I have finished the monster that is the Legend of Galactic Heroes
That took a little over year of on and off watching, which is less then I suspected.
There has to be a plot hole
somewhere in that 110 episodes series but overall I just feel...uh...that it was good?
The show presents itself as a historical drama (in SPAAACE) and comes across as just that, albeit with better characterization. There were never any, well, "anime" moments for the lack of a better term. Hell, there weren't any contrived wtf moments like in nBSG either. I don't remember any breaks of immersion beyond pausing because the subs went too fast (in my opinion).
Central Anime did an amazing job on this, by the way. I judge this based on no twitch worthy grammar, my incoherent memories of it being good, and that I actually had to look up a word some well-read character used. Although apparently the names were a bit off? Minci instead of the correct Mintz, for example. At least with the subtitles I had.
There are a bajillion characters, but the director remembers this is based on a series of novels, so every time a character shows up in an individual episode he gets a little Galactic Emperor/Rudolf IV or whatever. This is less annoying and more of a godsend. It does go away with very frequent characters
eventually because introducing a lead over and over again would be silly.
This is also very, very, very helpful if you're not going to marathon it, needless to say.
The plot itself starts off with a skirmish between the Free Planets Alliance and the Galactic Empire and their century long war over the dominance of space. It's 110 episodes, as I said, so the plot is huuuuuuuge. It semi-regularly has characters talking about philosophy (most frequently: democracy vs. autocracy), tactics, and political truisms. This works, and is generally done by characters and in settings when people would talk like that. They, of course, talk about other things. The ones who aren't all business, anyway.
Also it has battleships blasting each other with minimal use of fighters, as a proper space battle would be.
Anyway, to summarize, you should really, really watch it. The first..6-10 episodes I'd say. The first two introduce you to their take on space combat and the rest summarize the setting and how the show general does things.
(I also finished Elfen Lied recently, which was okay I guess, and nothing really to say beyond
)
