major complaint for this first episode.
There are some really nice shots of the Abh fleet though which all seem to be hand drawn and high in number and the episode has some nice scene transitions, such as where a defense satellite of the planet Martine fires on a Abh ship, to which it returns fire but instead of seeing the satellite explode you instead see a mug explode and shatter,spilling it's contents, as the current president of the planet is informed of what has happened just a short time later. That one maybe isn't the most original anymore but I liked how scenes were tied together in this way rather than fades or just sudden switches.
I knew that
Lafiel mentioned that his username came from this show at one point and looking up the show I had seen images of some of the characters but I didn't know who the character was. Right at the end you see her and it turns out Lafiel is the girl I had seen in most of the images when I very briefly looked up the show. Then I remembered he actually had her picture as his avatar for a short time before switching back to Asuka or Miki and felt kind of silly for forgetting...
I actually thought you put more emphasis on the "e" for something more like "Lah-Fee-El(like the English letter L)" or "Lah-fee-ale(like the drink ale)". Something more like that anyway but she pronounces it as "Lah-feel".
Since it was in the episode preview her seiyuu wasn't listed in the credits but it definitely sounded like
Ayako Kawasumi, whom many people would know as the voice of Saber in
Fate/Zero. I always liked her voice acting and wanted to hear more of her and while I'm sure she's probably been cast in many animes, all the one's I've seen so far she's either not in or more of a smaller support role character, sans the before mentioned Fate/Zero, so personally I thought that was another plus.
In the end I really liked this first episode overall and look forward to the rest. As this isn't a currently airing show, taking a quick look it seems many enjoy the show so it's at least slightly reassuring that it won't turn badly. I personally may still end up not liking it but at least there a bit more of a guarantee there that it won't turn out badly unlike with what you encounter with a currently airing show.
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