Last Exile
Well, well, well! Are y’all excited about Christmas tomorrow?
It’s winter now. And with winter, comes winter break. And with winter break, comes more time for me to watch anime! So a new season of Xbolt’s Anime Reviews starts today, and continuing every Thursday until I run out of animes. But you know the drill from last time. Let’s get on with it already.
Last Exile is a very interesting show. The art is very, very good, and the setting is of the “retro-future” type. Future tech, but everything looks like it belongs around World War I. The story is of Claus and Lavie, two Vanship pilots. (Pilot and navigator, actually.)
A Vanship is a mysterious piece of technology. It’s essentially a flying tin can. No visible propellers, and little stubby wings. And yet it flies. They must have anti-grav technology in this universe. But no radios, or any means of wireless communication. That’s why they have Vanship couriers to deliver messages. Each message has a corresponding “danger rating” represented on the seal on the outside of the messages. One star is no danger at all, and ten is “there’s a good chance I might never come back from this job” dangerous. Each Vanship has two people in it, a pilot and a navigator, or navi.
Claus Valca and Lavie Head work as one of these courier teams. But what they really love, is Vanship racing. (Which incidentally, operates much like the podraces on Tatooine.) During one of their races, they (literally) run into a Vanship pilot being pursued by a very not-nice flying machine. The pilot, Ralph, is unable to finish his delivery, and entrusts it to Claus and Lavie. Shocked at the seven star danger rating, they take the job anyway. They have to deliver a girl, Alvis, to the Silvana, a flying fortress that is feared by many because of it’s impeccable record as “the invincible battleship”.
After that, they are thrust into the battle between Anatoray, their country, and Disith. And the war is itself part of an even larger course of events. Many questions are raised in the first few episodes like: “What is this war about?” “Who is this mysterious “Guild” that runs in the background?” and “Why do the Disith wear those strange facemasks?” Some of these questions will be answered by the end of the series, and more will be raised. Unfortunately, not all of them are answered. The ending didn’t make a whole lot of sense. It wasn’t NGE bad, but still I had a hard time following it. (Though, maybe that isn’t a fair comparison. Nothing will ever be as bad as NGE.) But even so, I liked this series a lot.
I was really worried that I wouldn’t find anything good for the silly video portion of the review, since Last Exile is a pretty serious show. But… Heheheh…