There are, on the whole, two major wings of the Mecha genre. The “Super Robot” subgenre consists of shows where the Mechas and their pilots have magical powers and capabilities that often seem to run more on rule of cool than on anything resembling reality. One example would be Gurren Lagann, which frequently tells sense and logic to sit down and shut up, because the robots are going to do something awesome. That’s not to say that Super Robot shows can’t be serious or even dark. Neon Genesis Evangelion is also very much in the “Super Robot” bracket.
Then you get the “Real Robot” shows where mechas, even if technically still made less impractical than in reality as we know it, are treated more like standard war machines. They’re made of metal and powered by engines and nothing’s going to sprout a new ability because the pilot believes in himself. The mechas probably don’t have unique names or anything like that, and the protagonist can at least in abstract theory get a new one if they total the one they’re driving, even if they’d have a lot of customizing work to do to get it back the way they like it. Full Metal Panic lives pretty comfortably in this space, as do several of the more classic Mecha entries.
So, what happens if you put these in the same setting, forcing a Real Robot protagonist to fight against a variety of Super Robot bosses with their named mechas and might-as-well-be-magic powers? As you might have surmised from the title of the review, you get Aldnoah.Zero.
A word of warning at the start, this show has Gen Urobuchi’s involvement, and the one thing he might like more than slaughtering huge casts is having a huge cast to begin with. Since Aldnoah.Zero is not as blood-hungry as Blassreiter, this means that there are quite a lot of folks who are going to matter if not all the way from start to finish than at least for fair runs and a different but still large set that matter at a given time.
Managing such a large cast is something I have to give the show credit on. All too often, when creators try to make an epic by loading us down with this person and that person who all have their own little sub-stories to get involved with, they end up losing the plot, or not having enough time to keep the important characters important. I sometimes refer to this problem as “The Hydra” because seemingly when you cut off one head (resolve a plot) you find two more have sprouted to take its place. Aldnoah.Zero, however, never really gives you more than two or three real lines (mostly two), and the side characters in each are written knowing that they’re best kept side characters, so our leads can really shine.
That said, it does make it somewhat difficult to discuss with any degree of brevity. Remember the person from episode two who was tangentially related to that other person who was only relevant as an accessory to a third individual who isn’t even a main character? They’re important now! It’s not difficult to follow along while you’re watching, but I’m going to assume that most readers would like the summary side of the review to be able to be read in less time than it would take to just watch the bloody show, so I’ll dispense with chronological order where necessary in order to introduce the primary movers, rather than trying to keep up with everyone who’s going to come back.
Our story begins in an alternate history. The early space program in this universe found a warp gate on the moon that lead to Mars, and the first travelers through the gate to Mars discovered ultra-advanced, nearly magical technology dubbed Aldnoah, centered around a physics-defying energy source called the Aldnoah Drive. The first human to tame Aldnoah power became the first emperor of Vers (Mars), gathering many followers and building a society on the harsh, red planet. After a time, there came to be a war between Vers and Earth, but before the invasion of Earth proper could begin, the fighting in near-earth space caused the calamitous detonation of the warp gate and prompted a cease-fire.
Fifteen years later, our show begins in earnest. The peace between Vers and Earth is extremely fragile and tense, especially with legions of Martian troopers, dubbed the Orbital Knights, effectively stranded in Near-Earth space. Asseylum, the teenage Crown Princess of Vers, hopes to alleviate the tension and work towards a more peaceful and cooperative humanity, and makes a state visit to Earth in order to do just that.
However, Asseylum is almost immediately assassinated once planet-side (or so it seems), her motorcade obliterated by guerrillas, prompting the Orbital Knights to blame Earth and begin their assault en masse, dropping their “Landing Castle” bases out of orbit to obliterate major cities via their mere arrival, the first act of a war of conquest.
Our main character for Earth is Inaho Kaizuka, a young man with a flat affect and genius analytical ability who I should by all rights despise as a main character. I’ve talked about the problems with Flat Affect characters before, most notably with Inori in Guilty Crown, and I’ve talked about the problems with genius characters before, both in the bad with Guilty Crown’s Gai and in the good with Alderamin on the Sky and Ikta Solork. Neither trait is a total killer, but at the same time, they are both red flags, and Inaho is waving those red flags around quite loudly.
