Welcome returners and newcomers, to Macross March. I’ll be going through all the main TV series of Macross this month (possibly plus a little extra), and up today is the second entry, the extremely (xtremely?) 90’s edition called Macross 7
Macross 7 takes place in 2045, introducing itself by quickly going over the Super Dimension Fortress timeline, which seems to have ended in 2012. The show takes place on the titular Macross 7, the seventh Macross-class colony ship, bearing something like a million humans towards the galactic core in search of a new home. I guess the number of survivors dredged up from that Zentradi alpha strike was fairly sizable giving how many folks seem to get off Old Earth.
Since this isn’t too far out, we even have some legacy characters: Remember Max, from Super Dimension Fortress Macross? The ace kouhai of Hikaru who ended up happily married to a Zentradi ace after a bad case of love at first attempted murder? We start out with one of his and his wife’s kids, Mylene – who along with her pet kuriboh, Gubaba, has joined a rock band. Her problem (aside from not being able to quite wash the 80’s out of her pink hair, which is a common issue in the show) is that the band’s front man and show’s main character, Basara, apparently loves drama and is thus hanging out upside down for no reason before making a late entrance to his own concert. He makes his entrance and they start to perform, but then it turns out good ol’ Max has a problem of his own as an unknown hostile force prepares to attack.
Max commands his pilots out to fend off the enemy, but many of them get outmaneuvered and hit by a mysterious ray that leaves them in a zombie-like state, which probably has something to do with what the baddies talk about, claiming “Spiritia”. This means that the danger gets close enough the the colony ship that it disrupts the concert.
Basara thinks this is the moment he’s been waiting for. He runs and gets in his own robot and flies off into battle, broadcasting across military frequencies, disrupting formation, and shooting speakers into friend and foe alike so he can rock out at them. While the brass questions if he’s trying to be Minmay, the enemies this time around to not seem quite as easily impressed as the Zentradi and Basara is bummed when it seems like soldiers and alien menaces alike are more interested in fighting for survival or seeing to their comatose comrades in the former case than sticking around to listen to his song. That’s our first episode.
When I watched this for the first time, I probably should have been in pain or frustrated, but against my better judgment I found myself smiling. Super Dimension Fortress Macross, in terms of its story and characters, was a very timeless show. Sure, it had some elements that locate it as being written when it was written even aside from the technical dates given for everything in the show, but by in large as a story about a recently and painfully unified Earth dealing with an alien invasion, largely focusing on a motley cast brought together by circumstance, it’s not bound to being the age it is by anything other than its technical specs.
Macross 7, on the other hand, is so dated right off the bat that it’s actually kind of charming for it. By Haruhi, there are choices in this, right from the start, that couldn’t have been made except in a narrow window of the late 80’s and early 90’s. As something of a 90’s kid myself, there’s a deep nostalgia that’s awakened just by seeing this stuff on screen, even watching this particular show for the first time. You have to realize, from this very opening moment, that Macross 7 is not going to be the same kind of viewing experience as Super Dimension Fortress Macross. You have to be ready to accept it, in all its 90’s cheese, with space hot rods and roads of glittering starlight that never would have flown in the generally grounded and somewhat gritty Super Dimension Fortress. That said, it can still be good or bad on its own merits: overall character writing, plot, choreography, pacing, and the like know not the boundaries of era that stylistic choices do. So, being in the appropriate frame of mind, let’s move on.
Basara repeats his stunt the next time there’s a battle, annoying the military but causing the enemy to discover that his Spiritia is of a spicier flavor than they can drain with their little green lasers, as is. This also makes him late to a gig, which displeases Mylene (who is going through a subplot where her mom is trying to arrange a marriage for her).
This is, for a bit, the loop of the show. Play a gig, get in the robot, sing at the space dogfight already in progress, rinse, repeat. During this we learn more about our characters, like how Max and Milia seeming to be kind of on the rocks as Captain and Mayor of the ship (respectively), and how Basara is a moody grump who won’t be told what to do, and how he’s obsessed with reaching people with music to the point where he pretty much has a “blue screen of death” when he throws a punch to protect Mylene from some goons rather than singing them into submission like he was trying to do and then gets mad at her for causing him to use violence which is always pointless and wrong and… Oh.
Oh no.
He’s Kaifun, isn’t he?
