Since it seems I’m going vintage for the better part of this year’s mecha offerings, let’s take a look at 1999’s Infinite Ryvius. And quickly, before saying that a show that continued its first run into 2000 counts as vintage causes my knees to start hurting.
Taking place in a future where a bizarre and catastrophic event has caused space in the colonized Solar System to start operating more like an ocean (with a gravitational anomaly called the Geduld Sea presenting a “surface” and “depths” that can crush ships unable to traverse such realms, and mysterious line-of-sight blocking clouds), Infinite Ryvius is less a true Mecha show and more… a sci-fi show with a Mecha in it. We’ll get there, but the focus is more on a cool ship than an awesome robot. To be fair, Super Dimension Fortress Macross was similarly focused on a titular ship and we don’t disqualify it from Mecha genre status.
We don’t start out on the Ryvius, though. In fact, we take quite a few episodes to get there. We begin, instead, on a training vessel where a load of kids and young adults are practicing to be pilots of various sorts. Or flight attendants, in the case of most of the girls. We check in with some of the loads and loads of characters this show has – particularly main character Kouji Aiba, his childhood friend with obvious and seemingly unwanted crush Aoi Housen, his roommate Ikumi Oze, and Ikumi’s girlfriend-apparent Kozue Izumi. Then we’ve got the elite senior class, Zwei, and their ace apparent Juli Bahana. Also, a group of delinquent thugs led by a dude called Airs Blue. And a host of supporting cast who may or may not figure later like the teachers, a gang of disguised terrorists, and a whole web of friends, acquaintances, and occasionally enemies.
But, there are three important names who I have not yet called. For starters we have not one, but two mysterious waifs of different flavors! The more normal one is Fina S. Shinozaki, who at least seems to be a flesh and blood human. The other is eventually known as Neeya, and seems to be some kind of weird psychic borderline-personality presence strongly associated with the ship – or rather, with Ryvius. Again, we’ll get there.
And, I’ve put this off as long as I can, but there’s also Kouji’s little brother, Yuuki. He may be the younger of the two but he’s also a prodigy, physically stronger, and constantly unreasonably angry all the time, particularly at his brother, who he seems to beat black, blue, and bloody as a hobby.
Getting on with the plot, he’s introduced coldly breaking up with his girlfriend. When sabotage from those terrorists causes the training ship to start to sink, he pummels Kouji to a pulp because, let me check… Kouji wanted to help someone else, and Kouji being a good person makes Yuuki mad. He later declares, when Kouji is missing from the evacuation point, that everyone would be better off if Kouji died, and when Kouji and Ikumi show up having rescued Fina from a section of the ship that was being purged to give the core more time to escape sinking into the Geduld Sea, he gets mad that his brother is alive and even madder, seemingly, that the dude did a good deed.
In addition to this one-sided grudge that borders on card-carrying villainy, he also shirks work when everyone needs to haul together in order to get the ship evacuated safely and in good time, pushing his share off on Kouji who thanklessly does the work of two.
I hate this little twerp. He’s consumed with so much blind hatred you’d think he came from the 41st millennium, except if he did he probably would have been capped by a commissar sooner rather than later given his problems with authority of any kind and the fact that said hatred is directed at his own. And there is no reason given pretty much at all for many episodes and several beatings. He seems to pretty much just operate on “See brother? Find a pretense to beat the tar out of him.” And there’s no excuse he really could be given that’s sufficient, given that we see that Kouji is basically a decent person. When we do finally start getting answers it seems to be that Kouji took up a fatherly role when their parents divorced and… Yuuki hates that, and thus interprets every breath Kouji takes as a drubbing offense, with a side of generally hating anything kind, generous, good, or that might accidentally tell him what to do in the world.
