Aquarion meets Platonism.

Aquarion has to be one of the most inconsistent series ever created. The original Aquarion was complete shit. Aquarion Evol was fucking amazing. And then somehow Aquarion Logos managed to be even worse than complete shit.

I don’t know what they were thinking when making this. The concept sounds pretty cool— words have power and they need to fight in giant robots to prevent them from being corrupted. Based on all the great word play Aquarion Logos had it seemed like they could go places with this idea. But nope. It just ended up focusing on a word / villain of the week, and each week was thematically shallow and uninteresting.

The worst part though was the characterizations. For example, the main character’s only distinguishing characteristic is that he is a “savior”. This is literally all he talks about. I mean, it’s fine if he wants to be a savior… but he could really use some sort of approximation of a personality beyond this. The other characters are similar. One guy is a politican who always wants to tell the truth, and that’s pretty much all he ever talks about. One guy is a comedian and all he does is tell (bad) jokes and hit on girls. The loli sings songs. One girl is shy. All she does is walk around blushing and stuttering. The main girl is… she’s so bad she doesn’t even have the *one* distinguishing characteristic the others do. Unless her characteristic is having the main characters fight over her. Overall, it’s pretty hard to believe how lifeless and droll these characters are. One of the main characters dies three quarters of the way through and it has no impact on the viewer whatsoever.

The rule is that the less time they spend on a character, the better that character is. Which is pretty amazing. The best character by far was the villain’s sidekick, mad scientist dude. All he did the whole time was stare into space looking melancholic. But since they didn’t actually do anything with him my imagination filled in the blanks and allowed me to construct an infinitely more lifelike and interesting character than anything the people writing Aquarion Logos could ever have imagined.

The animation is really really ugly. Originally I thought it looked kind of retro, like it was made in the 90s. But I realized that actually it just sucked. Exactly like everything about this show.

Rating: F
Recommendations: Aquarion Logos