SDF Macross was, in my opinion, meaningfully stronger for not letting Kaifun get away with being a complete jerk just because the principles he claimed to stand on were, in a sense, noble. I don’t hate pacifistic characters, but I do dislike whining, self-righteous brats who get special treatment from their authors because of their particular ideology. With more desperate conflicts a fading memory (and, less relevant to Macross 7, environmental concerns on the rise) the 90’s were particularly big on this brand of annoyance.
That’s not to say that Basara doesn’t have redeeming features. There are times, even early, where the mask slips and it’s clear that his prickliness, at least with his friends, is more of a tsundere thing than him actually being a jerk to them. But he does make quite a few jerk moves, and his constant ineffectual intrusions on the battles are pointed out as something that endangers soldiers and the civilians they protect alike. I don’t think we technically see him actually get anybody killed or energy drained in a specific and emphatic sense, but the topic is sort of acknowledged and then he’s just… allowed to keep going, which feels kind of weird.
Maybe it would be more tolerable if he had more songs to serenade us with. I won’t claim that Minmay’s big number, “My Boyfriend is a Pilot”, didn’t get overplayed, but there it was usually small bits of it being used in episode. We’d hear a snipped to indicate she was doing a show, or on the radio to remind Hikaru of her; there were only a few full-on performances. Here? Basara is going to rock out for a fair scene every episode. The dude needs a better repertoire.
What does help is the fact that the cast kind of rounds him out. The speaking member of the band whose name I have not called, Ray, is the exact sort of cool older guy to deal with the hot tempers. (the drummer pretty much never talks) And speaking of hot tempers, Mylene acts as a good foil. I can see how she could come off as shrill or annoying, but… she’s really not. She replies to Basara in kind, and we see softer sides of her when she doesn’t need to get riled up, like when she’s on (mom-prepared) dates with ace pilot Gamlin Kizaki… though she does make the mistake about lying about her daily life when he’s got a beef with Basara showing up and interrupting fights.
Suffice to say, she helps make Basara more watchable
The loop continues with only mild variation for quite some time. In all honesty, this is probably Macross 7’s biggest weakness, in that it wastes a lot of its running time feeling like it doesn’t have any sense of direction or purpose. That was something that was never a problem for the even older Super Dimension Fortress Macross, and while Armored Trooper Votoms seemed to take pains to move its plot slowly, it also moved it very steadily. We get movement on subplots like Mylene’s arrangement and the band’s continued work moving up in the world, and slowly introduce a new phase of the main plot.
In this phase, we find out that the alien leader dreams of being able to farm Spiritia rather than hunting for it, and that since humans can regenerate their values (in the presence of music) this provides the possibility of achieving it. Agents are sent into the Macross city who drain and ultimately start kidnapping people. In episode 12, this takes the form of kidnapping Mylene and then stealing the main city away from the rest of the fleet.
Basara and friends disable the fold system after its second jump, which is still not quite where the baddies want it, and then the general episode pattern… pretty much continues. We play gigs and have a fight scene every episode, hearing “Planet Dance” way too many times in the process. The difference is that this time the fights have a little more variance since the military is trying frantically to track and follow the city, rather than being there for Basara to get in the way. At least Milia gets in the robot herself to remind everyone that thirty-five years and seven kids later she can still kick ass.
We do at least learn a little more, namely that most of the “aliens” seem to be brainwashed humans referred to as the Varauta Army. As the city and fleet meet back up, an attack reveals another kind of enemy: a Spiritia-draining space-ghost-vampire-elf lady named Sivil and eventually identified as a Protodeviln (Energy-being space vampires, most of which are depicted less humanoid beings and more gribbly monsters). It turns out Basara’s music, which only annoyed people or recovered Spiritia-coma patients up until this point, is an effective weapon against the Protodeviln, which gets referred to as Anima Spiritia, thus allowing him to save the day with the power of rock by driving off Sivil when she appears.
You’d think this would really change the dynamic, but while it does freshen things up a little it mostly just moves Basara more into the hero role. The episodes have about the same structure, just with Sivil taking the place of main boss and ultimately infiltrator unit as well. The baddies even steal the city again (this time by creating a fold field around it with their own ships), and once again fumble the drop-off so that the city (plus the elite squad, including Gamlin, who reached it) is lost in space and away from the main fleet, but not in Varauta hands either.
