Macross is a bigger franchise than just its main TV entries! While I normally don’t take on short OVAs and Movies, I wanted to address something approaching “All of Macross” this March, so let’s go!
First, I’ll speak briefly of the entries I won’t be handling. Every Macross TV series has one or more theatrical alternative versions. For Super Dimension Fortress, that would be “Macross: Do You Remember Love?”. 7 and Delta each have one-movie summaries, while Frontier gets two.
Notoriously, the theatrical Macross editions aren’t just recuts of the TV animation. They’re full retellings of the stories, often with some fairly significant differences; characters can have different backgrounds and different fates. Despite that, though, I am but a mortal and March is only so long, so I won’t be weighing in on any entry that’s a recap. For a similar reason, I’ve decided to spare myself Macross 7 Encore, which is a collection of Macross 7 filler episodes that didn’t quite make syndication. I will also be skipping Macross 7 Plus because it’s two-minute-episode skits.
For the rest, I tried to track down as many unique Macross stories as I could, and I’ll be going through them in in-universe chronological order to the best of my ability.
Macross Zero
Macross Zero is a five-episode OVA that started appearing in 2002 – it’s not the earliest Macross OVA, but it does have a special place in the timeline since it’s actually a prequel to the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross, set in 2008 at the tail end of the Unification Wars that were often mentioned in the original series.
In Macross Zero, we follow a UN pilot who gets shot down. He ejects, but in a moment of realism pulling that is neither painless nor pleasant, and he ends up washing up on the mysterious island known as Mayan, there to meet the requisite love triangle components, sisters Mao and Sara Nome. If those names sound familiar that’s because Macross Frontier referenced Macross Zero quite a bit, with a whole episode making a movie based on it (where Ranka gets her break when she ends up playing the role of Mao), and with the fact that Mao at least survived the devastation of Earth by the Zentradi and went on to become both a respected doctor and Sheryl’s grandma, evidently passing down the “Nome” name.
In this one, Sara is the serious priestess girl, while Mao is her spunky and sporty little sister. Initially, Sara wants our lead, Shin Kudou, to leave their backwater islander lives as fast as possible lest disaster follow, but Mao convinces her to let the stranger stay until his wounds are fully healed so that we can have a plot. Briefly, Shin starts to learn some island culture, and we hear a local creation myth that sounds suspiciously like an Ancient Astronauts story.
It turns out the peace is to be shattered anyway, with the arrival to the island of a massive dogfight, this one involving the prototype Variable Fighters and Super Dimension Fortress Alumnus Roy Focker. He’s fresh from the B-plot where an ancient alien relic has been discovered beneath the sea and UN scientists are hard at work excavating it while making guesses about ancient astronauts and a “protoculture” that may have used retroviral engineering to cause human evolution.
Roy takes Shin there, to the Aircraft Carrier Asuka (which I must assume is a reference to the fact that Evangelion’s Asuka takes her surnames two aircraft carriers, Langley and Souryuu). There, Shin gets a training arc as a VF pilot, before being redeployed to Mayan Island as an escort for the anthropologist (an old flame of Focker’s) doing the “ancient alien device” research that seems to obviously tie in with islander culture. On our second visit, we get some modernity/tradition friction between Shin and Sara, and also discover that she can sing with magic that resonates in the plants and stones of the island, the blood of the islanders, and the excavated alien device. It even makes rocks float in the air, though Sara seems amazed by this as Shin.
After she and Shin have some Tsundere times and the anthropologist gets slightly sketchy, Mao (who likes modernity, as opposed to the staunchly traditional Sara) tries to put the moves on, taking Shin to see her “treasure” (the head of the alien relic, also known as the Birdman), even stealing an underwater kiss in the process. This is about when anti-UN forces attack, going for the two parts of the Birdman, resulting in fiery devastation all over Mayan island.
The Anti-UN forces seem to win the battle. Mao is taken to the Asuka for medical treatment, along with several evacuated villagers, while the head, retrieved from the water at Mao’s insistence, gets lost in the forest and Shin, Sara, and the Anthropologist are all caught by the bad guys. There, they find the Anthropologist’s mentor is with the Anti-UN team, but Focker comes in to save the day. In their escape, team hero gets split up with Focker and his old flame going one way while Shin and Sara go another. This gets Shin and Sara their actually good romantic bonding, before the Anti-UN team decides to flush everybody out by dropping some “I can’t believe it’s not nuclear” firebombs on the forest that everybody was just enjoying the scenic beauty of. Meanwhile, Mayan magic seems to promote further regeneration of the Birdman, which all indications are would be a really bad thing.
Thus we enter or final episode. Sara and the anthropologist are captured in the opening seconds, along with the head, and it becomes a pitched battle to rescue them and/or steal the other team’s birdman piece. This ends when Shin reaches Sara, only to get knocked away and, to her perception, seemingly killed. Thus, her pain and despair awakens the Birdman. She enters the head, it and the body fly off to unite, and it (with Sara too broken to resist) judges humanity unworthy for having reached space without eliminating war.
Shin races to Sara to rescue her while Focker goes for his girl. Shin manages to pull out the power of love to bring Sara back to her senses, but not in time to stop the UN from trying to nuke the birdman away, since it’s exceedingly powerful and shooting everybody. Sara pushes Shin away and takes the nuclear strike, containing it and seemingly folding away with it so that Mayan island won’t be polluted by fallout. Her spirit provides Shin one last give, helping his maimed plane fly off to a mysterious mystical fate.
Nobody tell her what happens to Earth entirely in, like, two years.
In the meantime, since we know Focker is with somebody else as of SDF, it’s no surprise that his love interest for this dies in his arms after a rescue seconds too late to avoid major injury.