And yet, Inaho is a character who never really annoyed me. He is, like problematic genius characters, pretty much never wrong and always capable of using his information with absurd precision. At the same time, he’s the one who has to pilot a Real Robot against Aldnoah-driven Super Robots, so he’s always on the back foot. He comes off as less of a “Tzeentch” character and more of a “Holmes” character, especially since he rarely schemes farther than the immediate battle. As to his flat affect, it is at least recognized as being a thing in character. And, in the first half you can still often tell what he might be thinking or feeling, even if he’s not particularly demonstrative, while by the second half there’s a compelling point of interest to his affect, which I’ll get to in good time.
In short, Inaho is a shining example that good and careful writing can excuse almost anything… which doesn’t mean just any writer should go for as much.
Along with his friends (including Inko Amifumi, who is the closest thing Inaho has to a confidante as well as being the girl with an obvious crush on him) and teachers (including his older sister, and a recovering alcoholic who saw something truly terrible in the last war), Inaho was there to bear witness when the Motorcade got blown up, so their team is at the primary target for Martians to plant a flag without, you know, just squashing everything by landing on it.
Some of the Martians have particular interests in the area, though. One is Slaine Troyard. He’s a teen boy who, while technically Earth-born, has lived among Martians for most of his life, particularly as a companion of the Princess herself. The other Martians seem to despise and mistreat him, but more than anyone he wants justice for Asseylum. The other is our first arc villain – it turns out (in a twist that should not be surprising to the viewer) that the assassins were plants by a conspiracy among the Orbital Knights, who wanted to spark a war so they could seize domains on Earth. One of the conspiracy’s Knight-caste agents arrives in his mecha, ostensibly to pick up the operatives but really more to obliterate them because dead men tell no tales.
However, his first swing misses the daughter of one of the operatives, a teenage Martian named Rayet who’s lived most of her life on Earth (essentially a mirror of Slaine in that regard), leading to him chasing Rayet through the city and Rayet ending up grouped up with Inaho’s team… including a pair of refugees who are actually the princess and her maid in disguise, a body double having been the real victim of the assassination. They manage to hide out in the school (which has Earth mechas, training models at least, because under the constant threat of Martian invasion, military matters are part of general education) but they can’t stay there forever, since the Mars Knight is on the hunt and the last evacuation craft are leaving soon.
The big problem is that the Knight’s mech is not only a towering mountain of metal, even compared to its Earthly counterparts, it’s a Super Robot with a unique special ability – in its case, the ability to manifest a field that annihilates any matter or energy that touches it, rendering it seemingly invincible to all conventional weapons and capable of destroying buildings (and people. And anything else) just by walking into them. This is the first tough nut that Inaho has to crack with nothing but a Real Robot, conventional weapons, and his wits.
In a sense, the show might have blown some of its best material here, since few if any of the other Mars Knights seem quite as overwhelming on paper as this guy. On the other hand, they take their time to deal with this one, covering most of the meat of two episodes and more than a single encounter (the first running, the second fighting back), so it plays well… and there’s something to be said for putting your best foot forward.
It is, of course, an intricate battle. Inaho uses logical deduction to determine every weakness of their enemy, and exploits those weaknesses one after another – blinding its spotter drones with smoke clouds, taking advantage of the fact that it can’t evaporate the ground it’s standing on, and ultimately knocking it into water to find its critical weak spot: the portion of mech that can’t be protected by all-consuming barrier because something has to let the drones relay vision from the outside. He disables the mech, but not before the Princess tries to reason with the man inside, revealing himself to (at this point) the conspiratorial knight and, unknown to her, Slaine.
After Inaho and friends (including the re-disguised princess and Rayet) leave for the evacuation site, Slaine hears from the knight how killing Asseylum is the plan, and thus shoots the man dead and blames it on the Terrans, gaining a new goal to root out the conspiracy despite his lowly position within the Martian power structure.
Inaho and team meet up with the last ship out of town, fighting another Mars Knight on the way, and the evacuation sets sail. But, thanks to some intel and decisions from the minor characters (now including the captain and her bridge crew) they make for an outlying island where they encounter, of course, yet another knight. Slaine appears as well, and though he and Inaho both work to disable the knight guarding the location, Inaho shoots his plane down after, making sure that they don’t end up on the same side.
This is one point that actually feels somewhat artificial. Inaho takes the shot for very little reason, given that he knows about the Princess at this point and that Slaine in his plane has just helped Inaho save the day. Inaho’s not one for too much talking, but you would think that in the face of unprompted help, at least a further parley via radio might be in order. However, it’s necessary for the entire structure of the show that follows that Slaine and Inaho exist on opposite sides, and kind of hate each other.
