From the creative mind behind Vividred Operation and the studio that brought us Kamitsubaki City, you say?
That pedigree is both why I pulled up Vertex Force, and very much what’s on the screen in Episode 1: 3DCG that looks at least Bubuki Buranki tier decent, some questionable camera angles (though nothing as awkward as Vividred. I probably only noticed being primed to look for them), and a well-worn sort of story that, while the jury is still out on this, could still have a good deal of heart.
So, this show centers on siblings Haruka (the older sister) and Akira (the little brother). Haruka has a special power called “Engine”, while Akira doesn’t. Why? Well, it turns out that the siblings are half alien, their father having been a refugee from the planet Theia (presumably, NOT the one that smacked into the Earth before life formed, but nice name reference).
Before we learn that, even before we meet the siblings properly, we are shown an event where a mysterious white-haired woman of robotic affect rides a satellite down from orbit to Earth. This seems to be the cause of the event, mysterious to Earthlings, known as the Power Down, where basically every computer went haywire at once. Two weeks later, huge swaths of worldwide electrical infrastructure are still dead. That’s not great, but in seaside rural Japan they at least have power and are treating this more like a mild inconveinence. Honestly, a shockingly realistic approach to earthshaking nonsense when the fundamentals of life are still in place.
Briefly, we get that Akira wants to become strong, possibly to catch up to his sister and possibly because he’s being bullied, while Haruka mostly wants to live a normal live and avoid the maternal wrath she’d draw if she actually used Engine. Naturally, we hit a point when she has to, when a VTOL suffering aftereffects of the Power Down threatens to crash right on top of Akira. Engine, it seems, manifests as a magic mecha appearing behind Haruka and both giving her super powers (gravity themed, in her case) and invoking some of its own along with her. It’s fairly cool and creative, and force lands the aircraft before the siblings book it.
Their return home gets us the backstory, after they explain why Haruka went and used her Engine and a red flash at her forehead worries mom. Dad, it seems, is no longer with us. The Theians fled to earth in the first place to escape a robot revolution led by an AI called EDVA, and when EDVA seemed poised to follow, went back into space to fend it off. The fact that Haruka has Engine at all is an inheritance, indicating that her dad died out there. The red flash indicates that EDVA is once again approaching and on the hunt.
After we get that backstory, amusingly from the kids reminding their mom that they already know all about dad, a hostile machine shows up: a very creepy giant robotic skeleton thing. It attacks Akira and, with everyone suspecting it’s after those with Theian blood, Haruka powers up to fight it off with mom’s blessing. She actually gives a much better account of herself than you’d typically see with this setup, knocking off at least two health bars even if she didn’t finish it. And no, they don’t actually use video game terms, thank Haruhi, that’s just sort of an easy way to think of the “down but not out” and “Did we get it?” beats.
After the tide turns against Haruka, Akira decides that, you know what, he still has alien warrior blood, and he goes and throws a pitchfork through the thing’s eye. It grabs him and seems poised to crush and devour him, but Akira gets the typical brink-of-doom power-up, manifesting his own engine, though it seems to appear as armor rather than a thing behind him. He knocks the skeleton’s block off and the mysterious white-haired woman, who we can kind of assume is some sort of agent or avatar of EDVA, announces that someone or something, presumably Akira’s specialness, has been located.
As episode 1 entries go, Vertex Force is putting a good foot forward. It’s not revolutionary, but it is a solid evocation of its type that gets through a few required beats without feeling rushed. Something I’ve said before and will very likely say again on this blog is that while there are an infinite number of ways to tell a story, only a finite subset of those ways are actually good. A consequence of this is that I’m not going to rag on a show for having a tried and true skeleton if it can put new and interesting flesh and clothes on that skeleton to create its own design. Boil down stories enough, and eventually they all start looking pretty similar, so there’s a level beyond which it’s not really useful to do.
Thus, I praise Vertex force for doing what an episode 1 is supposed to do. We know who Akira is, he’s a kid who feels useless or weak and wants to prove himself. We know who Haruka is, she’s a worldly modern high school girl who all the same wants to protect her family. We know a good deal of what Engine is like, we’ve seen it in action and even if we can get a lot more powers out of engines than the one’s we’ve seen, we have a good sense of the vibe. And we kind of know what EDVA/Robot Lady is up to. Why this roundabout method of attack? Why did she apparently destroy Theia’s people in the past and hunt its last escaped warriors across the cosmos? No hard answers yet, but the theme is clear, and at the start that’s all we really need. We got most of the required setup for Akira’s journey out of the way. The OP and ending tell us that we’ll be meeting quite a few more characters, so there’s more “introduction” work to be done meeting them and probably forming some kind of team (maybe one named Vertex Force? I have this funny feeling…), but we did enough for twentysome minutes.
Next week, we’ll see a little more.