Reviews for Star Driver: Kagayaki no Takuto (5.91) 61412

I still don't know why I enjoyed Star Driver as much as I did. Its characters are weak, its conflicts uninteresting, its plot by turns repetitive and incomprehesible. At its high points it reminds me of Evangelion, or a show made immediately after it, as if the past fifteen years hadn't happened - as if all a giant robot show needs is a dark organization and some psedo-religious mythology.

There are elements that seem intended as a pastiche of the whole genre; the over-the-top evil organisation, the half-face masks (which the characters never see past), the bromance between the male leads. But it's left wanting for a punchline. At the last moment, it turns out the evil leader really does want to destroy the world. The love triangle is left to dangle like every generic show before it. The robots remain as alien and nonensical as ever, without even Gurren Lagaan's full-blooded manly willpower as justification. The story does at least manage a decent finale, but it ends up where it started.

If nothing else, there’s always the visuals. Gurren Lagaan is probably a fair comparison; this isn't a full-on experimental look like e.g. Kaiba, but the palette has been shifted and saturated, and the character designs have quartered away from realism. Perhaps most importantly, the visual effects match and enforce the palette - and there are a lot of them, the robots duelling with glowing energy swords in a parallel dimension pretty much every episode. It's oddly formalized, in fact - again, almost as if the creators wanted to say something about formulaic, meaningless battles in anime series. But the other shoe never drops, so what we get is lots of fights - and they're good fights, reasonably choreographed and very well animated - but no sense of tension or drama, because the titular Takuto not only never loses, but never seems to break into a sweat. Making it worse, he uses two swords, while the bad guys only use one each - and they're very careful to take turns, one of them fighting each week.

The rest of the episode time is largely character drama, which Star Driver generally manages pretty well. Most episodes focus on one character - either this week's opponent, or the Maiden whom the bad guys are looking for. While this makes the series even more formulaic, it lets us have a closer look at a wide cast, and avoids the slowdown at around episode 18 that seems to plague series of this length. If anything the cast is probably too wide; beyond the lead triangle there is a great mass of characters, many of which seemed interesting enough in their episodes that I'd like to hear more, but far too many to keep track of everyone. And the relationship between the leads, while there's some interesting tension initially, never really develops; female lead Wako's steadfast refusal to pick one other of the male leads goes from cute to dull to infuriating (and again, the story seems bent on making some point - but never does). We do get an eleventh-hour challenge, but it feels awkward and forced, and dissolves quickly in the end.

So while it starts well, and many of the individual character studies are interesting, neither ongoing character drama nor overarching plot holds this show together. And yet something does, somehow. Possibly it's just the presentation; the aforementioned gorgeous animation is beautifully integrated with music, particularly in the parallel-world scenes (all of which have a semi-incidental background given by the Maiden's song - the end effect being rather like the opening and ending). Or maybe there is something subversive in a show that so closely follows the rules, inviting us to question them even if it never does so itself - but that seems to be giving too much credit for too little evidence.

In the end, then, I'm as baffled as when I started. Logically, Star Driver is a beautifully-presented series that never hangs together well enough to hold interest. But I never once felt like giving it up.