Thus, Shin’s love story has an esoteric end. I think it’s supposed to imply, since we saw that nukes did not actually destroy the Birdman, that Shin and Sara are together somewhere else in the universe? But you could also read those last images as Sara being dead and Shin just doing some fancy magic-assisted flying, there’s no denouement other than Mao (aboard the Asuka still) giving us one final line.
So, Macross Zero is… pretty good. It feels kind of Macross-adjacent. Technically a lot of the magic stuff happens through songs, but they’re not really focused on the same way as all the main entries having an idol singer or a rock band, so I guess if you’re a little leery of the Idol theme, Zero could be a good access point.
Some things suffer from the short running time, but really it’s the length the story needed. Zero isn’t a sprawling epic, it’s basically a long movie (clocking in at about two and a half hours total) chopped up into five parts for distribution, with a reasonably contained story. It probably helps to come into it with some concept of the lore of Macross, since I think SDF’s first episode gave a more full picture of “Alien ship crashed on earth, people went a little crazy” than Zero, even though that’s still current events rather than recent history in Zero, but at the same time you could probably wade in without any pre-existing knowledge of the Protoculture or Macross and have a good time.
Because there’s not as much emphasis on the music, it is much more strongly about the action and romance as well, which lets those elements shine… as much as they can. The romance is pretty good for its length. I kind of wish Shin and Sara had a slightly better rapport before the “lost in the forest” bit, but we had enough concept that he’d come to see the beauty in her view of the world and that her hatred of modernity was more a reaction to being tricked and abused by outsiders in the past, with a Mao-like core within her. Mao, as the spare of the triangle, gives a good account of herself before being written out for a bit, and it’s a nice moment when she basically gives big sis and the man they both love her blessing at the end.
In terms of the action, I’ll have to echo a bit of what I said about Frontier. It is very well executed… but the technology behind the fancy CGI dog fights isn’t quite mature yet. It’s much more glaring when there’s a “special effects failure” here in Zero than in Frontier, because it’s even more true. But the action is fast, clear, and well-sold. And boy there is a lot of it. If you like aerial dogfights, Macross is always a good time, but Zero in particular should be a treat. Just be prepared to, now and then when we have to get a good exterior shot, notice loudly how that’s a 3d render.
All in all, I’d rate Macross Zero at an A, the same ranking I gave to Delta. It has its awkward moments and sometimes the fact that it was cut into five episodes doesn’t help because elements don’t necessarily flow, but on the whole it’s a really fun one to dig in to.
Macross Plus
Set in 2040 but produced in 1994, Macross Plus is a very different take on “follow Super Dimension Fortress Macross” to its contemporary, Macross 7: of all the Macross entries, where 7 was the most clearly for children, Plus is the most clearly for adults. It’s about the same length as Zero, though split into four slightly longer episodes.
We’re focused on fairly serious piloting this time around, opening with a hot-shot fighter pilot being removed from field duty due to being a reckless hotshot. He’s given the one military job a reckless hotshot pilot is perfectly qualified for – test pilot, a role he’s more than happy to step into. However, the UN has more than one iron in the fire, so our lead, Isamu Alva Dyson, and the team he’s with are set as rivals with none other than an old rival of his, the half-Zentradi Guld Goa Bowman and his Mind-Machine Interface controlled next-gen fighter.
Well, Macross also needs its love triangle and its music, so we might as well introduce a couple of other critical characters. One is Sharon Apple, an AI virtual singer who none the less is basically the biggest star of the 2040 musical world, selling out concerts to huge crowds. So, Macross Plus basically predicted Hatsune Miku I guess. Her manager is Myung Fang Long, who happens to be the mutual childhood friend of our two rival pilots.
As we focus on the rivalry of the two guys in both love and piloting, we also learn that Sharon is an incomplete AI, with Myung acting as her live emotion donor. Or, at least, that’s how she starts out. After Myung acts out in concert on seeing Isamu in the audience, the scientist behind Sharon decides to give her some sketchy upgrades, causing her to “properly” inherit Myung’s feelings, with the extremely warped perception of a digital being with no proper body. Sharon starts a fire via super hacking skills and calls both boys to come to the rescue, of which Guld is closer and has his day.
The story moves forward, one fight between Isamu and Guld at a time, with Sharon’s shadowy presence hinting ever more at obsession. This comes to a head when Sharon and team (including Myung) are summoned to Earth for a concert celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Space War Armistice. At the same time, the Earth-based reveal of unmanned “Ghost” fighters cans both Isamu and Guld’s projects. The two of them end up stealing their planes and tearing off for Earth.
Meanwhile, as the concert begins in the oddly large and beautifully futuristic Macross City, Sharon takes Myung hostage, confronts her with her own now-donated feelings on the love triangle (She loves Guld, but loves Isamu more), and prepares her masterstroke. Isamu flies to Earth, Guld chases after him, and the two battle until Guld finally breaks through his repressed memories to realize he was the jerk who flew into a jealous rage over Isamu and Myung. This lets the two pilots reconcile, just in time for Sharon to take over that AI Ghost Fighter and send it against them. Guld takes that fight, sending Isamu on to rescue Myung, who is held aboard the original Macross, which Sharon has also commandeered.
Myung, who Sharon failed to actually kill despite nearly strangling her with some power cord tentacles and brainwashing armed guards with her song, does a pretty fair attempt at saving herself, ultimately confronting Sharon and demanding to know why she’s going around hacking the entire military and hypnotizing people.
