Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Xam'd: Lost Memories Review

A teenage boy accidentally receives the power to turn into a monster.



Xam'd is very similar and will obviously be compared to another Bones work Eureka Seven. They both center around a teenage male who gets involved with a mysterious girl and joins an airship crew. Naturally I also have issues with Xam'd that are comparable to the ones I have with Eureka Seven. Most of them concern the characters. It's not that they're bad or anything. I just couldn't get myself emotionally invested in them and found a lot of them to be very generic. Most of the characters aside from all of the teenagers didn't receive any development or exposition at all.




The other main thing I had a problem with is that it often sounded or came off as very preachy. Xam'd has a race of people called Tessiks. Numerous times throughout it is clearly shown that a lot of people don't like Tessiks, and I found most of those scenes to be way too heavy handed. Granted it's very nice to see anime handle a subject like that seriously.



Perhaps the aspect of Xam'd I liked best is the one between our hero's (Akiyuki's) parents. Parents (and often adults in general) have always been a mixed bag for anime. They're usually pretty happy, or have some rocky relationship with their kid(s), or dead. Akiyuki's parents have sort of an estranged relationship, but through their mutual concern for their son, they eventually reconcile over the course of the anime. It was executed amazingly and sets Xam'd apart from other sci-fi anime.



The story itself had a ton of standard anime and sci-fi elements: secret military experiments, people turning into monsters, temporary amnesia, teen angst/love, etc. They were all executed pretty well, and the plot was well paced.



* STORY - B - A sci-fi/adventure story that addresses some serious topics.

* CHARACTERS - C - Generic, but the main ones have good development.

* VISUALS - A- - Great production values.

* MUSIC - C - Awesome opening theme, an alright score.

* ENJOYMENT - B

* OVERALL - B-



Recommendations: , Last Exile
Full Post

No comments:

Post a Comment