Once upon a time, the Isekai subgenre was… kind of a different beast, where the standard model both of introduction and of the setting and story that the transported character would be dropping into had not yet formed. I’ve touched on pre-formula Isekai before, with shows like 1996’s Vision of Escaflowne, but after last week’s entry, I’m in the mood for a little more.
Enter Tenchi Muyo! War on Geminar (the title is excited in the first half). Being from 2009, War on Geminar is more recent than you might expect for its brand of Isekai. Certainly, the infamous Truck-kun was already well into his reign of terror, and the formulas that the original run of Shield Hero would work to freshen up or KonoSuba parody in just a couple of years were established. But it has something of a pedigree, acting as one of the many spin-offs of Tenchi Muyo!, which first debuted in 1994. And as such, it has a somewhat more retro outlook on its genre. This also tracks with it being an OVA, featuring post-watershed media standards and fairly arbitrary episode lengths.
The question is, has this aged like fine wine… or fresh milk?
War on Geminar starts with a princess, Lashara, going through the first stage of being crowned queen. Some shadowy figures watch, with one unsure member of their number being told she’s their mark. Later, they get in their magic robots and attack her flying palace battleship. The doubter (our main character, Kenshi) is the first in, tasked with claiming Lashara’s life so the mastermind will send him home. One of Lashara’s guards, Kyaia, strips to her improbably sexy pilot suit and gets in her own robot to fight him, finding it an uphill battle.
A stitch of our introduction to this totally serious and heroic fighter in a costume that clearly has no ulterior motives.
Other assassins try for the prize, but get intercepted, and when they have to run they hang Kenshi out to dry, claiming he’s responsible for the mission failing and that he needs to cut off the head right now if he ever wants to go home. He wins the mech fight, but on facing Lashara seems to have kind of a mental meltdown, which leads to his capture.
Lashara, who seems very cunning and canny as befits her office rather than her apparent age (a nice touch), recognizes that he must not be a particularly devoted assassin since he had a perfect opportunity to actually off her, and seeing as he seems to not have any honest loyalty to her enemies and is a stunningly skilled mech pilot (Seikishi) as well as a rare and valuable male one, she might as well try to turn a foe into an asset.
This is first done by leaving him imprisoned in a fairly exposed bird cage. One of the other assassins rescues him, which is exactly to Lashara’s plan, as she planted a magic bug on his clothing to spy right back on her enemies. His handler finds this pretty quickly and tries to kill him, insisting he was never meant to be sent back (though the rest of the assassin group doesn’t seem so keen). Kenshi fights back as an alert about the assassins’ ship involves a third faction, but his steadily worsening case of a local disease means he’s pretty out of it and has to be rescued by said third faction. They take him to Lashara, who both sees him treated for his illness and manages to use his woeful state to deduce he was summoned from another world. Because Lashara is smart and capable.
This process also seems to earn something of Kenshi’s loyalty towards Lashara and her faction, seeing as they’ve actually treated him with some human decency as opposed to the assassins. Thus, to cover up his true origins, Lashara brings him along as her attendant as they reach their destination, a site known as the Holy Land. And, within the Holy Land, an academy that trains the world’s Seikishi and top nobility.
There, we see more of the childish (or at least teen) side of Lashara as she’s allowed to calm down outside a crisis situation and do things like feud with her cousin, Maria. We’re also introduced to loads of new characters. Among important names I have not called are Maria’s attendant Yukine, the dark elf princess Aura (who was also the third party that helped out earlier), Kyaia’s elder sister Mexiah, Student Council President Lithia, and the engineer girl Wahanly. And in case you were wondering if this show had Harem in its genre makeup, recall that male Seikishi were already established as being quite rare. That makes all these ladies, along with a constant gaggle of background girls, eligible bachelorettes, with male Seikishi usually having arrangements made to ensure the bloodlines of magic mech pilots stay strong.
There are also the sketchier figures to contend with in the form of the Mest family: patriarch Babalun, who seems to be the mastermind behind the attempt on Lashara’s life as well as being her prime minister, his son Dagmyer who was the masked handler for Kenshi, and Babalun’s sickly brother Ulyte, who seems nice but who also converses about vague things with a mysterious voice so the audience doesn’t trust him entirely.
After this, Kenshi’s duties expand as he’s assigned to work in the dorms. He seems extremely skilled, even hypercompetent, when it comes to odd jobs, but his popularity (and Lashara’s greed – she’s hardly flawless as a person) lead to their share of shenanigans
Though this is largely a point of humor, the plot does get across that the Holy Land was rather understaffed due to high-class graduates poaching employees. A new boatload of laborers arrives as Lashara’s money-making schemes and Kenshi’s comedy setups catch up to them, and some of that number are poorly vetted and strongly implied to be trouble brewing.
