Presentation
The animation for this series (like so many others) fall into the big eyes, small mouth category. At least for character designs. The male are thin but well muscled and the girls are all generously proportioned. The dragon-mecha are all obviously CGI’d though and the fights are fairly amusing to watch. The dragon designs are very beautiful to watch as they combat each other. The art seems to focus more heavily on the action of the story than the individual characters movements and actions. The opening theme is “Perfect Blue” and is a upbeat and cheerful sort of song. It’s a very pretty song, though it doesn’t really fit the series very well. The ending theme “Rain of Love” suits the series a LOT better, being a very sad and longing melody. The music for the series overall though is amazing and well suited for it. Even the background music (which isn’t used as often as it could be) is well done and really reinforces the emotions the scene’s trying to convey. More so than the animation itself I’d say. The story itself sadly seems to be all over the place. Each episode starts with some event in the past, and then skips ahead to current day. We learn bit by bit what’s happened in the past, slowly unveiling the whole story to us. While, normally this would be a masterful experience they way it’s done seems to almost be an afterthought as opposed to the main focus of an episode. The fan service in the series also seems to get in the way of the story. It’s hard to tell the exact purpose it serves in the anime. There’s not quite enough to tantalizing most fan boys, but there’s enough that it can be a distracting from the actual story. There’s not much of a difference in the voices between the American and Japanese voice cast. Both do a fairly decent job, though I feel the Amadeus’ voice might be a tad deeper in the American cast. It goes to say something that they were able to find people whose voices were fairly similar to their Japanese counterpart.
Extras
Not only does this anime have the standard text-less songs and trailers, it also has commentary on Episode 10 “Truth:A Shattered Mirror”. Fairly amusing commentary at that. Good to see in a small 2 disc DVD set.
Overall, this series is a bit of a re-hash of alien romance stories with mecha that you occasionally see. However, the music itself makes it worth to see, as well as some of the complex plot this story weaves. Definitely a couple of plot twists you won’t quite expect coming out of this one.