Sometimes I feel like I don’t crack into enough vintage anime on this blog. Before streaming, before DVR, the industry for basically all things television was a different place, and that includes the anime industry as well. I’ve touched on 90’s shows before like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Record of Lodoss War, but I haven’t really taken a deep dive into a show that old that often.
Well, seeing as it’s Mecha March and I’m fresh out of model kit anime to assemble, let’s work to course correct that just a little bit with the 1983 vintage Mecha anime, Armored Trooper Votoms.
Armored Trooper Votoms takes place at the end of a period of interstellar war between the forces of Gilgamesh and Balarant. Here, just before the formal fighting ends, special forces operative Chirico is included in a raid against one of his side’s own facilities, where the vital MacGuffin of a mystery woman in a pod is stolen. Burned by his squad and tortured by his government, Gilgamesh, for information he doesn’t have, Chirico ends up busting out and ending up on the run from pretty much everybody in known space.
Chirico ends up in the hopelessly corrupt and very 80’s future city of Uoodo. Initially, he goes to ground, but getting set upon by a gang of slaving bikers ends up leading to, when he escapes from them, rearming as a mech pilot to participate in the city’s underground gladiatorial contests. This catches the attention of some of his old squad, which include the Chief of Police and a priest, but on the other hand gets him in good with a small band of friendly rogues.
These are Gotho (the old guy), Vanilla (the loudmouth), and Coconna (the girl, and also a loudmouth). The three of them work together pretty much as allies of convenience, with the shared goal of getting rich, mostly with schemes involving either the gladiatorial matches or the local precious resource, a teal stone called Jijirium, which was initially mined by the bikers’ slaves until the corrupt cops took over the racket.
What Chirico wants, though, is answers. Fighting his way into higher security areas to get them, he encounters the woman from the pod, known as “The Prototype”, again, and begins to suspect that she’s the heart of the matter, and also somehow tied to the Jijirium racket.
As Chirico continues to clash with the police looking for answers about the conspiracy behind them, we learn that the Prototype is specifically a prototype “Perfect Soldier”, and as you would expect from that, she’s pretty strong in a mech-to-mech battle. However, she seems to have imprinted on Chirico, due to the fact he opened her pod when he found it, and starts going against the conspiracy’s commands, ultimately teaming up with him after he gets the better of her while raiding police HQ
As the two of them try to escape, Chirico even, seemingly on instinct, dubs her with a name: Fyana, when she did not otherwise have a human name. Though the conspiracy manages to take her back, it seems their troubles are hardly at an end. The proper military, tracing Chirico in the belief that he’d know about the stolen prototype, sends in a full armored squad to basically raze the city until they get what they want.
In the end, Uoodo crumbles and burns, the Chief of Police gets dead, and the Priest from the conspiracy group (known as the Society) gets away with Fyana, who offered a cryptic comment about dying if she didn’t go with them.
This is the definitive end of the first arc of Votoms. After thirteen episodes, we skip three months ahead to a different sub setting, with Chirico working as a legitimate mercenary in a war-torn jungle hellhole called Kummen. Gotho appears in Space Veitnam as well, as a reasonably well-placed arms dealer, while Vanilla runs a night club where Coconna works.
While Kummen is both in a state of war with the overall planetary government and in a civil war, it’s the latter the mercenary outfit fights, hunting reactionary guerrilla insurgents led by the nation’s prince. While some of the superiors seem reasonable, Chirico’s immediate commanding officer is Kan Yu, who is pretty much an abusive, paranoid piece of human scum.
In the struggle, Chirico encounters a Perfect Soldier on the battlefield, but it turns out to not be Fyana. Rather, it’s a second (male) Perfect Soldier, Ypsilon, who is also there because the priest from the Society, Borough, is backing the insurgents. Chirico does eventually find that Fyana is there too, and she even helps him escape from captivity at the hands of the insurgents.
The struggle is about as much of a quagmire as you’d expect, until the official Kummen forces sign a cease-fire with the planetary government, spelling the beginning of the end for the insurgency. As everything starts to burn, Chirico has one mission for himself: get Fyana and get out. This puts him at odds with Kan Yu, who wants to capture a Perfect Soldier for fortune and glory, as well as the more reasonable commanders and planetary forces who also want as much.