So what is Sharon’s master goal? She loves Isamu, and so she wants to give the person she loves the experience that person has always craved – the ultimate life-or-death air battle, in Isamu’s case. It’s clearly twisted, but cleverly in a way that does still make sense.
Guld ultimately sacrifices himself to take out the Ghost, so it’s down to Isamu, in a single fighter, against the Macross itself, aiming to do a surgical strike and blow its computer mainframe, which will take Sharon with it. Sharon uses all the point defense guns and even hypnotizes Isamu’s hacker buddy (who gets the ejector seat treatment), before going in for the finishing stroke of dragging Isamu himself into a sweet dream during which he can crash and burn. However, Myung manages to sing one song from their childhood, which she clearly never gave over to Sharon, and this snaps Isamu back to his senses and lets him complete the mission, save the girl, and end the OVA.
Honestly, Macross Plus is a gem of a production where everything seems to have gone right. It’s an OVA, so even though the story is shorter it’s not forced to overstay its welcome. The visuals are stunning. In Super Dimension Fortress, you kind of knew that there were some limitations holding back the overall production. It looked great as 80’s TV animation, but at times it also had some serious fails. Macross 7 was also classically hand drawn, but it had a cheaper feel to it. Macross Plus got the premium treatment. Even beyond the raw production values, there’s a serious artistry to the production that’s night and day with Macross 7. Really, Plus is more reminiscent of the original Ghost in the Shell. It has a similar appreciation for heavy shadows, similar psychological sci-fi ideas (if perhaps ones that aren’t quite as philosophically intriguing), and a similar use of quiet that you don’t see in more modern or cheaper shows.
I also have to especially highlight the vision in Macross Plus. Macross 7 went with… roads in space. Bikers. The whole Saturday morning cartoon shebang. Macross Plus didn’t go specifically for the dark and heavy cyberpunk. Macross City in this has a gray steel skyline, but that’s a contrast with the environs of the planet Eden which, while still futuristic, have a different and more utopian vibe to them. It’s honestly hard to pin down. The architecture and the design of incidental objects isn’t like anything modern, but it’s not quite that dated retro-futuristic style you see in some things. That’s the closest I can come to putting it into words: an aesthetic almost but not quite entirely unlike Raygun Gothic. But it hits home really well.
In general, perhaps in homage to the original SDF where a small town was rebuilt in the bowels of a ship and largely tried to disguise its nature, cities in other space-faring Macross entries look pretty standard on the inside, like ordinary modern places where people would live. In Plus, they still look extremely livable, but not like what you’d see if you just went outside in an urban area.
And then there are the ideas. Honestly, if anything, Macross Plus might be even better today than it was when it came out around 30 years ago. In 1995, AI – and the idea of a holographic idol – were fictional concepts, and using advanced computers just to sing probably sounded like an absurd setup even if Plus takes Sharon Apple deadly seriously. Now, we have Hatsune Miku, and are starting to wonder just how far what we call AI, things like Large Language Models, might be able to go.
I’m very stingy with A+ ratings, but this has to be a second one for the Macross franchise out of me. It’s got some of the raw best aerial dogfights you could hope for, a solid plot, an excellent composition, and scifi ideas that are deeply resonant while also not being done to death in the work itself. It knows, critically, how much to say and also what not to. The worst thing I could possibly say about Macross Plus is that I think you need to have some appreciation for more vintage cinema to be able to accept it fully, but that’s true of some of my other A+ rankings like Serial Experiments Lain and Haibane Renmei.
Macross 7: The Galaxy Is Calling Me
This one is simple; clocking in at 30 minutes, this “movie” is basically just a filler episode of Macross 7 that was spun off into its own thing for some reason. However, I’ve decided to look at it when I passed over Macross 7 Encore because it is presented as its own thing, rather than just an unaired episode. That said, it does take place during Macross 7 and even features a version of the Macross 7 intro, so it’s very much on the edge of being nothing more than a lost episode.
The plot involves Basara ending up on a frozen mining world where the locals give him the appropriate reception (guns out).
It turns out he’s here (and the rest of the cast following) because of a strange distorted sound that blipped as powerful song energy. Thus, Basara ends up teaming up with a little kid and investigating some sort of singing wendigo. This turns out to be a Zenradi lady, Emilia, who Basara has an epic rock battle with, which they both seem to enjoy even as she admits defeat
They have a good time, perhaps less the cockblocking little toddler (If you really want to know what might have been, I’m sure the dark corners of the internet have you covered), until the Protodeviln show up to make a mess of things, attracted to odd and interesting Spiritia. The battle threatens to flood the town, but with the whole band there they manage to do the right level of crashing to save things just in time. In the very short epilogue, it’s even revealed that Emilia is, in fact, Mylene’s extremely big sister. I guess at least some half-bloods can still make full-sized Zentradi of themselves.
And that was a… slightly better than average episode of Macross 7. I watched it, it was fine, and I might as well report on it, but I don’t really feel like it deserves its own grade apart from the main series.
Macross Dynamite 7
Macross Dynamite 7 is the 1997 sequel to Macross 7. If you thought we were done with the 90’s cheese, you thought wrong, because it’s time for Star Trek IV to get a late retelling by way of Ferngully, only with more rock and roll. At least, that’s what the pitch sounds like
I knew, in a sense, this was going to be a hard one to watch. I don’t mean because it’s more Macross 7, which I’ve come to the conclusion is by far the weakest entry in the series, but because it was actually censored and recut for its recent release, forcing me to do a lot of legwork to find the full thing. Did I gain much? Probably not! But screw censorship on a fundamental level. I am covering that bit when I get to it.