So, to tell it more consistently, the terrorists are revealed to have offered the training ship’s course, causing it to sink. As it goes down, the responsible adults – all of them – EVA in order to help the “get everyone on the escape ship and let them escape” plan, and they die doing it so that this will be a cast of nothing but kids for the foreseeable future. Things keep going from bad to worse, Kouji rescues Fina and seems immediately smitten with her, and after quite a few episodes we get the last desperate moment where it seems like the escape ship is going to be destroyed, only for the people’s desperation (mostly Kouji’s) to reach Neeya, who does space magic. This reveals that the core of the old training ship hid another ship, the Ryvius, which given its superior capabilities like a working generator, more space, and more supplies, the kids all move into.
The Ryvius seems to be the show’s MacGuffin, where various shadowy government-adjacent forces want to either acquire or destroy it, denying the kids rescue as they pursue that goal. You know, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar (metaphorically speaking), you’d think any of these raiding teams could have tendered rescue and made off with the ship, given that all the adults who might actually know its secrets are dead. But, whatever, the plot must go on.
In any case, they escape from pursuers a couple of times before Airs decides to go ahead and use his gang to coup Zwei. He lets Juli and the other competent members stay, and also brings on Kouji and Fina because they’re convenient. Airs’s main order of business is to get folks heads out of their asses to realize they may have to fight to live, which means getting the mecha, called the Vital Guarder, up and running.
He also beats the crap out of Yuuki, which is kind of satisfying, even if he does give Yuuki an important job due to the skills Yuuki has.
Soon enough, as the kids arrive at Mars, they’re forced to make a great deal of use of it in a multi-episode sequence, where we’re threatened with mutiny by Yuuki (who is the Vital Guarder’s prime pilot) and the rest of team Vital Guarder. Turns out they needn’t have worried, it was just a couple of jerks who are promptly dealt with. As for the actual enemies… well, the Vital Guarder clears that up pretty handily
So that leaves the kids in orbit of a populated planet where they can broadcast their call to rescue for the locals and get picked up. Time for a party!
Of note by party time, Airs seems to have a weird thing towards Juli. Kouji is busy putting the moves on Fina, of course. We do learn that she’s a member of a particular sect who believes in “severing the past with your own hands”, but that’s a special note that will help us later. For now, we get some odd scenes with her, and a very good slow dance moment with Kouji. Also, Yuuki despises her for some reason and warns Kouji to stay away without explaining anything about why he might dislike her. Which is a plus for her in my book, of course.
Romantic entanglements are interrupted by a broadcast from Mars, alerting the world to the presence of the terrorist vessel Ryvius. So I guess we can cross off an easy rescue. Oops. Airs, who opted to spend the party alone on the bridge… doesn’t take the news very well.
In the wake of this, Airs lays in a course for a moon of Saturn where a breakaway colony has its own independent government. It’s later revealed he’s the son of an important person in said Space North Korea sort of place
Airs’s regime starts to look a little more “Lord of the Flies” as basically everyone on the ship enters either incredible jerk mode or victim mode, with the most consistently decent of the main characters (Kouji, Aoi, Ikumi, Kozue, Juli, and to an extent Fina) being the sole exemptions. Rationing, and every sort of treachery surrounding it, are the main focus as Ryvius heads to the outer solar system.
In the process, at least the romantic entanglements move forward, with Ikumi and Kozue getting a kiss, while Aoi literally falls into one with Kouji. As for Kouji’s stake…
Fina seems quite eager to have him, including sharing her philosophy that makes her come off as… a little stranger. This would seem to be sewn up, but if the writers going for the accidental kiss with Aoi didn’t say enough, when the enemy attacks and Kouji thinks he’s going to die, life flashing before his eyes, he finds that the memories that come to him are all about Aoi. He even mumbles her name in delirium so you know it’s serious.
Speaking of enemies, enemies attack! At this point, pretty much all humanity is Ryvius’s enemy, of course, though we do see enough of their manipulations to know there are at least two separate factions with separate agendas. But, importantly, they’re confronted by a next-gen ship with its own Vital Guarder equivalent, promising a battle that the Ryvius and its ultra-tech don’t simply win.