Helping carry this arc are a few of Chirico’s mercenary buddies, who have their own personas and in the case of one of them, Pol Potaria, even his own plot (namely that his childhood friend and possible crush is now an Insurgent, and that he had a past with the prince and now seeks said man’s head above all else). Seeing as the three recurring helpers are staying at home, with the partial exception of Vanilla enlisting after an insurgent raid burns down his bar, they’re quite welcome.
In the end, Chirico manages to be part of the raid on the palace as it falls. Pol’s story comes to a tragic close as he loses his sweetheart and learns that the prince led the uprising in order for it to lose and in fact didn’t betray his ideals, and Chirico and Fyana manage to help each other escape with Kan Yu and Borough getting dead along the way and Ypsilon’s fate initially unknown.
Having taken an escape shuttle to orbit, the two, now admitting they love each other, come to in a mysterious derelict autopiloting through space, into the territory of their world’s enemy in the war that ended at the start of the show. The ship is otherwise deserted, but a video of the war crimes and brutality Chirico’s past squad committed plays constantly, assaulting Chirico with his inner demons just as he thought he might find some other life, and as some sort of fever seems to overtake him. The locals don’t take kindly to the intrusion, and while Chirico and Fyana fight them off the degree of success they have at that just lets the new military know they’re dealing with insanely valuable Perfect Soldiers.
Eventually, the Society gets involved, with Ypsilon now working under some wormy twin scientist types. They destroy the military pursuers and down the ship on a desolate world, where Ypsilon leads the charge just in time for Chirico to get his groove back and fight alongside Fyana. Eventually, they ditch the crashed ship and get a good head start, running into some scrap salvagers on this ruined world of Sunsa… who naturally know Gotho, Vanilla, and Coconna, getting those three back into the story. By virtue of Chirico’s old squad having a very dark history on the planet, this ends with a flight across the desert and eventual capture by the forces of that rival space power… with the military guy who had been hounding Chirico now defected to them. We get some hints that he’s not on the level and that Chirico might be special other than pure skill, but otherwise the arc alternates between pitched battles and the survival situations the results of each pitched battle put the characters in, such as Fyana nearly dying from lack of Jijirium or Ypsilon and Chirico getting trapped underground and having to work together for an episode before going back to trying to kill each other.
The arc ends with the final duel between Ypsilon and Chirico, in which it’s said that despite his lack of Jijirium-consuming enhancements, Chirico himself qualifies as a Perfect Soldier. After Ypsilon’s defeat, he’s even given a lead on information about that, being told to go to the planet Quent to learn the truth. Thus, he embarks into the next arc of the show alone.
Quent is a desert world that’s said to produce superior soldiers, with “Quentmen” being legendary mercenaries. Chirico met one back in Kummen, and teams up with him to search for the truth on his home planet. At the same time, the Society is acting directly. With Ypsilon dead, the twins are now the bottom of the evil ladder, with the society’s master apparent directly above them and deeply concerned about Quent. Apparently its natives once had the power to rule the Galaxy, despite the fact that they’re pretty much equivalent to the Fremen now.
We get some more of Quent’s history, how they had a golden age spanning millenia until three thousand years before the present, when supposed “Gods” arrived intending to remake the people of Quent into new forms. They drove off the alleged gods and abandoned much of their technological ways out of fear of the augmentation technology. As Chirico digs deeper, he encounters active ancient Quent ultra-tech. It initially takes the form of a teleporter, but when the Balarant military arrive, still led by the defector, he reveals that his true master is a great intelligence of some sort that seems to exist in Quent, and that has special interest in Chirico. Usefully, this re-unites us with Fyana.
As the Quent tech seems to re-awaken, Balarant, Gilgamesh (with the trio of usual suspects in their possession), and the Society all have their eyes on it. At the same time, the mysterious intelligence behind both the Society and the defector, called Wiseman, draws Chirico to its convenient local Death Star sized lair. There it selects Chirico, apparently born a superhuman like unto a perfect soldier, as its successor to rule the Galaxy. Which… he accepts. The Society cult leader gets the axe and Chirico dons his best villain scowl with the scientist twins as his new underlings.