So, in less silly terms, what is Dynamite 7? Well, it takes place fairly swiftly on the heels of 7’s resolution, and as an OVA it has different production values (more noticeable than Galaxy is Calling Me, but still very familiar to the 7 family) and more willingness to go against broadcast standards despite still being from 7’s heritage.
We start out with Basara lost and confused on the planet Zola, where his attempts to sing ordinary people into submission go about as well as they did in the first half of the main show, getting him shot by the cops (with a stun laser), beaten, and left in the care of a weird kid who’s all to eager to explain about how evil poachers are stealing mechas to go after the noble space whales. Basara is about as confused by this as the audience, which is a nice touch. It’s not immediately clear what the natives are, whether they’re earth expatriates, Zentradi offshoots, or their own set of children of the Protoculture (the latter eventually being canon), but it is clear when she learns his name that they get the galactic network out here, because the girl is a big fan.
Her dad, who has made himself Zentradi-sized, not so much. It seems that non-poachers do still interact with the space whales, and since his wife died doing whale work he’s become Captain Ahab, dedicated to hunting down the biggest, nastiest, and whitest of whales.
Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.
Meanwhile, it seems like this whole wacky adventure is another unannounced abandonment of Fire Bomber. Mylene, take a hint.
They catch wind of where Basara might be when he tries to sing down old man Ahab, which ends in disaster, giving Basara a couple seconds of hard vacuum for his trouble before he’s rescued by one of the cops. In a spat of realism, the brief exposure and violent saving leaves him on death’s door and in intensive care for some time. I have to hand it to this OVA, it likes to see Basara in pain. Even after he breaks out of the ICU he seems to be in some whale-trance state, staggering around and almost dying. Again. It’s actually kind of legitimately comedic that the little fangirl has to be the adult in the room.
Fire Bomber doesn’t roll out immediately. They’ve got Basara-free shows to do! And on the heels of one, Mylene is approached by a producer lady who has her over for dinner, drugging her into a paralyzed stupor.
This would be that censored subplot. The next scene we see Mylene has been stripped down to nothing but her panties and tossed onto a big bed, with the producer lady clearly ready and eager to take full advantage of the terrified girl. And then the next time we see her after a kind of shocking hang time (in which we get things like catatonic Basara being played for laughs and a cheesy song number over scenes of the violence of the natural world for no perceivable reason other than filling time) including an episode break, the other two members of Fire Bomber have already rescued her before anything could happen (Guvava let them know).
And then it’s never mentioned again. It amounts to nothing, and seems kind of weird and out of place. In her next scene after the rescue she gets told they have a lead on Basara that Gamlin is following up on, and she might as well go too because she can’t focus and Fire Bomber will still draw crowds with its two lead singers replaced by literal cardboard cut-outs. That’s not a joke, they really do that in-character. I guess the writers had to do something with some drama with everybody but Basara, since he decided to ditch the cast folks would like to see.
Over the next couple of episodes we get more about the whales, poachers, cops, and such. We learn deeper and more compelling reasons why our Ahab figure wants to kill the white whale personally (not just due to a dead wife; he believes the ancient white whale wants to die but is incapable of doing so on its own, which might be a matter of projection), and putter around with the poachers getting their hands on a reaction warhead to try to take out the White Whale and thus make the others free game.
Thus, we get one more whale of a space battle wherein Ahab (last time, so his actual name is Graham) fails to drag the White Whale down to the Whale Graveyard on Planet Zola, the Poachers fail utterly (the Reaction missile does nothing), and Basara sings at the whale while the cops fight the poachers with Gamlin, until finally Moby Dick here gives in and we have a duet of Basara and some whalesong. All’s well that ends well, and Basara ditches the planet to parts unknown right as Mylene arrives, passing her ship to ship.
Mylene, take a hint.
So, in a sense Dynamite 7 is the strongest of the 7-related properties. It has a tight story excepting the needless check-ins with the rest of Fire Bomber, some actual emotional play (shockingly not just ripping off Moby Dick), and a few moments that are honestly kind of beautiful when they go all out for the space whales (which are weirder than just whales in space) and some of the scenes on Zola itself. It doesn’t feel very much like Macross content, but in the grand scheme of things it has plot-relevant music and it has the Variable Fighters, and that’s not a particularly important point.
There is one downside, in my mind, that I would be remiss if I didn’t mention regarding Dynamite 7: the music sucks. Macross is a franchise that integrates music into its stories, and has given us tons of notable and stellar tracks across many musical styles. I was a little hard on the core Macross 7 soundtrack, but most of the songs were pretty good even if they were played to death because the show kept them going constantly in the background. Most of the new tracks in Dynamite 7… oof. I hate the intro song in particular. Most of the in-episode new songs, I’ll admit, suffer primarily from being diegetic. Basara has these singing outbursts with just his acoustic guitar and I think they have his speaking voice do the bits rather than recording his singing separately. But while that forgives some of the bits, even the songs that get heavier production are a little off. They’re delivered in weird ways, or don’t have the energy of most of the other Fire Bomber tracks, or in the case of the duet with the whale and the intro song just go on way, way too long with heavy repetition. I think the only new piece I’d say I like without any hesitation or equivocation is the ending track. It’s mid by Macross standards but that’s fairly good.
My issue with the music not withstanding, I do think Dynamite 7 gets a slight upgrade. I gave a flat C to Macross 7, but Macross Dynamite 7 gets a C+. You could do a lot worse.
Macross Delta: Zettai Live!!!!!!
Macross Delta: Zettai Live!!!!!! (The title is so impossibly excited I think it’s going to start firing off exclamation points in one of those classic Macross missile swarms), also known as Macross Δ Movie 2: Zettai Live!!! (the title is still extremely excited), is an interesting beast. Zettai Live functions as a sequel to Macross Delta, either in its film or series form, though as a theatrical entry it presumably follows from any theatrical differences. However, since it is an entirely unique story continuing Delta’s plot, it doesn’t fall under the umbrella of recap movies that I’m not looking at.
