I have no idea why Megaton-kyuu Musashi, out of all this season’s mecha series, was passed over for any sort of streaming in the West. Maybe it’s considered too much of a “kids” series, though given the popularity of Inazuma Eleven and Yokai Watch you wouldn’t think that would be a deal-breaker. Whatever the reason this pretty much ensures it’s going to get next to no following outside Japan, which like it or not does impact my decision on whether to blog it. It’s also a shame, because I actually think it’s pretty good.
Of course, I also sense that Megaton-kyuu Musashi is the sort of show than can be difficult to write about, because it doesn’t seem to trade in a whole lot of subtlety. It’s just a good old-fashioned mecha show, in many ways the most traditional among this season’s many. And for the most part it’s hand-drawn. I rather like the premise too, traditional as it is. A bunch of aliens turn the Earth into a “donut” (I guess you’d call it anti-terraforming), and their leader is a Queen played by Sawashiro Miyuki (the cast is full of big names, actually). It’s certainly a show trading on execution over innovation, but so far the execution is holding up its end of the bargain.
The Musashi gets its first call to action here, but it’s sauntering over to the battlefield so slowly that Obaa-san orders the boys to split the beast into its three component parts, to be rushed over on jet packs. The zaku fighting the aliens are being wiped out at an appalling pace to time of off the essence here. When it comes time to gattai it turns out that it has to be done in free fall – because of reasons – in a process called “SKYBUILD”, and that’s good for a few dramatic moments. Once engaged in combat though the Musashi comes it’s clearly in another league compared to any other human weapon.
Like most mecha series this one doesn’t hold together very well when you think too hard about the internal logic, so don’t do that. The fight here was very nicely done, and even featured the aliens doing a gattai of their own and sprouting Sauron’s eye after Musashi has messed them up pretty good, but Yamato – proving himself to be quite the natural, which I guess was the whole point – thinks outside the box and turns the tables. It’s all in good fun, and as long as I can find this series on a weekly basis I suspect I’ll keep watching it. Above and beyond that, who knows.