The threat of Wiseman and Overmen (which are apparently born when a civilization reaches a certain point, even without engineering. Hence, Chirico) that seem to line up with the fall of Quent from prominence gets the formerly warring powers to unite against it, and thus tacitly against Chirico. He takes what resources he has and makes for Quent, where Wiseman’s true existence waits to pass on all its ultimate power.
When Chirico gets there, he has to fight through two combined armies, and even come to blows with Fyana. But, at the last moment, when he’s climbed into the very chamber that acts as Wiseman’s brain (Wiseman being an intellect uploaded to hyper-advanced computers), Chirico betrays Wiseman, refusing to become the successor and shutting Wiseman down block by block like the HAL-9000 clone he is. The turncoat (Wiseman’s last loyal servant) arrives, as does Fyana, who Chirico naturally didn’t shoot to kill, and Chirico completes the process of killing what passes for God in this galaxy. This is heralded to the rest of the universe with what at least appears to be a Quent-shattering kaboom
A year later, Gilgamesh and Balarant seem ready to go back to war. However, the three stooges and their Quentman friend are alive and well. They steal a ship and it’s revealed that Fyana and Chirico are with them, sealed in a pod and by their own wishes set to slumber in the depths of space until such a time as they can be awakened to a galaxy without war, since otherwise the powers of combat would try to use them over and over. Thus ends Armored Trooper Votoms.
At least, thus it mostly ends: Votoms is actually something of a franchise, with recaps, prequels, interquels, and spinoffs as well as at least a couple proper sequels. Most of these are OVAs or short OVA series, with a couple that manage full runs among the lot… but all of them are beyond the scope of this review. A roundup of the extended Votoms-verse might be an interesting feature article down the road, but after fifty-two episodes of Votoms proper, I think I’m ready to put this entry to bed.
Now, you might think when I say those words that Votoms didn’t sound like it was a 52-episode marathon… and you would kind of be right. Armored Trooper Votoms is an old show, the oldest one I’ve reviewed to date, and one way in which it shows that age is that it was written and produced for an audience that the creators couldn’t expect to have home recording devices, much less the ability to binge watch back episodes whenever they wanted. This was an era of television where if you missed an episode you just outright missed that episode, and thus unless you were lucky and caught it in syndication later you’d just be out that bit.
Votoms tells a clear, consistent story with a well-defined beginning and end, but as a means of kowtowing to the fact that you couldn’t expect your audience to necessarily tune in every week for an entire year, it tells it in such a way that almost any single episode is expendable. The big arc enders, particularly the final run with Wiseman, are something of an exception. But, for the majority of the show, if you have the episode that comes before and the one that comes after in a storytelling sense you can pretty much infer what happened in the one you missed and not be locked out on continuity. Thus, viewers could continue to watch the show and wouldn’t be lost after just one time when they couldn’t sit down for the time slot. There are even a few recaps scattered in that fifty-two episode run to help folks along who might have missed a great deal more, and each episode in the Uoodo arc opens with a narration explaining the setting and story thusfar in very broad terms.
Because of this, the story of Armored Trooper Votoms could be comfortably retold in the 24-episode format of a modern two-cour anime. That would give six episodes for each of the major arcs, though clever writers might steal an episode or two from Uoodo, Kummen, or particularly the Lost in Space/Sunsa arc in order to fill out the Quent/Wiseman arc a little better. I’m even convinced that if the writers were good and clever they could probably do it in twelve, though at that point something would have to give – most likely Sunsa, punching Ypsilon’s ticket in Kummen and heading straight from there to Quent. There would be challenges to telling Votoms in twelve episodes, like building chemistry between Chirico and Fyana or really breathing in the atmosphere of each setting, but it seems broadly possible
The age also shows in other ways. The animation is very different than anything you’d see now. I can’t say it looks bad or cheap (mostly because there are outright different standards in play), but characters move in very different ways, there are moments of clear budget save because every frame needed to be drawn by hand and those frames weren’t important, and the show isn’t afraid to show things like sketch lines. It’s more concerned about creating the impression and emotion of its scenes than in relating a literal and accurate picture a lot of the times.