I’m not going to claim SDF Macross had the most innovative episodes, and there’s some degree to which you accept or even want a little repetition in episodic media. But in Super Dimension Fortress we had some clear phases with some clear progression. We had the desperate fight until the first Fold, the race to Earth, the standoff until the Macross was banished back to space, and then the space war where the Zentradi started to defect properly. A lot of these episodes followed the same pattern of showing us mostly soap opera with a proper battle breaking out somewhere along the line, but during the run to Earth we had various Solar System landmarks to help it feel like we were moving, and had the little arc where our leads were taken prisoner to shake things up. And the later stuff focused more on the decline and fall of Zentradi morale.
Along the way, Hikaru had to become a pilot, then a leader. Minmay had to become a star, then a symbol of the wonders of culture. Here? Our characters start in a band that can play live concerts, and progress is playing somewhat more prestigious live concerts. Basara goes up into the very first fight to sing at it, and he’s still going up into fights and singing at them with no intent to fire a weapon (as Mylene calls him out regarding). Add in that this is all taking place nebulously in deep space and the sense of motion is much more diluted; you’d think this was the kind of show that was meant to run forever by doing the same thing over and over with slight variation, rather than a consistent story with an intentional beginning and end.
So, since this is a Macross series, how are our romantic entanglements doing? Surprisingly, kind of little. You’ve got options, but few seem poised to go anywhere.
Basara, of course, has the interest of Mylene. But he doesn’t give her more than grudging respect and they pretty much fight when they’re not singing, so that comes off as fairly one-sided right now. Basara also has the interest of a couple of extras, a cool space biker lady called Rex and a running joke credited simply as the Flower Girl who goes to literally every concert and always fails to give Basara a bouquet.
Mylene seems more like the proper center of a love triangle. She’s clearly interested in Basara, even getting jealous over the fact that his interactions with Rex treat her much more as an equal than he ever treats Mylene. On the other side, she plays girlfriend with Gamlin (who is head over heels for her, even having realized she’s lying to him) and does so in such an honest and friendly way that it’s hard to impossible to believe that this would be just because mom was setting the two of them up. She doesn’t feel trapped, smothered, or really even conflicted, she just outright gets along with him and the only question is if that’s more romantic than her crush on Basara.
I mention this now in part because Sivil’s entry seems to add a bit to this aspect. She possesses Rex for an episode, and the gestalt of the two of them gets openly horny with Basara until his music is too hot for the Sivil side to handle, which ultimately manages to drive Sivil out of Rex’s body.
Basara’s reaction to being snogged on stage in front of a live audience. You know I think Rex has a real chance here, aside from being a minor character who isn’t in the majority of the episodes
The next episode, Sivil does the same thing, except this time she possesses a producer named Akiko who had an “It’s complicated” with Ray rather than any feelings for Basara. Since Sivil’s influence seems to have a pretty firm thumb on the scales, this results in her getting awkwardly horny towards Basara (this time, he’s having none of it. She also flirts with Ray when she’s more herself and gives a bunch of extras the kiss of death as Sivil) until Sivil is driven out of her as well in the following episode. So I guess Sivil’s hat is in the ring?
The fact that she later manages to “introduce” herself (with some sort of name imprinting and explosive consequences) would seem to suggest that and you know what, I’d be happy to go with this.
The fleet and the city finally meet up fully again and finally, in episode 23, we get something resembling a second act as the members of Fire Bomber are made an official part of the defense of the Macross 7 Fleet. After some difficulties convincing anyone to let Mylene be included, they are granted Valkyries of their own and dubbed Sound Force. Sivil is out of it for this next part, as the Varauta/Protodeviln leader takes the stage. Macross 7’s fleet tries to meet up with Macross 5, which has found a planet and begun colonization, but they arrive to find it in ruin and most of the population MIA, only to be forced down to the planet surface themselves by the enemy’s attack.
We spar with various Protodeviln (including monster ones) for a while, during which Basara is rather distracted, having become fascinated with Sivil after that explosive kiss. He finds her in the forest, cocooned in energy and asleep, and kind of teams up with one of the enemy leaders, Gigil, who is also obsessed with her in order to try to awaken her with his music. This takes place over several episodes, with Basara neglecting his friends and losing some of his spark as he sings his heart out for Sivil in secret whenever possible, finally culminating when, as Basara begins to question why he sings given the military’s expanding use of Sound Force (with things like boosters to turn the power of rock into an actual anti-Protodeviln weapon) and his fascination with Sivil and inability to wake her.