There are a few differences that will be noticed right away. The old Windmere knight who Hayate and Freyja bonded with, only for him to finally burn up the last of his time near the end? He’s still alive for the Windmere/UN peace treaty announcement at the start of this movie. Later on it seems like Freyja and Hayate aren’t quite as comfortably an item as the show seemed to leave them off being, since she denies her peers suggesting that he’s her boyfriend when they visit her home town. And some other reveals seem to have not come out yet. A little discontinuity is the price of jumping here from the TV version rather than the recap movie.
Less in continuity, the Walkure performance at the start is done in full CGI, and it’s horribly conspicuous. Most of the fancy concert stunts in the show were done in the art style used for people rather than the CG that’s been used for the aerial action since Macross Zero, and frankly even by Frontier the difference between “Rendered” and “Drawn” was smoothed over better than the very opening big concert is here.
Wasn’t this the big screen release? Isn’t it supposed to look better than TV animation? Why is the style shift so glaring? It’s not that the CGI itself is bad; aside from being obvious and not trying to blend with the environments or drawn character models, it’s got some great choreography.
It’s even more obvious in motion
If the ending of Frame Arms Girl had the bit that was “We loaded up Miku Miku Dance to save time”, this is “We sunk hundreds of man-hours into making the best Miku Miku Dance number”, but it’s still kind of MMD-esque, guys.
I get why you’d want to use this tool for this job; there are some really sweeping shots where smooth, coordinated motion is everything, and there’s enough stagecraft and hologram nonsense going on in-lore that it’s kind of okay, even potentially fitting, if it doesn’t look “real” next to the other characters and environments. Maybe I wouldn’t be thrown by it if Delta itself had done the same, but it’s weird that it’s only done like this in the movie version when we normally think of going with CG, especially conspicuous CG, as more of a money-saver than anything else.
Even weirder, they never do this again. It’s just for the Windmere concert.
Anyway, we get a big Walkure concert for the announcement of treaty negotiations between Windmere and the UN for a lasting peace, and then visit Freyja’s home town. There we get some good work with Windmereans and Earthlings in general as well as Freyja and Hayate in specific, only for a new enemy to arrive and start blowing everything up.
These mystery enemies seem to be Earthling-adjacent (having a Macross class ship and a full-sized Zentradi in their number) but rogue. They’re kitted out with scary Ghost fighters like the tech Sharon Apple took over in Macross Plus, and their own magic singer, Siren, who seems to control the Ghosts and counter Walkure with the power of robot-voice Techno.
I’ll be honest, I actually think her song rocks. Sadly the version with the techno vocal filter seems to not exist.
The unknown enemy blows up most of the lesser Windmere knights (though they apparently all managed to bail, since we see them later. Even the old guy.), disintegrates the giant Protoculture battleship with reaction warheads, and declares an occupation of Windmere’s capital. Our heroes are shot up, but rescued when a Macross-class battleship comes in being flown like a dang fighter despite its bulk, picking up Walkure and the other survivors it can, Windmerean and Earthling alike. Aboard the bridge, we find this fancy flying is courtesy of a character we haven’t seen in quite some time: Mirage’s grandpa and the franchise’s most indomitable ace to never get a starring role, Maximilian Jenius. Exedol, the Zentradi archivist, is there too, apparently also having taken refuge from Macross 7 to make his way to a better corner of the franchise with Max.
They’re taking orders from Lady M, a figure who was mentioned a good deal in Delta but who never appeared – technically the leader of the mercenary outfit that Delta flight is a part of, and clearly someone who has immense sway but not actual authority over UN military chain of command. I’m going to cut to the chase here, it’s never revealed who Lady M is or even if she’s a single person, but she is or is on “Megaroad 1”, the lost first colony ship launched from Earth. And two very obvious candidates, Minmay Lynn and Misa Ichijou (nee Hayase), would canonically both be aboard that ship. So, make whatever continuity theory you prefer.
Before we can get much into the plot, a dying priest from Freyja’s home town has things to say, telling an entirely different story of Hayate’s father than what was canon in the show version. Here, his father was a secret agent who tried to prevent war between Windmere and the UN by stopping another secret agent from stealing what could act as genetic samples of the Star Singer. Only one of three samples was recovered, and with the outbreak of war it couldn’t be returned and was presumably used to make Mikumo. So this time, rather than being a legendary monster who dimension bombed the planet (even if he actually tried to minimize the damage), he’s remembered as a friend to the end who died trying to keep things from going insane.
The enemies then reveal themselves as an organization, Heimdall, that wants to demilitarize the galaxy and unban dangerous technologies like AI, Cloning, and various branches of Protoculture research. They even reveal the existence of Lady M and set her up as an evil mastermind holding back progress in the Galaxy. They’re said to be related to a shadowy corporate group we saw briefly in the show version of Delta, but which seems to be introduced fresh here, and Exedol analyzes from their broadcast that their singer is an even more advanced version of Sharon Apple’s AI, using Star Singer cells to produce something of a reverse cyborg (computer with a little biology to upgrade it rather than a biological organism with cybernetic “upgrades”), provided by that other agent who stole the samples and presumably killed Hayate’s father in the end.
We get a little turn-around time, including a training battle where Max shows up to prove he’s still the most badass pilot in the entire franchise by far. All is not well, though, as a synth infiltrator is found in the hidden base, putting up quite the fight after bursting from its fake human skin and giving the bad guys both the location of the base and potentially a way to where Megaroad 1 lurks in subspace.