The characters are also… products of their times. We spend fifty-two episodes, more or less, with Chirico, Fyana, Gotho, Vanilla, Coconna, and the various antagonists. But despite that, a number of them, perhaps particularly the most central characters, stay oddly static. I guess this could tie back to that “you could miss any one episode and be fine” aspect. Under such a paradigm you can’t do the same kind of deep-diving person-changing episodes that you’d see in more modern shows. I want to compare Votoms here with Gundam Build Divers Re:RISE that I reviewed last week. In Re:RISE, Par was able to overcome his fears in a really triumphant moment, but if you missed that episode you might be wondering (even if you think it’s a good change) why he’s not a wimp any longer. In Votoms, Chirico starts out the show taciturn and brooding, and while some good work is done in individual episodes to look into his damaged psyche and his scars as a surviving soldier, it’s not a matter of changing who he is going forward but rather explaining and expounding on who he’s always been. Chirico can’t really reach an epiphany and turn over a new leaf for most of the show because you’d risk stranding people.
But conspiracy theories about the needs of the oldschool TV format aside, the characters do skew towards the archetypes, and archetypes that might not play so well to a modern crowd. Vanilla is loud, shrill, and somewhat wormy. Coconna is loud, shrill, and easily excitable but at least good-hearted. Gotho at least isn’t loud and shrill, but he’s little aside from “conniving old guy of the team”. I actually think the villains and incidentals might get better work at times. Pol Potaria has a whole dang arc, but he’s allowed to have it because he doesn’t matter to the long run. Ypsilon is a kind of fascinating study when you get down to it, how his hate shapes him and evolves over time, but no matter what he’s always going to be a big bad boss enemy for Chirico to fight. They’re bonuses for the folks who follow along the whole way, not necessities for people to follow along.
And then we have Fyana. Poor Fyana. I’m sure by the standards of 1983 she was meant to be a strong, willful, powerful woman, and she does at least get a couple scenes where she kicks ass in an AT, but most of her involvement in the story is getting held by various forces and crying out for Chirico in various shades of distress, because those were the tools the writers had to show that she cared. She has some good lines in the otherwise rather padded third arc about what being a Perfect Soldier would seem to mean to her but again we can’t evolve her too much, so she largely stays in the emotional place she existed in during the Kummen arc, when she’d gained enough will of her own apart from her masters to be a damsel in distress for Chirico.
And, I hate to admit it, but the chemistry between the two leads is kind of forced. It’s forced the same way you see in a lot of classic action movies. You’ve got a dude, you’ve got a chick, obviously they’re going to be an item. You can excuse a lot of Fyana’s interest in Chirico because she did imprint on him before her proper life and memory even began, but it’s unclear why Chirico is so driven to her as a person. At the end Wiseman claims to have seeded Chirico’s interest in Fyana and even slipped him the name across space and time, but Chirico denies that could be the case, so what do we believe? Was he matchmade by the digital ghost of an evil galactic conqueror, awestruck by canonically being an 18-year-old who had probably never had room in his life for a lustful thought when he first came across her literally tailor-made perfection, or was there something in their interactions that was supposed to sign for positive regard?
I will say, reminding myself that Chirico is supposed to be 18 (the art style makes him look much older than most modern Anime 18-year-olds would look) does remind me of some of his better character moments: throughout Uoodo and Kummen he always gruffly refuses alcoholic drinks, taking only coffee, and most seem to regard this as an asocial tough guy thing. Trapped on the spaceship with Fyana, they share some wine and he absolutely gags on it and wonders how people drink the stuff. It’s a nice moment of humanity for a character who is (deliberately) sometimes kind of short on it.
So, let’s get away from those aspects for a moment and talk about the most important part of Armored Trooper Votoms for Mecha March – the mechas! The Armored Troopers (ATs, or VOTOMS as they’re shockingly rarely called) are kind of the pinnacle of the Real Robot idea and ideal. Yeah, they’re piloted humanoid robots, but on the other hand they are 100% mass-produced war-machines. There’s no mythologizing of the robot, or placing it on a pedestal. They’re effective parts of an armed forces plan, and we’re brought to believe they are effective and reasonable by the way the show is written, displaying their maneuverability and firepower as well as their resistance to light arms (they tend to explode in fireballs to heavier ordinance, like everything else in this show). It’s believable that we are dealing with all-terrain combat vehicles, able to swim, stomp across rough terrain, skate down roads with the wheels built into their feet, maneuver in space with special little thruster backpacks, and so on.