After this, the headmistress ensures that Kenshi will attend classes, which gets a little more low-stakes puttering and a bit more development of Lashara’s tsundere side when he’s placed in class with Maria. We go through some school comedy bits, where along the way Dagmyer seems to build himself a following, including recruiting the villain of the week bandits who attack the “summer resort” episode.
We get back to school with a sports festival episode largely focused on Kenshi’s marathon run being a case of wacky races due to Lashara trying to rig the bets, but now with much more urgent and serious signs of Dagmyer’s treachery coming to fruition. This hits finally in episode 8, when everything goes to hell.
Dagmyer’s forces infiltrate, take out the first line of defenses in stealth, and begin shooting up the school. Technically they mostly seem to target hangars and turrets so we don’t see anybody explicitly die, but it’s pretty clear he’s more than willing to slaughter his teachers and classmates if they’re in the way. This comes as a particular blow to Kyaia, who had a serious childhood friend crush on Dagmyer.
Perhaps even more pressing is the arrival of Babalun in a giant flying tower bristling with guns. This is a bit of an endgame threat, and prompts the principal to call for all students and staff to evacuate, rather than trying to stay and fight. Kenshi is assigned to rescue duty and gets Aura, Lithia, and a few others out of obvious mortal peril before deciding that turning mecha weapons on his friends is a little too much. Thus, he breaks with the plan to keep his capabilities secret and gets in the robot, outing his mystically awesome Seikishi abilities.
While Kenshi is able to pretty much wipe out Dagmyer’s squad (though again, we don’t confirm any kills, and it seems reasonable that he’s fighting mostly to remove mechs from the board, not their pilots), this doesn’t do much to Babalun’s flying tower… and Babalun reveals he has another ace up his sleeve. Mexiah is not, in fact, Kyaia’s biological sister, and is rather a homunculus created with ancient lost magitech. At Babalun’s command, she’s painfully forced into the alter-ego loyal to him, the green-haired lady called Doll who was hanging out with the assassin crew back in episode 1. This breaks Kyaia’s heart and brain even harder.
Doll awakens an ancient super-robot with which she’s able to out-fight Kenshi, but since she’s at least a little sweet on him, this doesn’t get him killed and some of the cavalry guarding the retreat (Maria’s mom – the one person she and Lashara will team up against – with a train full of cannons) break up the fight with heavy shelling. Thus, Kenshi gets back to Lashara’s ship, and everyone puts the conquered Holy Land to their stern, left to Babalun, Dagmyer, and their celebrating conspirators and looters. Only Dagmyer seems to have a more somber outlook, with further schemes already in motion.
Dagmyer sends a message through a girl on his side with the refugees, getting in contact with Kyaia, and talking her into murdering Kenshi for him.
She’s not able to go through with it and Lashara finds out, but is surprisingly merciful with her wayward bodyguard. She still runs off to Dagmyer, though seemingly to attempt to talk sense into him. That doesn’t go so well, and the rescue attempt sees Lashara’s battleship fall into a trap, from which they’re barely able to escape when Doll shows up.
The next movement involves visiting the elves and trying to get assistance from Aura’s father, as if Lashara sits back her country is likely to be torn apart both by war and to pay reparations for Babalun’s deeds. They win the elf king over in a foot race through the forest between him and Kenshi, but then Dagmyer, Doll, and the goon squad teleport in to attack. In addition to making it a very good thing everyone important was at the footrace, this turns out to be part of a coordinated effort using secret church teleporters to attack every major capital and sow chaos throughout the land, including hitting the church’s HQ and forestalling attempts to retake the Holy Land.
The team travels to Maria’s kingdom, where she and her mother are initially presumed dead due to the massive damage to the capital. However, when they get bailed out of a trap set by Dagmyer’s bandit pawns, it turns out that the royals had an underground fallback city and are fine. There, the plans for defeating Babalun are organized, but Lashara is faced with the fact that she might be stripped of the last piece she has on the board, Kenshi. This amounts to a pretty good crying scene between her and Kenshi, and his decision leads to him being independent on paper but the arrangements on the cool flying ship more or less staying the same in practice.