The next such battle is particularly rough on Airs. As things go against Ryvius, Airs decides to take over the Vital Guarder’s support ship and use it to flee to his home moon of Hyperion, abandoning everyone not on said ship to die. However, before he can force this plan at gunpoint, he realizes that he doesn’t have a valid destination, as the shadowy government forces with their Ryvius-class ship have gone ahead and given Hyperion the Alderaan treatment, reducing it to rubble.
If that wasn’t bad enough, some of the bridge crew broadcaster Airs’s treachery to the entirety of the Ryvius, causing a revolution to spring up. All of the gang are taken prisoner, except for Airs himself who nobody is willing to rush because, well, he’s got a gun. He escapes into the bowels of the ship.
Thus, Juli is next elected captain, but as she’s forced to take the reins she finds that while she’s an excellent resolver of conflicts she’s not exactly the decisive leader type. She tries to fix some of the problems aboard, but without a firm hand, things fester. Ultimately, the situation boils over in the next battle with an enemy Ryvius-class ship, where Juli kind of shuts down.
While the battle is ongoing, we have an important note for Kozue. She’d been… not exactly discrete with her kitchen co-workers about her boyfriend (Ikumi) and they’d been seen in several scenes to really resent her having had the easy life before and… mostly just for existing thereafter. The bullying reaches a boiling point during the battle when she stands up for herself and Ikumi, and the girls gang up on her and drag her off, much to the horror of the one co-worker who was actually a friend.
We’re never shown or told exactly what happens to her. We know she comes away with injuries, but this is treated much more seriously than any of the many times that Kouji is beaten up, either by his brother or by similar resentful mobs. Given the degree to which she’s broken by this and how far Ikumi goes (as well as the brief shot of all the people he’s beaten up over the incident – mostly not girls), I kind of assume the jealous girls had her gang raped as well as beaten. Which is dark as heck and probably better to not be explicit text, even if it’s not exactly difficult to read between the lines.
Notice: Kouji in particularly bad shape after his seventy-third time being mugged warrants no similar sympathy.
Now, Ryvius runs on a lot of lines at once so it takes a while, but the big takeaway from this is that Ikumi decides to take the Vital Guarder under his command and threaten Ryvius that he’ll mess ’em up good if folks can’t play nice. Most of Zwei (less resigned captain Juli) supports him, and he launches a dictatorial police state aboard the ship in order to stop the out-of-control violence until they can get to their new destination (Fina’s home moon, Titania, orbiting Uranus).
As this builds, we do get other character arcs but we also start… wasting a good deal of time. In the last arc of the show here, half or more of some episodes will be blown on recap. There’s always some new material, but it kills the pacing and makes you feel, at times, like you’re watching a crummy clip show episode except since there is new stuff buried in there, you have to keep watching.
It’s clear that despite being booked for 26 episodes, Ryvius didn’t have 26 episodes of material. I doubt it was actually the budget, despite the clear save of using clips – rather, there was not enough story to fill out that entire running time; it probably could have told everything in 23 instead, forcing us to deal with these recaps to pad it out.
So aside from that waste, we also have a staggeringly strangely handled little emotional sequence. Aoi, who had previously been the most steady and sane of the main cast, starts breaking down into a weepy helpless wreck who can’t handle being alone after getting called out by a post, erm, incident Kozue.
This makes Kouji start to get protective of her, and fair enough he’s a decent chap and always has been, but recall, he’d been pretty set on Fina and despite being generally meek and decent, Aoi is the one person he was actually sharp with other than grudging his brother for obvious reasons, throughout the vast majority of the show treating her every presence and overture as a nuisance. And I dare say it didn’t feel tsundere of him, the hostility felt very genuine and really convinced me that she was actually unwanted.
Sure there was the weird “life flashed before his eyes and it was full of Aoi” thing, but that was no less shoehorned then Kouji, now, breaking up with Fina and, while soothing Aoi of a crying breakdown where she’s clearly lost her grip on reality, being very strongly implied to get an H-scene on with her.
