Majestic Prince [Blu-ray]

A piece of the plastic fell of after I opened it I probably just got a bad one it did seem well packaged! :)

The artwork is good-- when it deals with just people. Add a machine, take it outside the ship and have big mecha monsters battle, the artwork just comes off as stupid.No effort is made to include common sense, the laws of physics, any of that boring stuff, and there is a great big amazing battle that just flat does not make sense. Then they go back inside the ship, halfway make sense, then do something inside that doesn't make sense, followed by going outside and making even less sense.Some people will watch the flash-bang-dramatic KABOOM outside action and be happy.Some people will hang on for the story, try to piece it together, and enjoy what they see.The characters are fairly well put together, the music is pretty good, and if teenage girls in mini-skirts and micro-skirts flying around in giant mechanical fighting machines is your cup of tea, you will LOVE this show.Everyone else will just go "Huh?"And strangely enough, six out of ten or three out of five might say I did not like it, but there still were a lot of people who enjoy it greatly. It is one of the best empty headed big mecha battle shows around. Some of us, however, don't accept lightspeed being a moderate trot, and cannot quite swallow absurd violations of physics.Decide which one you are, and that will tell you if this is for you or not.

Poor Majestic Prince has yet to receive any reviews on its complete collection, so I suppose everyone who was interested in the show bought the two 12-episode collections. Rightfully so, since occasionally the two combined collections cost less than this one, and vice versa every other month. So, has the intrigue factor of this space opera/mech war practically diminished? Apparently not, since a new season may be in the works, but I don't know how long they can wait before everyone moves on. Essentially, Majestic Prince is a terrific execution of an unoriginal premise; the base material is so bland and obviously recycled, but the show does well to work with whatever weak story foundation it was set upon. There is a laughingly obvious rip-off prevalent throughout this series pertaining to many storytelling elements, so I'll start with the best stuff first this time around. Mission Start!ANIMATION: The best thing in the show, hands down. The battles are fast-paced and ALWAYS fluidly animated, the prevalent mech CGI almost easily mistaken for hand-drawn animation. Everything is bright and colorful, burning sights and images into your mind better than a darker anime might do, and allowing for quick distinction externally where there might not be so internally. This depiction of the cosmos will blow your eyeballs on Blu-Ray, you can bet on that. Sure, you may see the same Wulgaru fighter swell up like a balloon over and over again, but the budget seemed expansive enough to create a dazzling and gorgeous series of frames for each episode. The characters are drawn well and distinctive for the most part, so long as you refrain from comparing them to the designs of characters in Fafner, Heroic Age, and the later Gundam series, but the series of mechs that they pilot are all, from my experience, very creative and original models with their own unique function. It's a pretty show, but so was Captain Earth, and I'm sure most of us know how that ride went, so let's look for some lasting, more substantive qualities here.CHARACTERS: This is quite the likable cast, from the Fail Five to the captains to the mechanics and the Doberman squad, you are bound to enjoy the use of at least one of these character's screen time. Things are a bit rough in the beginning, considering our five leads have horrible chemistry at the get-go, but that makes their growth as a team all the more interesting. Unfortunately, with such a ginormous cast, I was unable to find a favorite, but at least I didn't find myself averse to anyone. They are decently written, without conforming to normal tropes, humanizing them (or, at least, the main characters) to a point where it seems like a natural drama. There are no tsunderes, lolitas, or kuuderes: only straight-up energetic personalities with typical, but not inhuman, quirks. I found this to be quite the interesting take not often done in anime, but sometimes that doesn't work to the show's benefit and results in a dialogue drag.MUSIC: Think every space opera you've seen, with their pop songs and electronic instruments and heavy electric guitars. It's here, too. In fact, I found both OP to be downplayed for such powerful visuals, despite the 1st's catchy tune, which did not hype me up at all for the forthcoming episode. The endings are oh-so-skippable, being your overused slow guitar ballads, but the background for most of the space battles are fantastic! They really pump your heart with galloping beats and bellowing orchestrations, and so I applaud Toho Animation for making sure the action itself did not lag from an audio standpoint. By the way, as a side note, I have no idea on the quality of the English Dub. Just so you know.PACING: The pacing is downright awful. What we have here is a solid beginning, a resolvent end, and a whole conglomeration of who-knows-what in the middle. Heroic Age also suffers from this, and it really does pain me to watch such unfocused progression. It almost becomes episodic in nature, but we still must retain the overarching storyline of the alien invasion, so I became very lost and uninvested during the middle. In fact, it was the character interactions that kept me going, and their mean tease of a romance that never is satiated by the end.STORY: First of all, slight spoiler alert. Here is where my critique becomes mischievously cynical. What we have here is an achingly clear rip-off of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Of course, many mech series tend to be labelled as such, but hear me out. This is a new kind of rip-off; the basis of Majestic Prince is a series of "What-If's" derived from the polar opposites of Evangelion series' state of events. A few examples would be, "What if the pilots DIDN'T hate each other," or "What if the mechs used the pilot's DNA, and not the DNA of their dead mothers," or how about "What if the ancestors of man were still human-like, instead of giant monsters, and they were fought in space rather than on Earth and concordantly were gifted with a clear motive," or even "What if Gendou Ikari was still a bitter old man, but preferred to save the world over destroying it (and let's name him after another Gainax commander, just to make things even more perplexing)," or, last but not least, "What if Evangelion chose to focus on the robot battles rather than the psychological and philosophical states of its world and characters?" You see, Majestic Prince's premise is merely a reversal of everything already explored by Evangelion, making it a shallower, less-impactful anime. What was needed was something new, and instead we received a new twist on something old that is not nearly as deep. A very heavy blow, if you ask me.Majestic Prince is all right. It really is, as your typical fighting-aliens-in-space-with-giant-robots anime. I do recommend it, but not for this price; it is up for streaming on HULU. You will probably watch it once and enjoy it despite your better judgment, as I did, but I probably won't be picking it up again as such a small title in such a vast array of similar, but better, shows to be viewed. The one theme of family is not enough to hold the show on an emotional or psychological standpoint. I at least applaud it for having more guts than Heroic Age by killing off a few characters (I am still so incensed over the softness of that show), but that also did little to attach me to this title. It also didn't help that I was watching the far more impactful Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 at the same time, during which manly tears were shed. But that's another story. Everyone uses the analogy about waving keys in front of a child's face, so I'll say that Majestic Prince is like a glittering disco ball in a closed room with a hyperactive cat; pretty and engaging as you watch it, but easily forgotten when the doors are opened and the lights come back on. Take my word as you see fit.