On their way out, one of Dagmyer’s lieutenants sets up a particularly dirty trap, using a hostage to try to get one of Kenshi’s school friends to suicide bomb him. This drives Kenshi into a berserk mode where he takes out said lieutenant for real, and traumatizes Dagmyer something fierce. That distraction done, the party finally reaches a long-promised exposition dump at the “field workshop” (courtesy of Kyaia and Mexiah’s dad) where they are also supposed to pick up something that can let them fight Doll and her super-robot.
The exposition dump starts with the history of the ancient civilization that invented mechas, evidently more or less for gladitorial games. The overall history is both moderately satisfying and exactly what you’d think, ending in basically an AI rebellion perpetrated by homunculus pilots. The important parts seem to be that the ancient civ had the technology to pass memories from one body to the next, called Core Crystals, and that one of their last rampaging creations was the ultimate mecha known as Gaia, whose invincible shield is now in Doll’s hands.
Doll/Mexiah was also one of their creations, and Babalun hijacking her seems to be due to triggering a safety of some sort. Not that she’s 100% hijacked, as when she leads a raid on the site to end the episode, she pretty much seems to just have a pleasant talk with her adopted dad.
It’s also said that Kenshi himself is one of the last ancient homunculi, hence his incredible abilities. Now, he seems to have memories of a former life implicitly on Earth, and this is a spinoff of a series that appears to be more science fiction set on something closer to Earth as we know it, so take it with a grain of salt… but it’s also said that the homunculi could reproduce normally, so it’s not a hard guess that he might be a descendant rather than literally the lost third member of the group (one being Mexiah/Doll, one being confirmed dead in taking out Gaia, and that third one being MIA)
When the attack comes, the team gets away thanks to Kenshi doing some really impressive stunts, as is the pattern for the back half of this show, but a sneaky enemy gets away with the secret weapon against Gaia.
In need of a different secret weapon, the gang takes a detour to utilize the ability of mechs to compress matter (which of course Kenshi can do on unheard of scale) to squish a sacred pillar mountain into the form of a sword that should be able to pierce Gaia’s shield. The bandits try to interfere, but everyone from the first arc whose name has not yet been called pretty much rushes in as the cavalry to protect Kenshi, and the sword is made.
Following that, Babalun sends Mexiah to try to hack Kenshi, using his artificial human trait against him. But either because he’s a halfblood at most or because he’s just got a strong will he throws off the purple corruption.
Thus, after one last attempt by the baddies to bring down the flying battleship (Doll tampering with the sword’s gravity-defying magic hilt on the way out), the stage is set for the final battle to retake the Holy Land from Babalun and either to prevent him from reclaiming Gaia in full or, more likely, to defeat Gaia the ultimate mech.
As could be expected of the big finale to such a big show, they make sure to show us everything. We deal with the last of the bandit leaders, hung out to dry on Babalun’s first defense line. All the cavalry helps, taking out bit after bit of the forces in the way. Dagmyer gets his second wind to duel Kenshi, and though he gets his rear soundly kicked, this buys enough seconds for Doll to awaken her mech and fight Kenshi next.
Then, to prove he’s the real bad guy of the show, Babalun… um… teleports to the top of Doll’s mech, declares he’ll show off the true form of Gaia, then turns into black ooze and absorbs into the robot.
Surprising everyone.
The evil robot changes into a slightly different and much more powerful evil robot, with Babalun’s deep voice of ominousness and God Warrior style mouth laser. From this point on, the extras need to bail, and we have the obligatory final 1v1.
After the necessary hand-wringing, the most major of the piloting-capable girls (Yukine, Kyaia, Wahanly, and Aura) decide to jump back in and see what they can do, ultimately coming up with the plan to overload a magical reactor that Kenshi could then use against Gaia. It gets a lot of dramatic buildup. Of course, we’re not going to just disintegrate the final boss.
Onto the next health bar, Doll wakes up inside the overtaken mech, limiting Babalun’s ability to actually attack Kenshi. Kenshi rallies and turns his mountain sword first into a lightsaber with massive terrain damage, and then finally an invisible ghost blade to take off Babalun’s mech head, which allows him to pull the plating away and extract Doll from the core.
After a brief happy moment returning Doll to her status as Mexiah, Babalun starts to pull himself together. This is where Ulyte proves he was apparently aligned against Babalun this whole time, and uses the secret weapon that reformats the core crystals of artificial humans to delete Babalun.
He also reveals that, much like Mexiah and Doll, there’s an alter-ego thing going on, with the other (or even true) form being a minor antagonist and sometimes helper known either as Reia or Neizai. She then goes on to spill the beans that the two of them were implanted with core crystals in childhood, resulting in Gooey Gaia Babalun and Ulyte/Neizai.
