Both Yang and Kircheis’s missions have heavy political ramifications the audience is made aware of.
#Is legend of galactic heroes good series#
I was drawn to the series on the promise of seeing two genius tacticians clash, and the opening two episodes delivered wonderfully, but the middle episodes move on to problems on the homefront, one of Yang’s solo undertakings (which is an excellent two-parter), and to a lesser degree one of Kircheis’s (which had significantly less tension). There is also a lot of political posturing going on. We don’t know enough of the other imperial officers to know how many feel the same way or if they believe the imperial dynasty is absolute. Reinhart is well aware of the damage a person at the top of the system can inflict, but being a product of the system itself, his solution isn’t to make a democracy, but to replace the man in charge. The Empire as a whole is a little too easy to frame as the villain, but to the characters who belong to it, it’s not. While this makes it clear to the audience the Alliance is no sweet-smelling bed of roses (its politicians embody the worst of election season mania), this also robs us of getting to know more of the Empire’s side of the cast other than Reinhard and his childhood friend Kircheis.
Ideally it seems the series should spend equal time between the Empire and the Alliance, so the audience can get to know Reinhard, Yang, and their cohorts in similarly sympathetic lights (especially since Reinhard is our opening POV for an entire episode), but after the first few episodes the series focuses primarily on the Alliance side of affairs, which feels a little odd. Given the opportunity, he’d love to resign and live a civilian life, but circumstances won’t let him. Yang is not interested in glory so much as minimizing loss of life, and his intentions are criticized even on his own side for being overly cautious or even cowardly. He never wanted to be a combat officer (in fact he’d rather be a historian), but his talent resulted in deployment rather than desk work. On the other hand, Yang comes from a blue collar life and entered military school to pay for his college tuition, which he otherwise could not afford. His privilege allows him to be daring and manipulative, and he dreams of a world he would like to make safe for the sake of those he cares about, no matter who he has to step over in order to do it. Reinhard is a noble, and though originally an impoverished one, his nobility gives him level of acceptance more common citizens of the Empire will never have. We learn their histories, their motivations, and though they are both excellent strategists, they’re cut from entirely different cloth. The series feels as though it’s built to see the war through the eyes of these two men.
Thanks to Yang, the Empire decides to withdraw, and Yang and Reinhart become well aware of the talented tactician on the other side. However, before he can finish the job, Yang Wen-li’s admiral is incapacitated, putting him in command of the remainder of the Alliance fleet, which allows him to implement a tactic that forces the battle into a stalemate. We meet both Admiral Reinhard von Lohengramm of the Empire and Commodore Yang Wen-li of the Alliance in the opening Battle of Astarte, where Reinhard nearly secures victory against a numerically superior Alliance fleet by disregarding common wartime protocols and using sensible strategy that a layperson can follow once broken down. It’s the story of two brilliant military leaders, but also the story of the two nations they belong to. This is where The Legend of the Galactic Heroes properly begins.
#Is legend of galactic heroes good free#
Some of his subjects rebelled and escaped to form the Free Planets Alliance, a new republic that is not recognized by the Galactic Empire, and the two factions have waged war for over a hundred years. But eventually a politician seized control of the government and declared himself emperor. In the far future, humanity has colonized the stars and formed the Galactic Federation. The Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These is based on the epic 10-volume novel series by Yoshiki Tanaka (which, by the way, is being released in English at a pace of 2-3 books a year, so we’ll eventually have the whole thing in a couple years).