Thus, cue the enemy incoming. At first Walkure cuts the performance of the ghosts to mortal levels, but then the Siren, having analyzed their performance, deploys her very own entire idol group.
I have to hand it to Delta here, it manages to somehow lean enough on the big sci-fi ideas of Macross Plus that I think I’d be a little lost without it, and yet it also manages to work in this kind of larger-than-life goofy challenge with outright evil counterparts forming a comically bad-guy-themed idol group.
This turn narrowly avoids killing important characters when Freyja goes super singer mode to empower Hayate and overpower the Siren idol group, but in the process she uses up even more of her life than she did in the TV version climax, setting her rapid degeneration as a major plot point and critical limiter on how well Walkure can fight back against their new nemesis, seeing as she’s put in intensive care and taken off active duty for reasons of being put in a tube to heal as much as she can.
Thus, we get a plan to reach the enemy by… doing the same thing that was done in the TV version of Delta where we take a Fold gate from Messer’s old world to Windmere in order to get a commando mission through, which clearly wasn’t done before in this timeline.
As they do, the baddies also pull Megaroad 1 into realspace, so the battle becomes one to take out the Heimdall flagship and also protect Megaroad 1 and Lady M from being blasted into smithereens. When all seems lost, of course Freyja, weak though she is, calls out, and her voice even trembling gives Siren pause. Even just her passionate speech to the other Walkure members about how she wants to live her life with them seems to reach the enemy.
In the ensuing fight, we even throw Mirage a bone and get a nice resolve to her feelings of inadequacy, not being able to live up to her grandfather’s skill as a pilot, as she discovers that she has an aptitude for command and strategy that he never did, freeing Max to get in a fighter and start kicking ass.
On the enemy side, as Walkure rallies and Siren falters, the corporate cyborg backing Heimdall tries to take his toys and flee, only to get shot to bits. Heimdall makes their last stand, and Freyja leads Walkure to sing a Windmerean song that reaches all her people, and also the now uncontrolled Yami_Q_Ray, all of whom begin singing with them.
Hayate blasts his way to the Heimdall bridge, but hesitates on seeing that Yami_Q_Ray appears to have had their heart touched by Walkure’s song. The Heimdall captain blows things to hell taking one last shot at Megaroad 1, which misses before the colony ship vanishes back into the warp, the Ghosts deactivate, the Protoculture amp structures vanish, and Hayate emerges alive from the gigantic explosion. He’s not empty-handed either, carrying Siren’s core – which after its evolution and coming to understand love, appears to contain Windmerean infant.
However, remember how in Delta, Freyja wasn’t given a “Get out of death free” card? Zettai Live takes it one step further. The strain of the last battle/concert was too much, and she only lasts long enough to die in Hayate’s arms as they profess their love for each other.
A final stinger after the credits then shows that Hayate apparently lives in Freyja’s old village, raising the Siren child as though she were his and Freyja’s daughter. The end.
Okay, it’s not like Macross hasn’t killed off characters before, or that Delta didn’t prime us to expect that Freyja was here for a good time and not a long time, but this still hits pretty hard. You know it’s coming, but there’s a solidity to it that’s different than the esoteric end of Sharon in Macross Zero or any of the various pilot deaths throughout the series. It’s a pretty good death scene for such a lovable character.
So, thoughts on Zettai Live… it was solid. As a movie, it’s not exactly self-contained, making more references to the rest of the franchise (not just Delta) that you’re expected to follow than might be entirely healthy. I think the pipeline is some form of SDF, Macross Plus, and then the first Delta movie to get here, with a bonus if you saw Max and Exedol as they were in Macross 7, since their designs are basically the same other than Max having gray hair now because he’s getting up there in years. But this isn’t a big deal, and the movie itself is quite solid. It handles its emotional arcs nicely, including finding time for secondary characters like Mirage and Kaname.
Its other issues are also mostly pretty minor. It’s not incredibly easy to get invested in the stakes of Megaroad 1 and Lady M since we only ever see the ship from a distance and they avoid confirming that “Lady M” is, in fact, a legacy character, even implying that it might be some sort of strange entity using Megaroad 1 as a sock puppet. But, Windmere is occupied and we can care about that. At times the score can hit a slight problem that Macross 7 had where it doesn’t know when to stop the pop songs, damping slightly how hard they hit when busted out for real, but that’s a quibble more than anything. I do think that it’s stung slightly by the length and format, so that it can’t quite reach the heights that the show itself does. But Delta was quite good.
All in all, my rating for Zettai Live is an A-. It may not be top marks, but it’s still a grade to be proud of.
Macross II: Lovers Again
So, it’s finally time to take a look at the black sheep of the Macross family, Macross II. Opening in 2089, it’s technically the latest point currently in the Macross timeline. It’s actually the first Macross sequel, coming from 1992, but it was made by a different studio entirely and has been considered of… dubious canon status over the years, sometimes being stated to take place in an alternate universe but in more recent years being included on official timelines.
Naturally, since it came first, Macross II can’t take later entries and their galaxy-scale crisis scenarios into consideration, and you wouldn’t think that entries earlier in the timeline would have to acknowledge things that haven’t happened yet. Much of Macross II’s music, however, is actually reused or referenced in Macross 7, causing speculation that since the “original” songs exist in 2045 it might be an in-universe piece of fiction (something that also gets applied to the movie/TV differences for the main shows, with it sometimes being said that the movie versions are how society in the Macross universe dramatized their history). But that could also be just a weird little continuity nod with the main timeline having yet to reach II’s position again.