Because, while beating The Price of Smiles on quality is not a high bar, Aldnoah.Zero is, in some respects, the show that takes everything that show was trying to do and does it better. The Price of Smiles was an incredibly bad evocation of telling two sides of a story where the two main characters are on opposite sides of a major mecha-fighting war, wherein a pretty princess strives for peace against reasonable odds. And Slaine is, ultimately, our Martian-side main character. This means he has to stay with the Martians and fight against Inaho, even though right at this point their goals align, both wanting to see the princess to safety and (in Slaine’s case, because it’s what the princess wants) stop the war before things spiral out of control.
In any case, something very interesting is found at the island: a mothballed project to retrofit a battleship with an Aldnoah Drive salvaged from the previous war. The former designers couldn’t get it to run, but that’s because only Martian royalty or those designated by them can activate an Aldnoah Drive. With the help of the princess, that problem is overcome, meaning that our heroes get to use a cool flying boat as their new base of operations.
Slaine is far less lucky. Mistrusted and manipulated, he ends up tortured by his guardian, a Count among the Martians, while the head of the conspiracy, Count Saazbaum, learns of Slaine and Slaine’s knowledge of the conspiracy. Saazbaum, oddly enough, decides to go with rescuing Slaine, killing the Count who had been his liege in the process, apparently owing some sort of debt to Slaine’s father. He treats Slaine very well, and since at first Slaine doesn’t know that Saazbaum was the center of the conspiracy to kill Asseylum, Slaine is wary, but not strictly opposed. Meanwhile, the awesome flying battleship makes its way towards a UN fallback base in Russia, in order to group up with the rest of Earth’s haggard forces.
At this point, I want to highlight a sequence that perhaps wouldn’t make it when trying to simply hit the high notes of the plot. Ever since she joined the team, Rayet (who is not openly known to be a Martian herself) has struggled with a deep mistrust of her own people, and for good reason seeing as the very lords she was raised to serve betrayed and murdered her father for doing exactly what he was told. This especially takes the form of a festering resentment of Asseylum as she drops the disguise and openly integrates as herself with the group. Asseylum is outgoing and, despite her condition, still perhaps a naive believer in people being basically good. She makes friends easily, which is the exact opposite of Rayet who, despite hiding the ‘terrible’ truth of her origin and nature and assuming she’d be betrayed and hurt if anyone got close to her, is still suffering for the fact that she’s terribly isolated and alone. Rayet is also faced with a hefty dose of PTSD when a simulator recreates the Mars Knight that killed her father (and presumably everyone else she was close to) as the sample opponent. In an absolutely desolate mental state, she encounters Asseylum in the showers and takes leave of her senses, springing on the princess and attempting to strangle her to death with bare hands.
Rayet darn well nearly succeeds too – with the princess in critical near-death condition, the Aldnoah Drive gutters and the ship begins to fall from the sky. Inaho rushes to perform CPR on the princess bringing her (and the drive) back around. Rayet snatches a gun while still having an epic level mental breakdown, and ultimately tries to turn it on herself, feeling that she can’t possibly be forgiven to live in a world she’d deeply wronged. She’s prevented from blowing her brains out, however, and will ultimately be given a second chance and make a pretty awesome secondary character of herself as the show progresses.
There are a few reasons why I wanted to bring this bit up in detail. First, it serves as a good microcosm of what’s being done with all the also-ran characters. I’ve dropped Rayet’s name before, but there are at least half a dozen more people on her level whose names I haven’t called, who get significant arcs and psychological development to add to the sprawling feel of Aldnoah.Zero, so we’re not just running and fighting all the time. Second, I’ll probably have to reference these events later. I think the reason why is a bit shoehorned, but all things in good time. Third and finally, I want to highlight what good directing can do for a scene.
You see, in this scene where we have two pretty girls in the nude in the shower, struggling barehanded, followed by the lead giving mouth-to-mouth to a pretty girl who might be a love interest for him, there is approximately zero ‘fanservice’. It would have been so easy to slip a little in, and most shows would have done it, if not with the strangulation then at least with the CPR. But the way the scene is composed, that’s never what is present or relevant. Rayet’s attack feels brutal, with a focus on conveying Asseylum’s shock and pain as well as Rayet’s despair and blind rage. For the CPR, Inaho performs it pretty much properly, which means I wouldn’t be surprised if he cracked a couple royal ribs in the process. What we have here is not the emotional but usually misplaced puttering about what the gesture might mean in another context, but a soldier with some first aid training trying to save a life. It’s quite well done in that regard. I think it was the right choice for the show we have, and it shows a degree of skill in executing it properly.