Speaking of that crying breakdown, Fina doesn’t seem to take being broken up with very well. To Kouji’s face she just swears she’ll win him back, but then she has a goon try to murder Aoi, which is interrupted but the fear from which led to her pre-nookie insane breakdown. So, on this ship full of people going absolutely insane, add Fina turning full Yandere to the pot.
And let’s circle back to the dictatorship thing. I know what they’re going for – this is supposed to be like in Guilty Crown where Shu goes off the deep end after Hare’s death and becomes an evil little dictator for no reason, resulting in a huge amount of avoidable suffering. They even share the note of the formerly good guy dictator making the blindingly obvious mistake of trusting former serial offenders as his secret police.
But where Guilty Crown’s arc was even more insane than the creators wanted it to appear, the arc in Ryvius… actually, I think Ikumi has a point. The show harps on the new climate of fear and how it’s unreasonable to expect to truly eliminate violent crime from society. But this isn’t society, it’s a single boat with less than five hundred students on it. In all honesty, a little law and order, preventing daily muggings and worse, seems needed.
And after what happened to Kozue… okay, we don’t actually know what happened to her, but the implication is pretty blinding and if what I think happened, happened, frankly Ikumi takes a shockingly non-extreme stand. He beats up a hall full of guys and shouts at and, um, pours soap on the girl who didn’t help (little to no info on what happened to the jerk girls, but I think we saw them looking kind of beat up), but frankly if he threw a few malefactors out of a convenient air lock sans suits I don’t think he’d really be in the wrong.
Again, this is NOT a normal society, it is a crewed ship. Even pirates, who famously didn’t exactly abide a lot of laws, had a pretty stern code, forbidding things like, oh, fighting aboard (as Ikumi wises to forbid), stealing from the group or another person (rampant aboard Ryvius), or other malfeasance great or small, and they’d usually punish infractions pretty harshly with death, marooning (delayed death), or at least lots of lashes.
This was done to keep the crew happy, safe, and able to work. Purely practical, and not at all high-minded. The level of discipline and rules exhibited by pirates is not a particularly high bar and Ikumi is not even asking the kids to clear it on any term other than no more violent crimes.
After a one-month time-skip we’re told that incidents aboard are down to 3% of the month before Ikumi took over. Which, given that Kouji and the former Zwei leader who Airs deposed are still getting harassed and beaten on the regular by gangs of muggers, must mean that the pre-threat crime rate was beyond absurd.
In any case, during the barrage of recaps, we also get a barrage of lore dump! We see part of an episode from the point of view of the shadowy government forces. They need Ryvius, and they can’t just take the kids off of Ryvius as a peaceful rescue and then take Ryvius itself for reason not announced, but we do get to learn why they need Ryvius. Apparently, it’s one of six ships of its class, which get their gravity control power from the fact that space life forms (which may or may not have been seeded by aliens) were fished out of the depths of the weird gravity sea (at great cost in lives and material) and turned into ship cores. This is presumably what Neeya (who we have been seeing more of) is.
These ships drive their crews insane, which would explain a lot if it weren’t strongly hinted that Neeya is different, but humanity needs them because a second freaky space event is coming and this one will destroy the whole solar system, allowing humanity to survive only if they can master the gravity control tech. The timer of this is said to be about a thousand years.
Far be it from me to doubt the importance of work to ensure the survival of our entire species, but I don’t think that’s as urgent as the bad guys insisting they must kill a bunch of kids and be history’s greatest monsters about it seem to think it is. Maybe there’s the time to come at this with a methodical sort of approach? But no, it’s time to take down/in the Ryvius, no matter what. The next ship going after them even seems to have its own humanoid avatar like Neeya, rather than squiggly stuff in a tank like the others.
