Let me blog something before my weblog starts to rot... Let me see... hmm... Oh well, I've finished watching the
Zegapain anime (ZEGAPAIN -ゼーガペイン-) few days ago. I think it's worth to intro to people that haven't watch yet.
Zegapain
Plot Summary
Kyo, an avid swimmer tries his best to keep the high school swimming club going, which is pretty hard when he's the only member. Facing the prospect of the club being closed by the student council, he tries to enlist beautiful Misaki to act in a promo video, shot by his good friend Ryoko, in a bid to start a recruitment drive. She agrees but only if he pilots a mecha under the wing of Celebrum, a resistance organisation fighting to destroy Deutera Areas formed on Earth by the aliens Gards-orm. He agrees but finds it all strangely familiar as if he's done it before....(more on ANN)
Kyo Sogoru
Actually, Zegapain doesn't really impress me when I first look on
ANN. It kinda gave me an impression that it's for younger shonen type where the main character is the chosen one that drives mecha, goes wild and always say "I'll save the world!". Well, turns out I'm wrong (happens all the time).
What is reality? real world? apparition? dream? existence? tomorrow? future? hope? The parallel/multiple universe thing in Zegapain isn't a new thing nowadays, but it still makes me going after the next episode, again and again.
Ryoko Kaminagi
The story and characters are interesting and pretty well developed. The ending is wrapped up pretty good as well. At times, the story is very emotional and sometimes it just makes me say "WTF". One example is when Kaminagi is vanished because her data is lost due to a failure during force-transfer, and after hours long later, Shizuno found the remains of Ryoko's data is still inside Zegapain's memory buffer, exists as
ASCII text. I mean, ASCII eh?? Kaminagi's data exists in pure ASCII and not encoded data?? quantum server is still using ASCII standard?? if so, the capacity of memory buffer on zegapain must be extremely huge
Also, the sudden Lu Sheng hugging and kissing Kyo in epi 24 makes me fell of my chair... haha... more ironic is Lu Sheng is voiced by
Romi Paku (also seiyū for Tōshirō Hitsugaya, the captain of the 10th Division in Bleach)...
Two M9 tango dancing in FMP! The Second Raid (OVA), funny project by lovely Mao :D
Anyway, although the anime is tagged with mecha genre, don't expect too much from it. To me, the mecha in Zegapain is really ugly (as well as their colourful combat suit), looks like those cheap toys that you get from McDonald... well, not really the case... but you get the idea. I wonder if Bandai has anything to do with this. I'm also not satisfied that the fighting movements between the mechas. The movements are too simple, dull and boring. If you think of the M9 AS is able to do tango dancing (though ends up badly) in
FMP! The Second Raid (OVA) and compare to Zegapain that just moves in one direction... meh... They even re-use the fighting scene in different battles,
several times!! omg...
Shizuno Misaki
If you're wondering, Zegapain is from Sunrise studio. Anime-nerdies say the studio finally stopped hiring monkeys and hired real people to do anime. Well, if you treat it as less mecha and more sci-fi, Zegapain is definitely worth your time to watch.
ps: also, I've heard heaps of anime-nerdies mentioning how sexy
Ayako Kawasumi voice is (who voiced Misaki Shizuno character)
Links