After that hitch, the show makes its way to the climax of Season 1. The ship reaches a UN base, from which Asseylum broadcasts a big speech about the truth, but her words will never make it to Mars and will be discredited before the Orbital Knights because Saazbaum’s loyalists control the moon base and can hold back the information or be believed when they declare it a ruse. This has also revealed to Saazbaum exactly where his primary target is right now, causing him to bring his Landing Castle out of orbit in the proximity of the dug-in base in order to assault it, kill the princess, and break the back of the Terran resistance.
Naturally, this calls for big plans from Inaho and team, leading to a massive multi-episode battle and a commando mission to deliver Asseylum to the core of the Landing Castle so she can shut down its Aldnoah Drive and all the Martian technology connected to it. This ends up with fighting Saazbaum’s mech, which has variants of all the special powers seen before the way a final boss likes to do it, and ultimately a major confrontation in the drive chamber. Asseylum shuts down the drive, Saazbaum (on foot) shoots Asseylum, Slaine shoots up Saazbaum, and then for good measure shoots Inaho in the head too. Saazbaum, wounded but not dead, motions for Slaine to finish him… but the sabotage damage is already done, leaving Saazbaum’s landing castle dead and the battle a costly victory for the defenders of Earth.
The second season starts up after a time skip, in which it’s revealed that despite it seeming like everybody but Slaine was toast, no one actually died in that final confrontation. Slaine spared/saved Saazbaum because only Saazbaum could get Asseylum the medical attention she would need. Asseylum is thus currently held by the conspiracy, locked in a coma from which she might not wake up (barring narrative logic) but alive. Saazbaum, for his part, seems pleased with this, and has gotten Slaine a knighthood while, despite the bitter differences over the princess, forming something of a father-son bond with Slaine, Slaine having lost his father young while Saazbaum lost his fiancee and hope of a family in the last war. Joining them is Asseylum’s bastard half sister, Lemrina, who while wheelchair-bound under normal gravity is still able to impersonate Asseylum in order to raise Martian morale for the war on Earth, which has been going shockingly slowly all things considered.
Inaho, while left for dead by Slaine, was recovered, and after a fairly lengthy convalescence is back on the battlefield with a new mechanical eye (complete with calculation engine AI hooked into his brain, enhancing his natural analytical ability) replacing the one Slaine shot out. He’s also able to restore power to the awesome flying ship, which went dormant when Asseylum had her second near-death experience. Supposedly this is because of the fluid transfer from that time he did CPR on her, but somehow I think her blood dripping into his open wounds when they were both shot half to death might have a little more to do with it. This enables the team to go and visit the space base of the Terran defenders, because apparently Earth has an orbital base able to fend off the Martian forces. I get the feeling that might have been useful before, but that’s more part of a bigger note with regard to the two seasons of Aldnoah.Zero.
So, since there are a few things that must be aired at this juncture, a word about the structure of Aldnoah.Zero. There is one story, told beginning to end, of the the Earth-Vers war as seen by a host of characters, most critically Inaho and Slaine. However, there are also doubtless two chapters. During the time skip between seasons, the show drastically changes its tone and structure. Season 1 really was about “Real Robot fights Super Robots”, with most of the focus being spent on the big battles where Inaho has to figure out the trick to defeating yet another Mars Knight with yet another freaky power, while Slaine largely had to deal with being an outcast and an observer. We still get some of that in the second season, including Inaho’s triumphant return being in a Season 1 style battle, but the focus is much more on the rivalry between Slaine and Inaho and how that drives the course of war.
This is where Aldnoah.Zero really kicks Price of Smiles to the curb directly and emphatically, because there is a real connection between the characters and real pathos in their experience, no matter the side they’re fighting on. There are still villains, but even the most easily despised among them have humanity, just as even a hero like Inaho isn’t squeaky clean.
