I continue to enjoy Space Battleship Yamato 2199, the reboot of the classic 1974 anime that was responsible for calling so many old school fans into the genre, including me. Two centuries in the future, humanity is under attack by an alien race called the Gamilas, who are dropping radioactive planet bombs. Using technology sent by Starsha of Iscandar, the WWII battleship Yamato is rebuilt into a spaceship that can travel the 148,000 light years to Iscandar to retrieve a machine that can clean the radiation from the Earth and make it green again. The reboot is excellent, paying just the right amount of homage to old school fans like me while updating nearly everything else, including the Gamilas (they’re much more complex than before, with a Zentraedi-like language and new political intrigue), the technology (Gundam-style plugsuits for the crew) and more. One of the biggest changes is the additional of several female characters, including a busty medical assistant, a cute twintail cadet and a strict meganekko on the bridge. Also, an arc involving a captured male Gamilas fighter pilot was tweaked to make the pilot female. These changes were made partially to acknowledge the realities of the moe era we live in — no modern anime can be successful without an ecosystem of figures and doujinshi for fans to get excited over — but also to enable new stories to be told. There’s a new female fighter pilot named Yamamoto who has a rather interesting love triangle with Yuki and Kodai, which would have been impossible in the original series. Rememeber, we’re carrying all the Yamato Blu-ray discs, which come complete with English subtitles!
The reboot of Yamato is an otaku dream come true.