We begin on Earth as we’re introduced to our male lead, Hibiki Kanzaki. He’s a scummy reporter acting as this future’s equivalent of TMZ, who only cares about ratings and whines like a spoiled child whenever anyone calls him to task about journalistic integrity or maybe not ambushing an ace fighter pilot and a ranking officer to imply a clandestine hotel visit has no explanation other than an illicit romance.
This is when trouble, shaped like what appears to be a rogue Zentradi fleet (because that’s still a constant bother in this timeline) shows up and the UN rallies to fight it. Naturally, the main strategy of the day is the “Minmay Attack”, the oft-referenced use of music and cultural arts to disrupt the enemy before going in for the kill. However, this fleet is actually in possession of a new enemy, the Marduk. They have their own magic morale-boosting singer, Ishtar, whose eerie, wailing song turns the tides of battle.
Gentle reminder that if this is still canon it takes place more than two decades after Delta and the Wind Singer of Windmere and various Star Singer ripoffs causing trouble. I know, Macross II came first, but I’m just going to say that even early on it’s pretty clear that even if it’s meant to be at least kinda canon, none of the later Macross entries, particularly not Delta, seemed to respect anything here. It’d feel kind of naked if I didn’t point out how silly it looks if you take it at face value in the timeline that’s been built since, with many elements being treated as new and strange that logically wouldn’t be, but I’ve pointed it out now so I’ll let later instances pass without comment.
In any case, it turns out Hibiki is a licensed pilot, so he’s asked to fly for a grizzled old war correspondent. During the battle, they enter a Marduk ship through a random breach and find an unconscious Ishtar. The old dude insists on bringing her back, but after shoving her in the cockpit, a random explosion gives him a bad case of being dead through… injury not announced, so Hibiki is sent home with an unconscious girl, a load of battle footage, and a sobering look at what a real battle actually can be.
Naturally, rather than this captured member of a strange new enemy group being reported or anything like that, Hibiki keeps her with the help of his sketchy metrosexual pimp-ish contact with the intent of making her the next big scoop
Hibiki doesn’t take very good care of the situation, though, as Ishtar wanders off, getting overstimulated by the experience of a human city. Eventually he finds her and they go on a kind of date to the “Culture Plaza”, where Macross City has re-created all the great landmarks of humanity past, which makes them really easy to shoot up when enemies come looking for Ishtar.
Along the way that ace pilot he gave the TMZ treatment to, Sylvie, follows along looking for a little revenge, causing her to get some hints about Ishtar’s true nature, particularly when Ishtar blows off the force sent to rescue her.
Hibiki later takes Ishtar where she wants to go – the original Macross itself. She believes that it’s a ship from the mythology of her people, and it’s shockingly unstaffed and underdefended for a clearly still armed and operational grounded space battleship, so he breaks in and leads her to the control room just fine. There, Ishtar explains that the Marduk know only war and destroy what other cultures they find, but use the singing of Emulators like her to control Zentradi to do their dirty work for them. This is overheard by Sylvie, who happened on the ability to stalk them. Rather than taking in as, you know, the only source of legitimate intelligence on a deeply hazardous enemy, Sylvie lets them go in response to a weak speech about how the Military is bad because they keep things from the public.
This isn’t the first such speech, and I’m just going to say that while I do understand where Hibiki might be coming from, but knowing a little history it’s pretty much standard operating procedure to not publicize every detail of a military operation while said military operation is still ongoing. If he was worried for Ishtar’s safety, like she’d be personally mistreated, I could understand, but that angle is not brought up meaning that he is actively keeping the UN forces who are defending all life on Earth from understanding the true nature of the foes they are facing by trying to hide the very existence of the one person who knows all about it. It’s kind of a big deal jerk move when you think about it.
We then go to a festival on the moon, which is a nice little concert and aerospace show until the Marduk decide to try to capture the “enemy Emulator” (random idol performing at the show) and Ishtar decides to trade herself for the release of said idol (riding with Sylvie in a valkyrie at the time of being snagged), believing she can lead her people to peace. Her lords accept because they believe once they have her back they can just wipe out all life on Earth. Hibiki rolls with this to take her there because it’s a scoop. And Sylvie hauls in with a combat-ready fighter because she just can’t let the idiot go.
This brilliant plan gets Hibiki tortured and Ishtar sent for factory reset. However, Sylvie manages a save for Hibiki, while the Marduk Feff, who seems to be obsessed with Ishtar, takes her even as the Marduk authority purges the ship they’re on for being infected with foreign culture.
As they get back to Earth, Hibiki decides to go guerrilla and break the story about the Marduk himself without any sort of plan or call to action. This gets him arrested, and Sylvie arrested for good measure. As the UN space forces get slaughtered, Feff decides to free Ishtar since she’s marked for death and he cares about her, while Sylvie hatches a plan to win by taking down the Marduk Emperor, seeing as he controls his people through fear and brutality (and, in the case of the Zentradi at least, mind control).
As Ishtar returns to Earth, this brings us to the final episode. Sylvie grabs Hibiki to help her because it’s not like he’s been nothing but trouble, and the commandeer the Macross itself with no real obstacles or obstructions as the Marduk tighten the noose on Earth. Ishtar gets aboard too. They shoot their shot at the emperor’s flagship, but it… maybe scratches the paint. He shoots back and utterly disintegrates the Macross, except for the bridge which is somehow untouched and still floating with our leads. Ishtar decides to give her best friendship speech, followed by singing at her fellow Emulators. This makes them hesitate, which makes the Marduk emperor mad and causes him to start blowing up his own people in a fit of petulant anger.
