Cheap Martian Successor Nadesico - Mission to Mars (Vol. 2) (DVD) (Nobuyoshi Habara, Tatsuo Sato) Price

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Customer Reviews of Martian Successor Nadesico - Mission to Mars (Vol. 2)

"The Best Anime Series Of All Time"
Prepare to be addicted! You've been warned. This really is the ultimate Anime. Wonderful humour, detailed art, huge mecha action, beautiful girls, and the dubbed voices are excellent. Akito Tenkawa, a fry cook turned unlikley pilot, must help the battleship Nadesico and her quirky crew defend the Earth from the evil Jovian invanders. It's so funny to watch Yurika Misamuru, the 20-year-old captain of the most effective weapon in Earth's aresenal, go from bubbly love-struck airhead to brilliant tactician in a moment's notice. Don't let the serious-looking box art fool you, this is a relatively light-hearted anime. I mean, the main character spends most of the battles in a cooking apron. You can't go wrong with this series! A MUST BUY! Enjoy!

Ciao, Greg

"I'm not a pilot, I'm a damned cook!" -Akito

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Entertaining As Both A Story and a Parody
ADV Flims markets this series in the US as something like "Japan's Most Popular Anime Series". While being very popular in Japan (and for good reason), it's not even the most popular anime title they've ever brought over - by a long stretch. That's fine, though. Nadesico is a series that doesn't even take itself too seriously.

Nadesico blatantly parodies not just mecha-genre anime, but shojo romantic comedy and classic anime of the 1970s and early 80s. It does it with such style, though, that it's terribly easy to forgive its occasional lack of subtlety.

The basic premise of the series is that roughly two hundred years in the future, the Earth gets invaded by aliens from somewhere out around Jupiter. After being pushed back to the boundary of Earth, one of the major corporations of the planet decides to retake some of the valuable technology left on Mars. Most of the capable people left have been drafted into the military. Left with the choice between intelligence and stability, they take the former.

The series eventually ends up reaching beyond this premise, but for the first four episodes - the first DVD - we see the crew working it's way to Mars and all of the troubles this presents. The action and comedy are fast and the plot definitely follows a "take no prisoners" sort of approach with your attention.

ADV has done a decent job with the DVD here. The one continual complaint - I find it a valid one, but many see it as nitpicking - is that much of the on-screen Japanese text has been replaced by English overlays. This does have the advantage not fracturing your attention. However, people like me can sometimes be purists who would rather slow down and watch everything frame-by-frame. This issue should not, however, stop you from buying the DVD.

"Nadesico" is a solid, funny series with some very clever parody. ADV should be congratulated for bringing it to the US is not for some of the liberties they've taken with both the advertising and the video itself. I definitely recommend the DVD and the series.

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Mildly Amusing At Best
* At the beginning of MARTIAN SUCCESSOR NADESICO, the evil Jovian
Lizards invade Mars and wipe out the human colony on the planet. Now
the Lizards press their attacks on Earth -- and Earth is forced to
rely on their last hope of salvation, the space battleship NADESICO,
built by Nergal Corporation and manned by a civilian crew.

The crew is a gang of eccentrics and misfits. The captain is Yurika,
a young lady who combines the tactical skills of a military genius
with the personality of a dippy romantic teenager. She has eyes for
Akito, who really wants to be a cook but always ends up dragooned into
becoming an ace mecha pilot. Yurika keeps insisting that Akito is mad
about her, managing to twist everything he says or does -- even when
he threatens to kill her -- into this fantasy.

That captures the tone of MARTIAN SUCCESSOR NADESICO: it's a
slapstick parody of mecha anime series such as SPACE BATTLESHIP
YAMATO, MACROSS, and GUNDAM. I had initially been reluctant to try
the series out, since anime humor tends to be weak more often than
not, but I rented MARTIAN SUCCESSOR NADESICO THE MOVIE and found it
nicely produced, though it suffered from an incomprehensible plot (if
there was actually a plot there). Reviewers suggested the series was
much better scripted than the movie and quite funny, so I decided to
check it out.

Actually, what I found after going through the four episodes on this
DVD was that the series had production values much closer to the norm
for anime, and though the plot could actually be followed ... well,
it's not all that funny, the style being: "Everyone acts like idiots
and runs around a lot." I would rank its scripting as about
comparable to the old Hanna-Barbara cartoons -- OK, maybe a bit
better, though the Hanna-Barbara stuff did have its moments -- but
certainly not in the same league as the old Jay Ward-Bill Scott stuff
or Looney Tunes. I might have chuckled here and there but I
never laughed out loud.

MARTIAN SUCCESSOR NADESICO seems to have been targeted at a
junior-high audience who really likes anime and is familiar with the
gimmicks of anime series. I think it would work very well with that
audience. I don't think it's of much interest to older audiences, and
it would certainly be of no interest to somebody who wasn't an anime
fan. Possibly the later volumes work better, but after going through
this one I am not all that inclined to find out.