HEROIC AGE

DESCRIPTION

CAST

MANGA ActionHeroic Age

REVIEWS

• 

  TheRealKyuubey

  30/100
  Stupid and pretentious are not good bedfellows.

  Space… It was once considered by the people of Earth to be the final frontier. A boundless, infinite universe stood just beyond the reaches of our ever advancing technology. We expected there to be life out there in the universe, but we had no way of knowing that by leaving the comfort of our blue planet, we’d be setting foot into a game of celestial thrones that was already eons in the making. As we entered this conflict, forced into the struggle for galactic dominance, we were dubbed the iron tribe. But with the regal albinos of the Silver tribe and the larvae-looking Bronze tribe teaming up against us, we were faced with the inevitability of not just defeat… But extinction.

  That is, until one fateful day when Dhianeilla, the princess of the human race, and the crew of her space ship The Argonaut stumbled across a half-destroyed planet, inhabited predominately by terrestrial squids. Living amongst the squids, they found a childlike young man; Savage in appearance yet kind of heart, his name was Age, and he alone possessed the ability to defend us against the worst that our enemies could dish out. But will this curious young savior be enough? Is he strong enough to bring about an end to this horrible war? Is he heroic enough to do so with as little bloodshed as possible? Or will he fail, dooming us to obscurity? One thing is certain: Without Age, this frontier truly will be our final one.

  Studio Xebec is a name that I’ve often heard spoken in painful, frustrated tones by many different reviewers. And hey, it’s time to add my name to that list. If animation studios were being sold in the supermarket, Xebec would be the store-brand option… I’m talking Great Value levels of cheapness. They’re the same company that produced Love Hina and the first Negima series, and the 2D animation in Heroic Age is a slight improvement over those works, with much better use of coloring, but as far as basic animation goes, this is pretty much the same stiff, lifeless crap that we’ve become used to seeing from them.

  Having said that, I’m still going to give credit where credit is due. The animation looks awful whenever characters are on screen, or with any shots that take place on land or inside the space ships, but when we leave those setting and venture out into open space, the switch in visual quality is like night-and-day. The 3D animation in Heroic Age is nothing short of beautiful. This series came out in 2007, so the CG looks a little dated, but it still holds up really well. The spaceships themselves look awesome at all times, but what’ll really catch your eye is the expansive outer-space backgrounds, which are full of life and color… Although when it’s sharing screen time with the 2D characters, the styles really don’t mesh well together.

  As far as the character designs go, there’s very little inspiration or originality here. The silver tribe… The primary antagonists of the series… Are emotionless, so of course they all have long white hair. Yeah, if you haven’t seen an anime where the villain had long white hair, then you don’t watch much anime. There are several characters who appear to have had their aesthetic lifted directly out of Leiji Matsumoto’s sketchbook, and thinking back, the only designs that really stand out are that of Age and a few less humanoid aliens, such as the bronze tribe and his squid friends.

  Oddly enough, the one aspect of the character design that stands out in my memory is the sheer number of baffling choices that the creators made in regard to the female characters’ uniforms. On the low end of the scale, you have several members of Dhianeila’s crew… Including the princess herself… Who are wearing uniforms so skin-tight that you’d swear they were painted on. I actually kind of wish that were the case, because otherwise, those poor girls are experiencing the most uncomfortable wedgies in human history. That, and somehow the suits indent enough to show off their belly buttons. On the high end of the scale, there are a few high-ranking female characters whose outfits were designed to have gaping, cleavage-baring holes in the front, and I would LOVE to hear the practical applications of this dress-code choice. I highly doubt they did that for the sake of sexiness or fan-service, because with Xebec’s art quality, one poor character’s cleavage looks more like ass-cheeks than anything else in most shots.

  The music is your standard sci-fi fantasy fare… If you’ve seen any anime like this, you’ve heard soundtracks exactly like this… But the English dub, on the other hand, is much more unique. I’ve heard quite a few bad dubs from Funimation before. I’ve heard them release dubs that were written poorly, directed poorly, or cast poorly. But through it all, I’ve always felt that they were at least trying. No, phoned-in dubs were always more of an ADV thing than a Funimation thing. Heroic Age is the first dub I’ve heard from them where it sounds like most of the people involved just didn’t care.

