Majestic Prince Episode 1
What They Say:
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The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Based on the manga series of the same name by Rando Ayamine that began back in 2011 and only has a little material out so far, Majestic Prince is a new as animated by Dogakobo. Science fiction shows that actually take place in space, involved action and some amount of aliens are pretty rare these days, so the shows premise had a certain amount of interest for me. Especially since it also features some less than standard character designs in a lot of ways, particularly with the supporting characters that feel like they came from the 90′s. There’s an appeal to shows that don’t do everything the same as others and just the first few minutes alone of this feels like a curious throwback in many ways.
The show introduces us to a group of teenagers that are doing the pilot academy school in space thing where they’re learning the ways of combat. There’s a war going on out in the galaxy that’s not too clearly defined early on and the group is a mismatched one at best. Individually, their grades just aren’t that good and as a team they’re even worse, with some of them even wanting to just get out of it entirely and be reassigned. There’s a strange kind of clique feeling to it as we see them interact with each other, with one of the girls constantly being rejected from those that she wants to date and the guys just being fairly archetypical at this point. But there’s a push to get them and their mecha skills up to speed because of the need in space, which means their Team Rabbit to step up, which means real combat in a real mission that could give them the bonding that they need. It’s a pretty out there kind of approach that you typically only get when things are at their absolute worst, which the show doesn’t feel like it’s at out of the gate.
The opening episode spends a good bit of time showing off the mecha that they use and talking about their capabilities as they set up the individual pilots with all of them. It’s all given a kind of old school reverence about it as we see them all big eyed and surprised at the chance that they’re getting, but it also has all the modern flair that you’d expect as well from how they actually operate and the management side from the support team back at base. When the gang gets thrown into the real thing, there’s some really well done action moments here with copious amounts of CG to allow it to be big and expressive while still reminding me at times of some of those old Macross battles as seen from a distance. It makes for a fun way to close out most of the episode, but there’s still a certain something missing here.
In Summary:
Majestic Prince throws us into things pretty quick and fast here as we get to know the Team Rabbit gang only in the barest of senses. Things move quick enough that you really don’t even get time to latch onto character names since it just keeps moving and pushing to the next thing, which leads to them being sent into combat far too early by all appearances. While they’re supposed to come across as soldiers, they don’t seem anything like that and just come across as lacking in basic combat sense, which makes sense since we do know they’re all so poorly graded in so many ways. While I’m keen on science fiction shows and I like the mecha designs and character designs here, there’s something that’s fairly off-putting about this opening episode as it’s trying to be all flash in order to hook you, but instead keeps you at a distance so you can’t connect well with it from the start. I’m curious, but Majestic Prince is going to have to work at it to retain my interest.
Grade: C
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
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