Finally, Mylene manages to stalk Basara and find out what he’s been doing, which she reports to her dad, causing the military to seize Sivil. Gigil goes ape, takes Mylene hostage, and tries to spring Sivil, with a very conflicted Basara mostly helping him while also trying to protect Mylene. Ultimately, Sivil is awakened enough to bust out when they get to her holding pen, followed by Gigil. Basara is somehow not thrown in the deepest darkest brig himself, and takes his mecha to go soul-searching and possibly Sivil-searching.
Mylene, take a hint.
In all honesty, this section (with Sivil’s awakening in episode 33) is a little stronger. There’s more impact to the “filler episode” fights, more meaningful subplots, more variety in the music, and a stronger sense of main plot with more direction even if it still has no clear bound.
Sadly the “Basara soul searching” arc isn’t quite as nice. It’s a different scenario, but largely feels like puttering around as Basara wanders the world angsting for no reason, Mylene tries to follow him, Galmin sticks by her to protect her, and we pretty much ditch the other characters for the duration.
Eventually (after being found by and then ditching Mylene and Gamlin), Basara finds a mysterious storm and decides “yeah, that looks cool to fly into.” Luckily for him at its center is a volcanic island where Sivil waits, Gigil struggling to reach her. They get there and have themselves a singalong as they go under, waking Sivil for real (I guess she was sleep-flying before), meaning that when the crumbling island sinks what looks like a giant mystical concert hall rises from the waves like some sort of musical R’lyeh
This turns out to be ruins left by the Protoculture. Sivil takes her boys and flies across the universe for an episode while Gamlin, Mylene, and others investigate and do the thing of learning a race’s entire history mostly from relief carvings left behind, though the Protoculture was nice enough to also have a spirit-in-a-box answering machine that Mylene is able to access and get some information from before the Protodeviln come and blow it up.
The lore dump is about what you’d expect: The Protoculture was an ancient race, the ancestors of humans and ancestor-makers of Zentradi and supposedly the first people to have culture. Eventually, the Protodeviln showed up from another dimension, possessed bodies for this one, and started eating everything with a soul (or Spiritia as the case may be), which is evidently what pretty much broke the back of the Protoculture and nearly destroyed the Protodeviln by wiping out their own prey, before “Anima Spiritia” was able to seal the Protodeviln away. This explains why the Protodeviln leader really wants to move to sustainable Spiritia sources, but not why said leader now really wants Sivil dead as an impediment to that goal
Since Sivil returned her boys from their galactic tour, this shortly sees her and Gigil hunted down by one Protodeviln enemy while another holds the Macross 7 fleet in place to force them to become livestock. Basara feels Sivil’s psychic distress and goes to help her (and Gigil). During this, Gigil awakens his true massive monster Protodeviln form and sacrifices himself to destroy their enemies, and also the planet they’re on, freeing the Macross 7 fleet in the process.
Rest in peace Gigil, you might have been one of the better characters in this one. At least he gets to go out like a badass, singing the worst Karaoke that still has dramatic effect because his heart is in it. And blowing up an entire planet.
After a few episodes of filler, Sivil reappears, saving Basara from one of her Protodeviln kin but then being unable to rein in her own vampiric nature. After that, Earth High Command orders Macross 7 to engage in what amounts to a suicide mission against the lair of the Protodeviln. Max gets it down to a commando mission, but it’s still treated as basically suicide that he and everyone else who can pilot in the cast except Milia and initially Mylene (who is explicitly excluded, but she flies in anyway with mom’s blessing) is set to participate in.
This goes about as badly as you might expect: pretty much all the extras bite the dust, Gamlin appears to be killed after raising so many death flags and with the kind of reaction where you’d believe it, and the Protodeviln teleport the bomb Max plants up to their escape ship at the last second to trap all the survivors on their planet. All in all, a bad day for everyone
Mylene is having an especially bad day
Of course, Gamlin is only mostly dead and nobody stops the cute mascot critter from swiping the cell key, so there’s shortly a multi-directional breakout. We get an episode thereafter where the annoyance Protodeviln decides to get revenge on Gamlin by possessing him. Mylene gets to rescue Gamlin through the power of maybe-love and singing, and then we move onto an episode titled, simply, Basara Dies.
In it, Basara finds himself on the back foot against a new pair of Protodeviln enemies. Sivil appears from nowhere to rescue him, but pretty much burns herself out doing it. So, Basara sings to her and basically offers up his soul, which her body takes even as she begs to not. This ends up being more serious than most Spiritia drains as Basara basically dies – no pulse, no breathing, he’s hooked up to mechanical life support. Sivil goes and challenges the Protodeviln boss in her rage and grief and gets put in a crystal prison for her trouble.