  In a cast full of late-2000s Funimation regulars, there are several actors who didn’t have to reach very far into their bags of stock voices to find the right one for their respective characters. Monica Rial plays her usual squeaky-cheerful voice, aged up slightly for the dual roles of the twins Mail and Tail. Luci Christian raises her voice ever so slightly for the role of Dhianeila’s personal attendant Aneasha, and Greg Ayres does his usual Greg Ayres thing for the meek Mehitak. Think Negi Springfield, but without the accent. Colleen Clinikenbeard plays another deep-voiced tough woman, Christopher Sabat plays what he likes to call a ‘coffee break role,’ and so on and so forth.

  Vic Mignona plays a scheming antagonist, which is fun to listen to, but he barely gets any lines. The only actors who seem to have brought any genuine effort to the table are Cherami Leigh, who plays the tortured Lekty, a member of the Silver Tribe who slowly learns affection and emotion with the help of a fellow Nodos who’s been tasked with protecting her… Cherami put out a compelling amount of pain through this character’s development… And Brina Palencia, who gracefully dances the line between adorable mascot and helpful navigator in her role as the ship’s AI system, Bee No Bee.

  And then you have the two main voice actors. I don’t even know where to begin with this one. J Michael Tatum plays the titular character, and it’s probably the only time I’ve ever heard him attempt to do a high-pitched, wistful voice. Thank God for that. Every single line he utters sounds like he’s making fun of Johnny Yong Bosch. Tatum generally has a very pleasant, soothing voice, and his performance as Age is proof that he should stick to that voice as often as possible.

  And yet, his female co-star is still worse. Caitlin Glass plays the role of Princess Dhianeila, and I am sorry to say this about any character voiced by her, but she will put you right the hell to sleep. She gives monotone a new meaning with her soft-voiced, droning delivery. She sounds like a lazy LOTR-style opening narration, which makes it even more grating to the attention span when she doles out exposition about long-winded prophecies or soliloquies about Age’s feelings.

  Together, these two voice actors turn the series into a boring, dull slog that’s often a chore to watch. They have absolutely no chemistry, which is insane because… And I can’t stress this enough… They’re the voice actors for Isaac and Miria in Baccano. Yeah, these two one-note windbags are directly linked to the most electrifying and entertaining couple in anime history. This is the only thing that ever surprised me about this series. The Japanese actors for both characters are far superior, able to hit the same basic tones while showing so much more personality in the process.

  The show had a whole slew of people working on the adaptive writing, and yes, it feels it. There were several different writers and ADR directors taking turns like a revolving door, and out of the three script writers attached to the project, two of them were actually good. I’ve always known Monica Rial to be a talented writer, and she’s always been able to adapt material in such a way that it’s accessible without losing it’s intent or meaning. I’m new to Brandon Potter, but he did a decent job as well.

  It’s when we talk about the third writer… J Michael Tatum… That we run into some serious problems. He’s a generally well-liked actor, and rightfully so… But when it comes to scripting a dub, he’s become notorious for over-writing. My least favorite kind of writers are the ones who think they’re better than the material, and take every possible opportunity to make themselves look like the cleverest person in the room, which Tatum does by replacing subtle and in-character dialogue with over-used cliches, purple prose, and bizarrely out-of-place idioms that make a mockery of the text while, in some cases, changing the intent of it all together.

  Here, I’ll give you an example from episode sixteen. At one point, one of Age’s enemies is defeated, and brought onto the Argonaut. When confronting Age, he expresses reluctance to the idea of fighting him again, and is relieved when he hears that they don’t have to. This makes sense in character, because this guy’s always been pacifistic throughout the story, and the idea of engaging in an all out brawl with Age in the middle of a populated spaceship will cause countless casualties. But in the dub, Tatun changes his line to “So, you’re not going to hurt me?” Down-grading it from a sentiment of compassion to a sentiment of selfish cowardice. And yes, there are worse examples in here. Definitely stick to the subtitles on this one.

  I’ve been putting off reviewing this series for a few years now… No exaggeration there, I’m dead serious… And in that time, it’s always been floating over my head as something I would have to tackle eventually. But there were two problems. The first one was that I didn’t know if I’d be able to watch it all the way through a second time. And the second was that, as many problems as I have with it, I had no idea how I was going to present my biggest problems with this series. So now that the time has finally come, I think I’m going to start with the problem that I like to bring up whenever someone asks me why I didn’t like this series… Let’s talk about the title character.