Good anime season

really great viewing

一般的な国内プレイヤーで再生出来ます（私の再生環境は数年前のSONYの最廉価プレイヤー『BDR-S1200』）。タイトルで日本語を選択すると、強勢で字幕が付いてきますが、本編が始まってから、リモコンなどで字幕を《切》にすると、普通に鑑賞する事が出来ます。ただ、一話毎に設定がリセットされるので、その都度字幕を《切》にする必要性があります。シーズン1とシーズン2に別れて発売されていた北米版『マジェスティックプリンス』が、この度1つに纏まってコンプリート版として発売されました。コンプリート版になって、お値段も更に廉価価格になったので、「本編だけ見れりゃ十分！」という方ならば、文句無しの一品です。物語としては、宇宙からの謎の侵略者を迎撃する為に、遺伝子操作を受けた子供達が戦闘起動兵器に登場して云々という展開ですが、とにかく戦闘シーンが気合入っています。艦隊戦・格闘戦・要塞潜入戦・狙撃戦・・・等々、バトルがマンネリ化しないように、次々と制作側が趣向をこらしてくるのも最高です。なお、物語のシリアスさとは裏腹に、キャラの雰囲気が若干緊張感に欠けるのがちょっと気になりましたが、重箱の隅をつつくような評価をするのもアレなので、☆×5にしています。