Apr 4, 2008

Anime Review: Dragonaut -- The Resonance

This anime started out promising and then went to heck and never came back out of it. The anime starts with a shuttle accident in which our hapless hero, Jin, loses his entire family. Fast forward to the future and Jin, who is lonely and emo, meets Toa who tells him that he is not alone. Yippee, Jin has a girlfriend. In the background of this sweetness are Jin's friend Kazuki, who is a member of the Dragonauts, a squad of warriors who ride dragons to defend Earth against Thanatos. The dragons the Dragonauts have are a friendly bunch with human forms when they aren't dragons. Their human forms are determined by their human partner's desire at the time of "resonance," when a human a dragon bond. Stuff happens and Kazuki's resonance doesn't hold with the Dragon, Gio. Instead Gio insists he must protect Toa and so Jin, Toa, and Gio live together as a happy trio. This causes Kazuki to go inexplicably insane with jealousy -- it's revealed at the end that it's some sort of "man crush." Anyh0w ... Thanatos makes its way to Earth and then Jin and the Dragonauts fight to save humanity. There's some Star Trek-like babble said that sounds like it was lifted directly from The Borg episodes during this battle. It's of little consequence, though, because by the time it comes you won't care. You'll just want the misery to end.

To summarize my thoughts on this show:
  • The story is unnecessarily convoluted
  • Jin's insane friend, Kazuki, was so annoying that I wished for his death in every episode. I then became livid and wished even more for his death when he suddenly confessed his man crush to Jin and then turned his insane hatred into insane love -- of the "man crush" sort (Kazuki just wanted to be the one that protected Jin, and was upset that Jin was strong in his own right and also had other beings that cared for him too).
  • The other characters outside of Jin and Kazuki had the potential to be interesting, but they didn't spend enough time developing them
  • I like the intro theme song
  • The female characters either have ridiculously enormous gravity defying breasts or little tiny ones. There is no in between. Garnet's outfit is particularly interesting if you like fetish garments -- ow, no part of her outfit can be comfortable.
All-in-all this was an alright anime. I did finish it even though by about episode 18 or so I began to care less for it. 2.5/5