  Age is a kind-hearted, childish savage who’s not human by birth. He’s one of the last surviving remnants of a tyrannical race of warriors that were almost completely wiped out by a more powerful force. He’s picked up by a crew consisting of mostly humans, and a lot of quirky hijinks ensue as a result of their many differences. It’s eventually revealed that he has the ability to transform into a giant, ferocious monster with it’s own name that’s unique to his, and he has to fight the other few remnants of his species if he wants to protect the human race from extinction. In other words, he’s Goku. Yup. Just Goku. He doesn’t have the personality, depth, or charm of Goku, but when you get right down to it, he was ripped wholesale out of the DBZ universe.

  Now, is unoriginality a bad thing? Not necessarily. Bleach ripped it’s initial premise straight out of Yuyu Hakusho, and I actually like the first three seasons of Bleach MORE than it’s predecessor. But then you have my next problem… Heroic Age is really stupid. This show knows about as much about outer space physics as I did in elementary school. There are plenty of rules you’re allowed to break in science fiction… Sound and color don’t exist in space, but very few Sci-fis care about that. Heroic Age breaks the rules you’re allowed to break, as well as the ones you aren’t. Not only do many of the characters move through open space as though they were swimming under-water, but in episode two, we see the main character digging a hole through the hull of the Argonaut in order to attack the villains waiting outside.

  Hey, do you remember Jason X, the Friday the 13th movie where Jason Voorhies kills a bunch of people in outer space? Pretty cool, huh? One of the characters was killed when Jason broke a hole in the hull from outside, and she was sucked through that hole. That was the dumbest movie in an entire franchise of dumb movies, but even THAT story knew that when you compromise the hull of a space ship, shit goes terribly wrong. Also, I get that Age and the other Nodos can breathe in space, but an inhuman biology doesn’t explain outer space wind blowing through their hair. Someone had to animate that.

  But much like unoriginality, stupidity is not a deal breaker. There are plenty of shows that were awesome, despite having the IQ of mayonnaise, but they usually offer up some redeeming qualities to make up for it. Gurren Lagann is stupid, but it has so much energy and confidence that you just can’t help but believe in it. Knights of Sidonia is incredibly stupid… Probably even more so than Age, now that I think about it… But it’s so creative and sincere that it honestly just comes off as fun and adorable. Heroic Age doesn’t have anything like that. In fact, rather than making up for it’s stupidity, it compounds that problem with it’s insistence on looking smarter and deeper than it actually is.

  At the start of this review, I gave a heavily simplified(and not 100% accurate) plot summary of this series. What I left out was all the over-complicated pulp. Heroic Age goes up it’s own ass to establish a long-winded and often self-contradictory lore about the many tribes vying for control of the universe, which never serves as anything other than an explanation for the setting. There are scattered references to Greek mythology, namely to the five ages of man, but these references are in name alone, and the tribes named after them have little to nothing to do with the ages they correspond to. The only reason Age is a descendant of the Heroic Age is because the creators wanted to emphasize how heroic HE was, never mind the fact that they’re also comparing a brutal race of murderers to one of the most noble ages of the five. The tribes could just have easily been named after different ice cream brands, with the show being called Haagen-Daas Age, and it would have had just as much depth to it.

  But is pretending to have depth or meaning a deal breaker? Not on it’s own, but I’m sorry, ‘stupid’ and ‘pretentious’ are not good bed-fellows. This show would have been a lot easier to watch if it had dropped all attempts at undeserved profundity, and had just told the simple story that I mentioned earlier… Only it wouldn’t, because of this series’ final, and biggest, problem. Heroic Age, at it’s core, is just very badly written.

  There are a ton of characters floating around in it, but Age is the only one who even gets the slightest hint of a backstory, and not one of them have any complex motivations. The two main characters… Age and Dhianeilla… have no personality outside of the fact that they’re good people who are always right about everything, and everyone else just exists to support or oppose them. I’ve seen this show twice, and I cannot describe a single one of it’s characters with anything more than a two-sentence explanation of what they are and who they’re connected to.

  And it apparently isn’t enough that I don’t feel invested in any of the characters… I can’t even enjoy the action of these epic space battles because of how muddled and poorly edited these multi-episode set pieces are. You’ll notice quickly that during these long battles, there is a LOT going on, at many different locations, involving many different characters, often at different times. You’ll get a few seconds of Age fighting his brethren, followed by a cut to Princess Expositia explaining to us what he’s going through, followed by a cut to the political squabble involving her scheming brothers, to a cut to the other Nodos’ loitering around and discussing their lot in life, to a conversation someone had with Age earlier, and by the time they finally cut back to Age’s fight in current time, I’ve all but forgotten what he was doing there in the first place, which is the final nail in the coffin for a series I had to struggle to care about.