With the plot resolved, the most pressing issue is of course the marriage of Kenshi, for which every high-placed woman in the world is in the running – and run they’d better, because it’s a literal chase into the sunset.
Finally, very finally, Dagmyer picks up the shattered Gaia core from where it fell and pricks his finger on it, causing it to light up ominously, and his right-hand woman seems prepared to protect him for whatever future villainy fans may imagine.
The End.
On the whole, every part of War on Geminar is good in some sense. Some parts are classically good, while others are “good” like movie theater popcorn swimming in that fake butter sauce: a guilty pleasure but you’ve gotta love the taste somewhere deep inside.
On the classically good, let’s hear it for most of these characters. Now, War on Geminar has a truly obscene cast of named folks when you get down to it, but let’s focus here on the core “group” we spend the most time with.
Kenshi is, as is often the case with harem leads, one of the weaker ones. All the same, I give him that he’s not generic. He’s weird. His physical spec is off the charts, but mentally… he’s often likened to these friendly little two-tailed squirrel creatures called Koros, and the show sells the likeness. He’s the kind of character who when told to stay put doesn’t waste two seconds jumping out the window to go exploring as soon as the nearest authority figure isn’t looking. He is pretty kind and generally accommodating, and doesn’t usually show much emotional range aside from “chipper” or “whining like a little kid”, but he does at least have those major notes and the capability, as rarely as it is deployed, to put on a serious business face. That’s pretty good for the “generic” protagonist.
Lashara, I’ll be honest, I am unfairly biased towards. If I had seen War on Geminar when I was in her age bracket (probably don’t show War on Geminar to twelve-year-olds), she would have been a fictional crush for sure. Approaching the material as an adult, she’s a compelling, watchable, and well-put-together character. She’s smart and capable, but it’s a mortal level of smart and capable not the level of a Tzeentch-character. She’s overall heroic and good-natured, but she has her jerk moments with her greed functioning as a major character flaw. Her status as a tween monarch gets explored, where she gets good scenes expressing how having been put in a position where she was forced to excel made her feel, especially with regards to the fact that her whole life to this point has been burned on forcing her into a model of perfection. She’s watchable when she’s smug and usually funny when she’s suffering. Sometimes she’ll feel like she should be playing chess with Moriarty, but other moments will remind you she’d probably fit in joining Kazuma’s party too. Achieving that without feeling scattered or contradictory marks her as a really well-rounded character.
This is Lashara staring down an assassin having a mental breakdown. Balls of steel on this twelve-year-old girl.
Kyaia’s very solid as well. She spends most of her time positioned very comfortably between being the cool yet angry big sister of the group, and being the noble knight as is her position. She gets a lot of depth from her feelings for Dagmyer, and how she handles that. It’s actually really refreshing in something that’s as heavy on the unrequited harem as War on Geminar that we have an important female character who has hangups about somebody else. And, since Dagmyer is a villain and the early parts of the story took their time building up Kyaia’s regard and hope and even hinting there might be at least a glimmer of reciprocation, it’s dynamite to see her have to face up to what he has become. Her interactions with Doll are less compelling, but needing to bear that burden still does a lot for her portrayal.
Speaking of the show taking its time with things, I think the OVA format really helped War on Geminar. While it fits to thirteen episodes (similar to familiar seasonal anime), they’re long; most clock in at 45 minutes. And it when it comes to the episode count, it feels more like that’s just what it ended up as, and not what it was forced to. Because OVAs don’t have the same distribution requirements as common broadcast, there’s a freedom to the format that I feel like War on Geminar takes advantage of. It has all the time it wants and all the time it needs, and just has to use that time intelligently so as not to bungle the pacing.
On the whole, it uses that timing advantage to give us… everything. It fits in fanservice, subplots, comedy, loads of characters, school life, running gags, sweet scenes, emotional scenes, over-the-top goofy harem scenes, and lets each of them take the time they need to do what they’re trying to do. It’s got action as well, of course, and that action is very strong, both in terms of the animation and the pacing. These are battles that didn’t need to fit between ad bumpers or find good cuts, and it shows.
On the popcorn side, one could probably take umbrage to at least some of the “everything” that War on Geminar wants to show us. Half a season of school life with no robot action? Kenshi getting chased by the female student body for episodes on end with no seeming rhyme nor reason? This much fanservice with this little excuse? There’s a certain lack of shame in War on Geminar that you’re either going to find charming or annoying as hell. Me? I find it charming.
