Captain Earth is garbage. I can think of no nicer way to say it. I originally gave up on this anime after seven episodes, but I gave it a shot again because I hate leaving things unfinished. I know some anime can start off kind of shoddy only to end brilliantly so I was willing to give it more time. I gave it until episode 20. Please keep in mind that this series is only 25 episodes long. I gave it far more than the benefit of the doubt and my efforts were not rewarded. Not only was this anime not anything close to interesting or good it was also boring. I can forgive many things, but boring is not one of them.
I love me some mecha action. I think giant robots kicking the asses of other giant robots can be pretty awesome and it's just tough to screw that up. Yet Captain Earth does it somehow. Well, I know how so I guess I can dish out the goods (and bads) on this series right now.
The Kill-T-Gang is a group of semi-immortal bad guys that want to do bad things to humanity using their juiced up mechas. The organization Globe wants to stop that so they use their own mechas to fight them off. How they do that is by using a group of kids that can handle a Livlaster. Essentially a Livlaster is a gun that can control a mecha or something like that and I guess the Livlasters are living beings that choose their handlers. I guess.
I admit after a while I just stopped paying attention because the pacing was just awful and the story was just too pointless. I've seen this type of anime before, but what made this anime different is that things just seemed to be happening just so they could happen. There was absolutely no tension at all and the characters seemed so vanilla and none of the villains warranted any attention from me.
Inevitably, I asked myself again why I was still watching something that was just so dull. So I stopped watching with only five episodes left because I just couldn't take it anymore. What sucks is that I did have high hopes for this anime when it came out last year, but it just never became anything like what I was expecting.
The two villains that were recurrent throughout the series reminded me of the Team Rocket characters from Pokemon. Hell, even their hair color was the same. These baddies are the leaders of their immortal gang, but the gang never seem to attack the good guys at once. Instead they do it one at a time one episode at a time. So basically we get a dozen episodes of the same thing. A different bad guy attacks by himself each episode only to lose. It's tough to build momentum when each episode is the exact same as the last episode. By the time they start working together the series is practically over.
I found myself with virtually nothing to look forward to, but that wasn't the worse thing. The worse thing was that after a while I didn't even know what I was watching and didn't feel compelled to understand. There'd be a robot that wanted to enjoy being human or some scientist that wanted gain immortality by using one of the "Designer Children" to do so. While these could be interesting concepts they felt like they were just thrown into the mix and none of these characters were given any kind of background at all. They simply just existed as plot devices in a plot that couldn't focus long enough to really flesh out characters that needed to be fleshed out. After 20 episodes I still couldn't tell you a lot about the main characters and I couldn't tell you that much about the bad guys.
Now all of this could have been forgiven if the mecha fights had been truly epic. Unfortunately, they were not. The mecha fights were actually fairly pedestrian so even that small hope at redemption for this series was gone.
Not even the politics, such as they were, could have improved this series. A lot of mecha anime try to throw a bit of politics into the mix that try to make us use our minds, but even that was fairly pointless. One group wants to leave earth and the other wants to save it, but other than a scene of some old people in a room that never really amounted to squat.
Oh, well. They can't all be winners. Better luck next time.
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