  Herioic Age is available from Funimation. The old releases are still available in relatively affordable halves, but you can get a much better deal by going with the SAVE release, which you can find pretty much anywhere for between fifteen and twenty dollars. The manga, which released it’s first volume during the initial run of the series, is pretty much the same story told from another character’s perspective, and it’s not available in the states.

  I don’t like Heroic Age. I also don’t hate Heroic Age. Hell, I don’t anything Heroic Age. I gained nothing from this series, and in exchange, I lost way too much time on a series that I’m going to forget in less than a week. It’s biggest crime isn’t the fact that it’s stupid, pretentious, badly animated, or generic. It’s biggest crime is that it’s boring. I can stare at the screen for several episodes in a row, with no distractions, and I still have to constantly rewind to pick up on what the hell I missed in regard to what’s happening. I’m glad to finally put this turkey behind me, and I look forward to forgetting it exists. I give Heroic Age a 3/10.

  Continue on AniList
• 

  cosmicturtle0

  74/100
  a flawed but enjoyable blend of retro space opera/mecha anime and Greek heroic myth [spoilers]

  On April 1, 2007, the first episode of Gurren Lagann aired in Japan. Widely regarded as one of mecha's last great hurrahs, Gurren Lagann would go on to become a beloved anime all over the world (and this reviewer's personal favourite). The next day, April 2, the first episode of Heroic Age aired. But despite sharing in Gurren Lagann's message of hope in the future and the power of humanity, Heroic Age would go on to be mostly forgotten, swallowed up by the sands of time and the ever-increasing seasonalization of anime. Outside of series like Gurren Lagann and Code Geass, mecha as a whole in the 21st century has had little staying power in the anime community, and despite the fact that I actually quite like this show, Heroic Age is a good example as to why.

  

  To get the technical stuff out of the way, the show looks and sounds really good. The animation is fluid and pretty consistent throughout, which is pretty much all I ask for. I do have my issues with the CGI, but it wasn't so egregious that it broke my immersion. The character design is something between Leiji Matsumoto and a 2000s shounen, which I feel was intentional and spoke to the series trying to craft the tale of an epic hero while staying true to its mecha roots. And in that vein, the orchestral soundtrack really works in the show's favour, adding a layer of tension to what is, in some points, pure melodrama.

  The story of Heroic Age takes its inspiration from Greek mythology and Hesiod's Five Ages of Man, but brings it into a space opera setting. The premise of the show is that the Golden Tribe, the original master race of the galaxy or the universe (this isn't really clear), eventually reached such a stage in their evolution that they left this universe for another. Before they did, though, they called upon other "Tribes" to step forth and claim their place among the stars. The show follows the Argonaut, a ship of humans (in this world known as the Iron Tribe) as they try to find their Nodos, a boy named Age, and reclaim the Earth from the ruling Silver Tribe who are hellbent on destroying them. Complicating this relationship is the presence of the Nodos, five individuals who contain the power of the extinct Heroic Tribe within them. There are the main "mecha" of the show, although calling them mecha is about as accurate as calling a bicycle a motorcycle. Nevertheless, the show presents the Nodos as giant-robots-in-spirit, and in doing so sets itself up in the vein of things like Mobile Suit Gundam and the Twelve Labours of Hercules simultaneously.

  

  For the most part, this combination tends to work well. The political elements of the show, such as Dhianeila being forced to stage a coup against her brothers, or the Silver Tribe splitting into factions over how best to deal with humanity, makes the fantastical elements feel more believable and this world feel more real. At the same time, the show is trying to do a lot in its combination of classical and retro anime inspirations. Twenty-six episodes, despite seeming like a lot by today's standards, feels like it wasn't enough to explore this universe as much as I would have liked. This isn't necessarily to say that the story was rushed or cut short, but there elements of the worldbuilding, like Dhianeila's psychic powers, Age's backstory, or the technology of the Silver and Golden Tribes, that weren't as fleshed out as I thought they should have been.