Now, while I think the gun was jumped on deciding that Ikumi had a bad idea, it turns bad real fast when he delegates to the wormy second in command who has been wormy second in command to everyone in charge of Ryvius this whole time. Wormy second institutes a ranking system by usefulness and then seals the “E-class” students away in their own section. With no light. Or food. When we were twenty-some days from theoretical salvation, not long all things considered. In fact, throughout the ending arc, wormy second tries to get people killed repeatedly and emphatically, far beyond his previous cold but logical demeanor’s persona.
With Neeya’s help, Kouji gets out of the sealed-off space to confront Ikumi. Ikumi is initially pretty reasonable, like he does not want anybody left to die and promises to get the barricades open, but matters escalate as Kouji demands that Ikumi repeal his new regime. This ends with Kouji finally drawing the gun Airs gave him in an earlier footnote, but then having it wrested from him, ultimately getting him shot by Ikumi. Perhaps if he expressed himself better or offered an alternative rather than just wailing about taking peoples’ freedoms, he might have done better.
Fina overhears this all on comms, including Kouji fighting with Yuuki over Aoi as part of the conversation and making it very clear he’s done with Fina in the process. Fina approaches him while he writhes on the floor after Ikumi and gang leave for the final battle, and suffice to say the Yandere is not happy
Neeya manifests to stop her and tell her that she can’t destroy her past no matter what she does, and we get some flashbacks as those words freak Fina out that she has murdered before, both her parents in backstory and one of her friends on Ryvius at the very least, in addition to having her cultists go after Aoi.
Neeya then carries Kouji back to Aoi, and it’s time for all the low-class folks to put their heads and skills together to save his life and tend his wounds. Mostly with Aoi screaming a lot of love confessions and how she doesn’t want him to die.
The battle against the last enemy ship… does not go well. Ikumi calls an evacuation to the “lift ship” that manages the Vital Guarder, leaving the much larger Ryvius behind. His instructions are to save everyone, but the wormy second manipulates it to not save the E-class folks… because reasons, I assume.
The abandoned Ryvius gets boarded, and mercifully the marines all have web guns rather than lethal guns and are rather confused at finding nothing but screaming children. While this is going on and the E-class trying to do their best to right the ship, Kouji and Aoi decide that they’re going to go over to the Lift Ship to confront Ikumi and the others.
While this is happening, the Vital Guarders of the Ryvius and their enemy fight, ending with both breaking free of control and ending up disabled. I guess Neeya won, as she manifests on the enemy bridge and gives the captain an attack of conscience so that he calls an end to the battle and orders the marines that all the people on Ryvius are innocent kids please rescue them.
Kouji initially locks Aoi out of his battle of ethics with Ikumi, but Neeya shows up to make sure she just arrives late rather than not at all. They have their talk, wormy guy is outed, Yuuki realizes he actually doesn’t hate his brother, and it ends with this tense standoff where Ikumi has a gun to Kouji’s head and Kouji basically dares him to fire, taking a bet on basic human goodness.
Basic human goodness does not win. The arrival of rescue marines wins, causing both Ikumi and the wormy second to have breakdowns, with Ikumi’s revealing that his protective obsession over Kozue stems from his tortured past where he had an incestuous relationship with his sister and she killed herself over it, leaving him guilty for not protecting his girl. Weirdly dark twist at the end of the game, but at least it’s over. Fina also has a breakdown here (completing the one from when she found Kouji shot, essentially), revealing her darkest side.
A year later, the Ryvius hasn’t been doing much, so the government scouts its kid crew, the only folks who seemed to successfully bond with something like Neeya, since learning from their abilities should help determine that path forward for humanity when thousand years and solar system go boom happen. Most of the old gang shows up: Kouji and Aoi (very much an item), the various Zwei characters, the fat kid (now much thinner) and his crush from Airs’s group, et cetera. Even Ikumi and the Wormy Second show up to atone for their previous misdeeds. This results in an actually happy reunion between Ikumi and Kozue that suggests they’ll be alright now that he can see her as her. Almost like that whole sister thing didn’t even happen.