The UN forces bring their real last resort guns to bear with much more effect than the poor old Macross (rest in peace), and the Marduk decide to turn their guns on their emperor rather than watching him just blow them up for no reason. Thus, the emperor is destroyed and Marduk and Earth can have peace. Ishtar goes home, Sylvie and Hibiki are an item (for no reason except possibly Suspension Bridge Effect), and all is well that ends well.
Macross II is… a lesser effort, that doesn’t do a whole lot with the setting or concept. It introduces basically no new ideas, and even fails to build on the end of the original – something that the entire franchise except II did really well by following the stated mission of space colonization. The visuals are good, but even they don’t really live up to some of the other early entries.
For instance, when they bother to be distinct from their Zentradi predecessors, the Marduk look pretty cool; they’ve got a sort of biomechanical body horror vibe going on, with a lot of skulls, cyborgs, and whatever the hell is going on with the Emperor where he’s got bone armor and muscle cords everywhere. It’s too bad they’re just Zentradi II, now on hard mode. For all that the pitch is that this time, for the first time, the enemy Earth is facing has culture of their own and isn’t vulnerable to the Minmay Attack, the Marduk’s culture begins and ends with having some ability to sing as a weapon; like the Zentradi before them they know nothing but war and destruction and slaughtering everything that isn’t them before being shown a better way with embarrassing ease.
Even if we were looking at the series in release order, where Macross II was literally the second entry, it really doesn’t have much going for it. Its six episodes retread the same “Beat the invaders because love and culture are beautiful” arc that the original did. It gender-flips the pilot role, but Hibiki is miserably unlikable without the time or effort to grow into a better person, his chemistry with Sylvie is non-existent, and Ishtar as this ignorant waif isn’t really that compelling. Plus, they kill off the SDF-1, the original Macross, itself… for basically no reason. I know there was a reason why they thought they needed to involve the old girl, but it ends up just being a bait-and-switch where what we needed was Ishtar to do the same thing she’d been doing since episode 2 but now with more magic. I think this could have been solved with less orbital bombardment if Hibiki had introduced her to the authorities, or even better if Sylvie had done so after the rumble at the culture park rather than letting her and Hibiki go for no reason.
And, of course, when you try to consider it in the context of the broader Macross franchise, it’s nonsensical as a “canon” entry and everything that it tried to do for itself has been done drastically better by some other entry. I think Delta is probably the biggest “Macross II Killer”: Windmere plays the same card as the Marduk where they have magic music of their own, but they’re actually interesting, compelling, and studied as an independent culture rather than being more fanatical warmongers.
Suffice to say, I see why people find the idea that this thing might not be canon a comforting thought.
But… is it the worst Macross entry?
Well, the competition there is Macross 7, and the issues are kind of apples and oranges, other than that Basara actually had a good deal more charm and charisma than Hibiki here. Macross 7 was long, repetitive, and childish. At its best, it was high-flying fun, while at it’s worst it seemed to take neither its setting nor the intelligence of its audience seriously. Macross II is a consistent product that tells a coherent story in a sensible time frame, but it’s a clear downgrade from what came before, lesser offspring of a greater sire. It takes itself seriously and respects its viewers at least if they’re newcomers, but is derivative in the worst ways. Say what you want about Macross 7, it Planet Danced all the way out of SDF Macross’s shadow to be its own thing. Macross 7 is the sequel that leaves you scratching your head, while Macross II is the traditional bad sequel where everything is the same but worse.
In the end, there’s only so much I can hold Macross 7’s excessive length against it. When you get down to it, it tried more and achieved more than Macross II did. Did it do less of that per episode? Maybe, but I think it also offended less per episode most of the time, so that evens out. As such, I’m going to stick Macross II with a C-. It is still, when you get down to it, a watchable alien invasion story. If you go in with just the basic spoiler notes on Super Dimension Fortress, I could see enjoying Macross II, if only for the well-done space battles. But in this franchise, that’s a dud.
In the end…
Should you get into Macross? Hell yes. In terms of a whole franchise, this is one of the more consistently strong ones I’ve taken on, up there with the Science Adventure Series.
How do I get into Macross? That’s more of a question; it depends what kind of time you’re willing and/or able to sink into the shows. All the series and even some of the OVAs have movie versions that might be a little more digestible, but I can’t recommend those outright because I went for the series.
I do think it pays to approach the series in some sort of order. Release and chronological are basically the same, with only Macross II (an easy skip) and Macross Zero that are really out of order. You’re here at the bottom of a spoiler review on a site that does nothing but spoiler reviews, though, so I think it’s safe to say that anyone reading this will understand the basic continuity going into whatever entry they please.
Of the main series, Frontier is incredible, but does really want you to recognize callbacks to Super Dimension Fortress, and to a lesser but still very present extent, Macross Zero. Delta is a little more stand-alone, like I don’t think you really need much of the background since the UN has a whole galactic civilization by that point and we’re mostly concerned with a previously unexplored little corner of it. But of course, there’s nothing wrong with Super Dimension Fortress either. It’s old, and that’s going to bug some people because it looks and feels very different when compared with modern shows, but my personal opinion is that it’s largely managed to age with some degree of grace, so unless you’re really a hard “never!” on Vintage anime, you could probably start there and be fine.
If you’re sure you’re going to take the plunge, I’d start with Super Dimension Fortress (in some form, whether series or movie as you prefer) and then move forward, working in Zero somewhere before Frontier. If you’re less sure or have trouble with the vintage stuff, you can probably test the waters with whatever entry has your own personal bias. Wherever you go you’ll get the staples of variable fighters, plot-relevant music, and some manner of love triangle, so you can probably discern whether Macross’s series tropes are to your liking.