And they’re everywhere. They’re scrap. They lose arms and legs. They run out of ammo, and can be messed with if their scopes get shot out or punched into a twisted mess. If your AT gets wrecked (and you manage to not explode), you can get your rear end into another one, because these things are being mass produced in a variety of models across the galaxy, some best recognized by their make and nationality while others are more tailored to their environment of operation. I’m not sure the ATs of Votoms are strictly the realest of Real Robots, but they’re certainly up there.
As a consequence of this, there’s a lot of action in Votoms that’s not the staple robot-on-robot fighting. The characters, even badasses like Chirico and the Perfect Soldiers, hide around corners, abuse terrain, and have to fight dirty and make gambits in order to survive. Penetrating hits and metal-shattering damage are the order of the day, so most fights can’t go on too long and those that do are largely games of cat and mouse rather than stand-up punchfests. The most brutal drag-out fights can get at least somewhat like that, but by the end everything is limping to emphasize what a terrible battle it’s been. And, there are plenty of your action set pieces where one or both sides aren’t even in the robots, they’re just fighting as soldiers or rogues or with ships or other war machines.
When it comes to the story, I’ve mentioned before that there are four major arcs that are fairly discrete from each other. They have different themes and different environments. Even when we go from the desert hellscape of Sunsa to the deserts of Quent they’re extremely different deserts with fully removed vibes from each other. This gives a sense that Votoms is kind of four shows: The one about bloodsport and crime in a seedy cyberpunk underworld, the Space Vietnam scenario, a battery of chase sequences, and finally a more mystery-laden setup. They show inspirations from different science fiction hallmarks as well… but they’re all Votoms. It is one story. The transitions aren’t always graceful and the chunking is kind of transparent, the most jarring being the jump to Kummen where everybody but Chirico has different design sheets and roles, but I can’t say there isn’t this very solid thread. The opening episode is about the Perfect Soldier Prototype. Act 1 is dedicated to finding her. Act 2 is dedicated to freeing her. Act 3 is about getting to know her, and facing up to the true meaning of a “Perfect Soldier” by fighting Ypsilon for real. The fourth and final act puts Fyana out of focus, but zeroes in on the truth of the Perfect Soldier and what it means to be human or something more than human.
That is the main thread. That is the main theme. Armored Trooper Votoms is about the idea of the Perfect Soldier, a brutal “Overman” or super-human and why that would be a bad and painful thing.
In a sense, this is why I thought the show really finished strong with the Quent arc: it addressed its core, and it addressed it rather well. Sure, it clearly stole quite a lot from Dune for that last arc, in terms of the environment of Quent and the mutterings about destined supermen that could save and/or destroy the galaxy, but with the setup to get there, Dune becomes an oddly fitting place to steal from.
At the end of it all, I do have to grade Armored Trooper Votoms, and that’s a difficult thing. It’s out of the “strike zone” where I can really compare it to the modern fare that’s most of what I review and, let’s face it, most of what’s going to get watched these days. But I didn’t start this blog to follow up on the latest seasonals and nothing else, I started it to look at anime – any anime – and hold it up to more-or-less fresh eyes.
That said, I will be spotting Votoms a couple of points. I’m not going to hold the bloat to a 52 episode running time against it as much as I would an anime that debuted in 2024, and I’m going to lean generous if I feel like I’m on the edge. Which I’m mentioning because I kind of did feel that. I’m awarding Armored Trooper Votoms a B+, the plus partially in recognition of its age. It’s got solid action and great environments and the plot, while it has its ups and downs, I’d ultimately call well-handled. At the end of it all, it kept me entertained for fifty-two solid episodes despite the bloat involved in that, which has to be worth something. If you’ve got some time to kill, check out Armored Trooper Votoms.