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Now in Japan
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Monday, 08 January 2007 00:00 |
 Another day, another new mecha show. I'm in mech heaven at the moment - long may it continue. In the best tradition of mecha wars, young Sara Werec's about to find herself on the opposite side of a long-running war to her brother, who she once held dear but who has now turned traitor...
1 - Prelude Of Despair
When Sara Werec's older brother Ralph left the family home to fight in the war, she made a promise to follow his lead. It's now several years later, and Sara has joined the military academy and is in training to become a Reasoner - a pilot of combat mecha known as STRAIN. Her brother was the best Reasoner the academy had ever produced, and features heavily in just about every lecture Sara attends - but her next meeting with her brother isn't quite what she expected. A late-night Deague attack on the academy turns out to have been led by a Union traitor: Ralph Werec...
2 - Meeting
Having changed her name to Sara Crewe, to avoid any connection with her traitorous brother, Sara's training continues. Having lost her MIMIC in the attack on the academy, she's reduced to fighting in the lower-powered GAMBEE units - but if she wants to find out what caused her brother to switch sides, that's her only option. Her stand-offish attitude with the rest of her squad hasn't helped her make any friends. She seems to be doing her best to annoy the instructors as well, by continually arguing for an accelerated training schedule even though she's behind the curve in her GAMBEE piloting skills. It seems Sara's not the only person at her new academy who has reason to hate Ralph, though...
I had made extensive notes on the characters introduced in episode one - usually a sensible thing to do when starting a new show, it helps to keep track of who everyone is - but Soukou no Strain had to be awkward and killed everyone bar Sara off before the show even started. ::throws away crumpled notes::
Anyway. A word first about the world and technology of S-Strain, as it's known for short. Mankind has spread to the stars, and along the way has split into two distinct nations: the Deague, who are being sold here as the bad guys (and their fighting machines have a suitably dark and menacing look about them), and the Union, who Sara fights for. We don't know much about the Deague yet, but the Union has a strange mix of the high-tech and the low-tech - for example, Sara and her classmates return from training in their mecha, but go back to the dorms on the back of a horse-drawn cart. It's pointed out that the Union aren't scientists and can't create new technology - that means they're stuck making the best of what they have, and that creates an interesting world to set the series in.
As for the mecha... Pilots of STRAINs are known as Reasoners, and the key to piloting a STRAIN is the pilot's MIMIC, a cluster of brain cells cloned from them. It's a one-off device, so if your MIMIC is lost or damaged that's the end of your career as a Reasoner - as Sara finds out at the end of episode one, but there are signs that something's about to happen that will give her access to a MIMIC again. It wouldn't be anime if the rules weren't bent in situations like this, would it?
We're also in the dark about what led Ralph to switch sides. His raid on the academy was cover for a foray into a nearby military lab, where he retrieves a young girl from some sort of suspended animation tank. Any bets on her being a super-Reasoner of some sort? She seems to recognise Ralph when she wakes up, and the story continues from there. Whatever has happened to him since he last saw Sara, he obviously has no reluctance to kill her now, and one of the show's main threads will cover Sara trying to find out what's happened to him.
The second episode takes Sara to her new academy, and covers her further training and relationships with the girls there: loli genius Reasoner Lotti Geller, her partner Jesse, and super-bitch Isabella. It's development work, before the real story kicks in hopefully in the next episode or two, but it's interesting to watch - most of the characters are likeable and easy to watch, although Isabella just begs to be slapped down.
For the record, the show is loosely based on the novel A Little Princess by Francis Hodgson Burnett. It's very well presented - CG scenes are smooth and nicely detailed, the soundtrack is one of those that just begs to be turned up during action sequences, and the story moves along at a good pace. There's nothing I've seen so far that's given me cause for complaint - and I've been in particularly picky mood recently. Definitely a show I'm eager to see more of. |
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