War on Geminar knows exactly what it wants to be. It does want to be a good fantasy epic, but more than that it wants to be fun. It wants to be a crowd-pleaser. It wants to serve the audience what they want to see, and it knows that its core audience is young men interested in seeing some good-looking girls. So of course we have the absurdly sexy impractical pilot suits for the lopsidedly-female mech pilots. Of course we have the constant harem shenanigans that use and abuse poor Kenshi. Of course there are more and more girls so that there’s a flavor for everyone on screen some times. I went over Lashara and Kyaia, and they’re quite round even if Kyaia at least also plays an archetype, but there are of course more. Want a shrinking violet with a small voice? Yukine has you covered. Confident yet secretly vulnerable woman of some maturity? That’s Aura. Wrench wench? Wahanly sells it all the way. Prim and proper, you’re probably going for Maria. Busty, affectionate, and overtly sexual? You have your choice of Mexiah, or Maria’s mom. Into the angry disdainful one for whatever reason? They type-cast the student council president before you even thought of it. Most of those aren’t entirely devoid of depth either.
In terms of the plot, it’s a pretty basic fantasy epic. Take our time getting to know a world of magical wonder, then contend with some jerk trying to use the ancient ultimate power to take over the world. But it’s a well-executed version of that story. We get the time to know the world, and the focus to understand the kind of damage that Babalun is doing. The main villain himself is not exactly the most compelling or studied of figures, but that’s made up a good deal with Dagmyer.
Yeah, I left him off before, but he’s actually in an interesting case for a villain. On one side, he’s pretty aloof and reasonably nasty to people, so I think you can hate him as you’re supposed to hate the forward-facing baddie pretty easily and without reservation. At the same time, he’s given some solid motivations for his villainy. Dagmyer lives in a world where he’s constantly held back from utilizing his awesome power because, like all male Seikishi, he’s too valuable as a breeding stud to actually be expected to do anything and certainly not to be allowed freedom in terms of his future, romantic or otherwise. It’s little wonder that he gets most of the other males of his class to join up with him.
Similar to the sympathetic motivation, it’s also clear that Dagmyer has personal standards and even a moral compass… but that he ignores them because of his overbearing father and burning need (whether enforced by said father or not) to achieve his ends. He prefers military targets, and when plans come up to do really dirty things he gives them the green light but clearly doesn’t actually like it. When one of his friends dies, he takes it pretty hard. Dagmyer knows to an extent what the right thing is, but he feels like he needs to do otherwise.
This is not to say that he’s a good kid in a bad situation. He’s not. The way he uses and abuses Kyaia and the henchwoman who’s into him, as well as his deep wellspring of spite towards Kenshi and willingness to murder people who get in his way… these are all top villainous hallmarks, and they win out in his portrayal. It’s not that he’s somehow good, he’s just given a reasonable level of humanity; we see a bad person rather than a cackling demon.
Until the final episode, Babalun does very little. He only appears for more than a couple seconds at a time and possibly not even a minute in total until the fall of the Holy Land, and even after that usually stays off screen, being ominous. Thus, most of the weight of the prime antagonist role has to fall to Dagmyer, and in his shift from school bully to traitorous schemer, he has that covered through all phases of the show.
All of this actually makes War on Geminar a little tough to rate. It doesn’t aim that high… most of the time. But it’s more that it wants to deliberately hit lower targets as well as the high ones. For every epic battle or well-done emotional scene, there’s got to be an idiot moment from Kenshi, a slice of cheesecake, or the like.
Normally, I end up restricting shows with lesser ambitions to the B bracket, but the more I mull it over, the more I think War on Geminar’s ambitions aren’t actually that low. It’s not slipping us the popcorn-munching goodness at the expense of the legitimately strong parts, it’s getting everything out there, and in a package that feels rather balanced.
Thus, I’m going to err on the high side for this one and award Tenchi Muyo! War on Geminar an A. I don’t think I could really ask for more out of what this thing wanted to be. There are faults Some of the back-loaded exposition could have been delivered a little more smoothly throughout the show, but it was fairly set up. Babalun could have been a more compelling antagonist, but he had Dagmyer to cover for him. But none of that takes away too much from what War on Geminar really is: a surf-and-turf pairing that nearly perfects what the Fantasy-Isekai-Harem genre cluster could have been before it was cast in the mold of the endlessly reprocessed pieces we see today. If you’ve got any interest in that sort of concoction, do yourself a favor and look up War on Geminar.