Folks get beaten up by unruly crew for old times’ sake, Neeya says hello, and Kouji is given the chance to pick their first destination, setting the course for Fina’s home colony since he has a thing or two to say to her, whatever state she’s in.
Thus ends Infinite Ryvius.
So, this show was a lot of things.
As a sci-fi show, the space physics are beyond laughable… but at least they gave themselves a fig leaf of some weird science babble happening to create their “space is an ocean” scenario. Still, I think Spelljammer is easier to take seriously. Some of the elements of the show… do not wear their age well. For instance, while some of the soundtrack is nice, other bits sound like an Atari 2600 trying to emulate record scratches and barking dogs. Which was the style at the time, and in some ways can be a little charming with how dated it is, but it still doesn’t exactly sound good.
The female characters kind of get the short end of the stick, being light on agency and often dismissed as useless because female. This extends to the background extras as well. Pretty much the only human female who actually pretends to have agency in a positive sense is Aoi – Fina does little of interest until she turns yandere, Kozue is waiting for her prince charming Ikumi to save her and care for her, and Juli talks a good fight until Airs starts making moves on her at which point her knees and spine both go really weak.
I wouldn’t normally note something like this, since it might just be coincidence, but Juli really feels like she was outright assassinated by the writing in the second half. And Aoi, while the one who seems to get the best treatment (only having a real breakdown when threatened with death) does mostly contribute in love and emotional support. I guess she was planning on being a flight attendant so she’s short on practical skills, but that tells you the level we’re on.
Though, I suppose there’s an extent to which the male characters aren’t much better. Yuuki, I’ve made my opinion clear on, but he’s not the only persistent annoyance, as there are a bunch of tertiary folks chewing up screen time and several of them are pains, like the perpetually angry brat with the slow keeper who is perpetually angry and screams all his lines while running wild and out of control. Airs is a violent reprobate, Ikumi goes psycho and gets this last second dark background, Kouji while displaying inner strength is bandaged from his most recent beating more often than not, and a lot of the others are in one way or another unpleasant, troubling, or simply unhelpful, with such recurring extras as the creepy stalker who gets the girl by signing up to Ikumi’s enforcers and finding an excuse to taze his rival, or the guy who steals all his girlfriend’s ration points to bet on bot races.
With such wonderful examples of humanity, perhaps it’s no wonder the wormy second-in-command wanted to cull the herd.
Normally, this would make a show an absolute chore to watch, as the misanthropic hybrid of SDF Macross and Valvrave, but Infinite Ryvius rarely actually gets that bad. Even without the recap-dominated episodes, it’s a fairly slow-paced show that really lets you drink in the atmosphere, even in crisis situations. The sinking of the initial training station and evacuation to Ryvius takes a huge amount of time and covers a huge number of characters going through it, and is pretty emblematic of how the show runs. They didn’t have enough material for 26 episodes, I said before, but frankly you could tell the basic story in twelve; once folks are on the Ryvius there are basically four arcs, after each figure controlling the ship: Zwei, Airs, Juli, and Ikumi.
But you would lose a lot if you cut it down that harshly. The sprawl, oddly enough, is the greatest strength of Ryvius. You aren’t following a plot on rails when you watch it, you’re more hanging out on this ship and seeing all of what life aboard means – the good, the bad, and the frequently ugly truths (I’ll omit a long tangent on human nature and phrase it this way) of a bunch of kids in a survival situation.
That said, it’s also a tough show to recommend. If you’re looking for space battles and mecha action, it doesn’t have that many and they’re not great for a variety of reasons. Perfectly serviceable, but not great. If you want powerful emotional drama, I think some of that gets lost in the meandering.
It is, at least, an interesting show, especially considering it as “Vintage” material. It’s a snapshot of a different attitude, one that I don’t think would be made these days and don’t think would really catch on if it was made. It’s rough around the edges, but in some ways I think it was meant to be rough around the edges.
In the end, I think I’m going to give this a show an overly long-winded and very troubled C. It is, when you get down to it, a watchable show with good material in it, it’s just… not what it used to be.