I have finished
Last Exile.
I will start off with the positives. In spite of the 3D CGI, the show looks cool. Airships with people manning observations towers looking around with binoculars. People shouting down brass tubes. People aiming signaling lamps at each other to communicate in morse code. Airship battles. The Silvana crew look good in their black uniforms and Alex looks great in his black coat. You also have airships plunging through clouds and creating "splashes".
The story conflict is also a little more original than your usual fantasy/adventure anime. Instead of the tiresome "plucky rebels vs evil empire" setup, you see the empire and the nomadic barbarians team up to fight the guild, which has a monopoly on clean water while everyone else is drinking filthy water and nations are disappearing off of the face of the earth because of drought. The first few episodes do make the series look promising. The English dub was also pretty good and had some funny moments. Worth watching up until episode 12.
The Silvana looks great.
Now the bad and ugly. Rule of cool is no substitute for the fundamentals of storytelling: proper pacing and scene tension, coherent plotting, and so on. The show was okay up until the Silvana's first battle with the Urbanus, at episode 12. After that, the show begins to break down.
- Characters we were supposed to take seriously as adult military officers begin acting like indecisive, bratty children, and you have to wonder how these people managed to survive as an outlaw airship on a secret mission for the emperor while being pursued by guild fleets.
- The show goes with an indirect exposition approach but does not adequately convey the fundamentals of the setting to the viewer. For example, there is an important place called "the Grand Stream" that airships are constantly dipping in and out of, but the viewer never understands how the Grand Stream works or where it is until the final episode. Much of the show's conflict is derived from the guild having control over airship engine technology and a large percentage of the plot is dedicated to figuring out how to circumvent that, but it's not apparent to the viewer why the characters don't have control over their own engines. It doesn't become apparent until the last few episodes the engine compartments of all airships are sealed off and contain guild personnel who have machineguns and they crash the ship if anyone tries to enter and takeover the engine room. It is never explained why the two countries of Anatory and Disith are at war each other, and it gets even more confusing when the true nature of the setting is revealed at the end of the show (why would a nation on one side of the hourglass try to invade the other sides? The logistics of your invasion and occupation would depend entirely on one chokepoint, the Grand Stream, and could be easily foiled, not to mention the difficulty of trying to occupy a populace with a completely different culture and values). Etc.
- The mystery boxes are not paid off in a timely manner, and eventually have unsatisfying reveals, or aren't revealed at all.
- Things happen for no apparent reason. Why are there thousands of people evacuating onto rockets in the middle of nowhere, that then launch and crash? No clue. Why is Alvis and Exile so important? No clue. Why isn't the Guild doing anything to stop the Alliance when they are clearly massing for an attack? Why did Luciolla put on the suicide ring? No clue? Why does the Silvana's crew trust Dio and Luciolla with a mission to fight the guild, even though they haven't renounced the guild and still walk around wearing guild uniforms? Why was the Maestro able to control Exile without Alvis or the last stanza? Why does Alvis have the power to control Exile anyway? If Exile was a colony ship, then shouldn't everyone on the planet be descended from the colonists and should be able to control Exile? Why was Exile covered in a shell and floating around in the Grand Stream in the first place? And so on.
- Miscellaneous stuff like a character dies and other people cry over his death... and then that character inexplicably comes back with no explanation. There is a love polygon (the MC and four girls) that never resolves. Contrivances like the Silvana's vice-captain turning out to be the imperial princess.
When you add all this up, the story becomes really incoherent and difficult to follow. The only other anime I can recall with this level of "I don't know why things are happening, to the point that I have to go to google to find to rationalize the plot" was Evangelion, and even then Evangelion. I've heard that the sequel series is "worse" and often viewed as noncanon by fans, but I am curious as to how it could possibly be worse than the first.
Hm I'll probably pass then.