With only two episodes left, you know the endgame is upon us.
This also causes the true body of the Protodeviln boss to start to awaken. He turns his possessed human body into an implanted hood ornament on the ground-to-space-sized tentacle monster, which if it finishes regenerating will possibly suck the whole galaxy dry.
Thus, we launch into our final battle, trying to take out the giant doom boss before he can be fed enough Spiritia from human captives to be fully regenerated. About halfway through the last episode, everybody singing together is enough to get Basara back up, at which point it’s his show. The Flower Girl – after showing up in every episode and being focused on weirdly much – even finally manages to toss him her bouquet, which he catches while hang-gliding back into the cockpit of his mech.
We still get a couple required “all hope is lost” beats, but ultimately Sivil breaks out of containment, reaches Basara, and they sing a duet that transforms the Protodeviln into beings that generate their own Spiritia like other forms of life, rather than draining it, allowing a happy ending for everybody left alive. I know I’m introducing that idea abruptly, but so does the show. They fly off (Sivil included) and Basara just sort of plays us out.
How does this all hold up?
Really, there’s good and bad here. Once the second half kicks in, the show is mostly a good deal stronger, with only a couple flagrant filler episodes and some real stakes in the plot. But the “first half” is still two whole seasons by modern standards. I don’t think you’d react very well if somebody said of a franchise, “Trust me, it gets good after the first five movies” – and that’s the kind of time investment we’re talking about.
Now, from the start, Macross 7 isn’t exactly bad. The animation is nice for its era, the 90’s cheese is its own sort of flavor, and even the characters who could be pretty annoying are at least tempered. Most individual episodes work, and the tapestry of the entire series actually comes together pretty well, utilizing its massive running time to include all sorts of little subplots and moments that work because they’re given hangtime and the show, in general, has a lot of room to breathe. One of the reasons I mentioned the Flower Girl is because she’s pretty emblematic of this.
The Flower Girl has no name. She’s just credited as Flower Girl. She has a distinct design, and while she doesn’t have many likes, she is a speaking role (I think Veffidas, the drummer of the main band, speaks less, uttering two admittedly extremely important lines across the whole show). But she is in every episode, always holding a bouquet. Early on she’s clearly trying to give the flowers to Basara, like she’s his biggest fan even long before he gets famous, but something always gets in her way and she’s shown, through her mostly silent actions, to be pretty meek and timid. Even when Basara isn’t available for her to make a real attempt, like he’s off soul-searching or in the hospital mostly dead, she’s shown, with her flowers and typically listening to his songs on her little boombox, or watching the news or events as they unfold, and you know who and what she’s thinking about. She even evolves over time, getting slowly bolder and more confidant until she’s able to make the delivery in the last episode.
There is no point to the Flower Girl. Had she never existed, we’d be none the wiser. But all the same… I like her. I think I’d kind of miss her. The show would feel less alive without her. She’s a character-shaped part of the look, feel, vibe, and setting of Macross 7. And in terms of these little elements, she’s not alone, it’s just that when I’m trying to summarize forty nine episodes, I kind of have to leave things out.
But even while I respect what was done with the scale, core problems still exist, including the draggy first half and miscellaneous filler. But, there are other issues.
One is that Basara… is an annoying character. He’s not as bad as Kaifun, not even close, but he’s an arrogant, egotistical brat. He always goes at his own pace and demands others match him, rather than having any sense of teamwork – something music people I know assure me is a pretty jerk way to go about being in a band. He has no real reason or history either. We know Ray picked him up and acts as a surrogate father, but we know nothing about where Basara really came from, or why he holds and where he got his strong convictions. We just know that as a little kid he thought he could move a literal mountain if he sang hard enough at it and… apparently nothing ever changed?
The lack of knowledge regarding Basara is clearly by design. We’re directly blocked from learning anything when characters try, so I’m reasonably sure the creators wanted him to be this mysterious, idealized figure rather than a rounded character. Which, if he wasn’t quite so much of a jerk, would play a little better. As it stands the tongue lashings he gets from Mylene feel pretty deserved. Which does make both her shrill moments and his jerk behavior less annoying because there are justifications and consequences respectively, but it also means that it’s hard to believe their chemistry the way we believe Mylene’s with Gamlin or Basara’s with either Rex or in a sense Sivil.