  And I think this issue is compounded by the fact the main character of Heroic Age is somewhat unclear, and thus the show isn't really sure who to focus on. You would imagine, from the title, that Age would be the show's protagonist. He is caught somewhere between a Greek mythological hero and a messianic figure, but there are times when he vanishes for episodes at a time, locked in combat with another Nodos as the focus shifts to the Argonaut trying to navigate a space battle against the Silver and Bronze Tribes. In a way, I appreciate this more than the monster-of-the-week format of older mecha anime--the trouble is that it pushes Age to the margins of the show. In fact I was surprised, watching it 14 years after I saw it as a kid, how little Age speaks throughout the series. This time around I've come to see the main character as Dhianeila, trying to navigate her people through the conflict against the Silver Tribe and trying to create peace in the galaxy. The problem I have with Dhianeila, however, is that she is a little too one-note to be a main character. There are only so many times you can sit in front of a tv and watch her gasp, "Age!", and she, too, is a sort of large-than-life figure with her powers and how the other humans venerate her as royalty. And, to make matters worse, the show develops this strange admiration/love between Age and Dhianeila that isn't all that believable because Age has the mentality of a five-year-old and the two really only share a bond through fate. This isn't to say that I dislike either character, but I didn't really find myself to drawn to either of their personal stories.

  The side characters, though, are all quite enjoyable, and for me, that's where the real characters arcs lie. The characters of the Argonaut, like Iolaous, Anesha, Mobeedo, are all really likable, the other Nodos have interesting personal conflicts that carry them throughout the show, and as the series progresses and the Silver Tribe becomes more and more pressed by humanity and their own dark past with the Golden Tribe, characters like Rom Ror, Prome Ou, and Paeto Ou are all given the spotlight. I would say this is where the show feels most like an 80s space opera like Zeta Gundam, where the story of the side characters is just as compelling as that of the main characters.

  

  At the end of the day, though, Heroic Age is an anime driven by its plot. Even if things are abstract or unexplained, you never get the sense while watching that anything is really out of place. Despite the slow pacing of the first few episodes and the seemingly endless fighting between Age and Karkinos, once the Argonaut returns to the new human planet, Dewey, the show picks up steam and really gets going on its epic journey. Beginning on a ruined, backwater planet and ending with the opening of a portal to another universe, Heroic Age takes you across the galaxy in a melodramatic, interstellar battle for the survival of humanity and universal peace.

  And I think, ultimately, this is why it was mostly forgotten. Heroic Age is heavily indebted to two traditions, Greek hero myths and 80s mecha anime, that are largely antithetical to modern anime storytelling. As opposed to something like Gurren Lagann, where we follow and get invested in a personal journey of growth, Heroic Age is far more impersonal in that it speaks to something bigger than one person. It isn't really a story about anyone in particular, though it tries to be with its pseudo-love-story between Age and Dhianeila. Rather, this is an anime about everyone, about humanity as a whole and our place in the universe, in a way that comes more from hard sci-fi than the individualized, shounen-eqsue tropes of Gurren Lagann and many modern anime.

  This isn't to say that one is better than the other, and if you look at my favourites you'll see which one I prefer personally. At the same time, I think there's a place for stories like this. Unfortunately, they don't really get told anymore. The space opera is a dying genre, and though Heroic Age isn't nearly the best that I've seen, I do give it credit for trying to do something new with its retro mecha inspirations and bringing them into the 21st century. Eighteen years after it first aired, it's fair to say that it hasn't really translated to the rest of the anime industry like Gurren Lagann has, but I do hope that, like Age, shows like this come back at some point--and when they do, they bring us to a new world of space opera mecha that speaks to our own times the way Gundam did to the 70s and 80s.

  _May the wisdom of the stars forever light your way._
  Continue on AniList

SIMILAR ANIMES YOU MAY LIKE

• ANIME

  ActionTerra e... (TV)
• ANIME

  DramaSoukyuu no Fafner
• ANIME

  ActionShin Seiki Evangelion
• ANIME

  ActionZegapain
• ANIME

  ActionArgento Soma
• ANIME

  DramaDensetsu Kyojin Ideon
• ANIME

  ActionSousei no Aquarion
• ANIME

  ActionKoukyoushihen Eureka Seven
• ANIME

  DramaGasaraki
• ANIME

  DramaBokurano
• ANIME

  DramaRahXephon
• ANIME

  ActionGinga Kikoutai Majestic Prince