Eureka Seven (television series)/Review by o


 * Opinion: disappointing

Eureka Seven was the first, and currently only, anime series I've watched. Soon after playing through Ever17, I was bored, and the person that recommended Ever17 to me also praised Eureka Seven. I looked it up and wasn't impressed by the premise (surfing mechas), but was assured that the series was much more than that. (It turns out that he was mainly interested in the character development aspects, while I find a good plot much more important.) I watched the Nanashi fansubs.

Eureka Seven is primarily about a fairly normal boy named Renton and a strange girl named Eureka. Most of it takes place aboard a renegade military vessel (the Gekko-Go, operated by by Gekko State) and involves the other Gekko State members as they fight to stay independent and stop the military from implementing a plan that could destroy the planet.

The 50-episode series (20 minutes per episode) starts out very slowly; the plot only starts to pick up around one-third of the way through. The initial part was rather annoying to me, mainly because of its slowness, though I pushed through, believing it would improve. It in fact did start to get better; the second third seemed to be getting somewhere. But then the plot started to fall apart. If I had to put it in words, I'd say that the writers added too much symbolism at the expense of the story, but it's probably not that simple. Even looking past the ridiculousness of surfing mechas, which I believe I did successfully, there was too much else wrong with the series.