Which does bring me to Mylene, Sivil, and through the latter Gigil.
I said when he made his exit that Gigil might have been one of the show’s better characters, and frankly that’s because he’s possibly the only one who has a real arc. Mylene, Basara, Ray, Veffidas, Max, Milia… they’re the same in the last episode as they were in the first episode, with the possible exception of Mylene realizing she’s at the apex of a love triangle that she doesn’t want to resolve because she likes both guys (she never takes the hint). Gigil starts out a pretty cardboard antagonist, basically serving the same role that the Zentradi hothead teamkiller from Super Dimension Fortress served, leading most of the attacks and sparring with the leads. Once Sivil is up, though, we see that there’s something more important to him than fighting and doing vampire things, and we see how this drives him to even work with former enemies, and ultimately come around to really be on the side of life and music rather than vampiric mayhem.
Technically, Sivil does much the same, but she doesn’t express herself half as well as Gigil, mostly speaking in unearthly banshee howls and sentence fragment or noun-phrase screams.
Static characters aren’t the worst sin. Most of them are at least a little rounded. As much as I’ve read Basara the riot act here, we do see that for all his sour talk he’ll be there when people really need him. Mylene and Gamlin are decently explored, and we see them in a lot of scenarios both with each other and with other portions of the cast in order to understand them as people. Ray is a little flatter, but he’s got at least one good focal episode and an interesting “it’s complicated” with the music producer Akiko.
All of this made me realize, though, what I think the big delta between Super Dimension Macross and Macross 7 really is. I think Macross 7 was aimed at a younger audience.
Super Dimension Fortress Macross was… moderately hard science fiction, with a story and scenarios that appealed to an adult’s sense of the world. Macross 7 is much softer, with magic music that can ultimately bridge vacuum thanks to mumbo jumbo tech, roads of starlight that cars and bikers drive-fly on to go between ships in their fleet, giant organic space vampires, and so on.
Super Dimension Fortress Macross was grounded, and fairly gritty. When the Macross transforms, and we see the damage to the town, and hear how long it’s taking, the technical aspect makes it feel real. Similarly, the mechs in the original move and operate much more like real machines. Yeah, original Valkyries are unreasonably capable, but they’re also strongly implied to be based on salvaged alien ultratech and there’s attention given to how they operate as machines and why. Hikaru’s cockpit had levers and buttons. Shifting modes was done with some real analog weight to it. Basara’s cockpit has all the controls replaced with a guitar, literally being flown by rocking out.
Super Dimension Fortress Macross was willing to be heavy, tragic, and address serious emotions. When Focker dies, he leaves a hole in the cast, and we even kind of follow up with his girlfriend for the rest of the show as she deals with her grief, helping Misa through her love life in the process. Not to mention what happens to Earth and how the second arc goes because of it. Half credit for the soap opera romance at least having a solid arc to it. In Macross 7, technically Gamlin loses a couple of his buddies in battle partway through, characters we’d met and spent some time with. But they’re never mentioned again, and any legacy they leave behind is quickly swept under the rug. There’s a scene where Galmin means to give a music box his late buddy had to his wife and son, who the man hadn’t seen, only to turn back when he notices the son call a different man “daddy”. We don’t know if the guy’s wife was cheating, or if the 2-ish son (who was said to not recognize his often-absent-because-military father) was just confused… and we never follow up, not even with what this experience means for Gamlin. It’s one scene in the episode in which the man dies, and it’s put away thereafter. And for the most part, while Macross 7 has its scary moments and blows up its share of redshirts, it’s kept reasonably harmless as action shows go.
There’s nothing wrong with aiming for a younger audience, and while there’s an extent to which Macross 7 “talks down” in doing it, that extent isn’t too big. But it is enough to mean that there’s noticeably less here when you start breaking the series down.
At the end, I’m going to give Macross 7 a C. It’s a pretty take it or leave it production, that peaks to fun but rests a little lower on the whole. But in terms of whether I can recommend it or not, the length rears its ugly head again. This isn’t something I like to consider, and don’t for 24-ish episode series (except where length is a component of pacing, which does matter) but it’s harder to say “Go sink twenty hours into this thing that’s not bad but also isn’t great” than to say the same for five hours, so I’m left conflicted. Take from that what you will I guess. I’ll try to have a more definitive answer next week when we take on Macross Frontier.