In fact, there’s a recurring theme in the second season when it comes to Inaho’s flat affect, which I hinted at before: his artificial eye has a powerful AI calculation engine, but it’s also hinted at, more strongly and directly as the season goes on, that it may be bleeding over and twisting Inaho’s human side, adding in the question of if he acts cold and out of touch because that’s just what he’s like, or if instead it might be the coldness of the machine coming out in force. Mercifully they don’t go with the tired cliché of “cybernetics eat your soul”, so that the AI still seems to have Inaho’s goals in mind
In a note unrelated to that, a word about the space battles that I’ll get out now, because it is something that bugged me in every space battle. In this show, space-based mecha combat, and especially long-range fire, is said to be difficult because of “the wind”. It’s not really excusable as the Solar Wind either, and is played off more like high-altitude atmospheric flight having to deal with familiar high winds that might cause aerodynamic effects on crafts and projectiles. This is, of course, entirely backwards. There is no wind in space. There is no air in space. In theory (we don’t have a practical example yet), space-based combat should be capable of incredible engagement ranges since there’s not a lot of stuff to limit line of sight and no pesky atmosphere to provide drag and keep shots from going literally forever.
We get the mysterious Aldnoah.Zero space wind, despite the fact that the show had been pretty good about giving plausible scientific explanations for Super Robot Mars Magic, for one simple reason: the show wanted to give us more of the cool fighting, and having the robots dogfight through a debris field is a subject of more visual and narrative interest than having them sniping at each other with railguns from as far as they think they can stay while still not giving the other guy a chance to dodge well. Is the zero-effort “A kid could point out what’s wrong with this” excuse kind of lame and distracting? Yes. Do you just sort of roll with it because, heck, this is an action show at heart and you want to see some more cool stunts? Also yes.
Before one of these orbital engagements, Slaine finds himself hassled by some of the Mars Knights, to the point where Saazbaum steps in and declares Slain to be his son and heir by adoption, and by that same token his right to pilot a Super Robot into battle beyond contest. In the fight that follows, Slaine uses his robot’s power of precognition to set a trap, shooting rounds into orbit to strike a specific point on a later go around. The trap misses Inaho, though narrowly, and Saazbaum takes the hit from it, disabling his mech while the Terrans flee.
There, away from other forces and thus in privacy, Slaine reveals the nature of the trap, and that the next orbit after the one that disabled his mech will finish Saazbaum off, vengeance for what was done for Asseylum. Despite that irreconcilable bad blood, though, he does acknowledge Saazbaum as his father, letting our (former) chief villain go out with a smile. This causes Slaine to inherit the title of Count as well as a critical dominion among the Knights, which he promptly secures in the eyes of his peers by single-handedly taking down that Terran space base once the heroes and their awesome flying battleship are out of the picture. From there, he works to leverage his status as a powerful fighter, a count, and a close confidante of “The Princess” (believed to be Asseylum, actually Lemrina) to gain power and authority among the Mars Knights, rising to the top as the new de-facto leader of the Martian war effort, seeing as the Emperor is both on Mars and more or less on his senile death bed.
Slaine’s rise is not without challenges, but he deals with them as he needs to, winning some lords over with promises of plunder to be had on Earth while intimidating others into line by killing his most vociferous opponent in a duel.
While talking about bad shows I’ve previously reviewed that Aldnoah.Zero provides a direct upgrade to, I suppose I should mention that Slaine’s rise to power as a dictator is basically the good version of the cruddy arc in Guilty Crown where Shu goes and becomes the evil overlord of the school. We see Slaine’s slide from good kid to tyrant, and it feels very natural. Even at the end, he’s clearly doing what he thinks is right, and there are elements in which he certainly have a point. For instance, he sees the Martian hereditary class structure as a problem, and acts to promote meritocracy, elevating the importance of his underlings and simultaneously gaining the loyalty of the rank and file. Slaine manages his opponents carefully, going from a position where most who were aware of him at the very least didn’t like him to being a popular if polarizing leader, rather than Shu’s slide from “Everybody’s idol” to “Zero Percent Approval” via pointless cruelty. All the while, the things he does to gain and maintain power are bad, metaphorically selling his soul to achieve what he perceives as victory. He sells out his principles one by one, all the way to his love for Asseylum as he forms a relationship with Lemrina, and each step makes sense even as it transforms a kicked little puppy of a boy into Space Hitler.
Though, it should be noted that, in another element of this show that speaks positively of the quality of the writing, Slaine has a point. It’s one inherited from Saazbaum, who desperately wanted war on Earth because Mars is still kind of a miserable hellhole for most of its people, and utterly dependent on Aldnoah and the fickle whim of the royals who control it. Earth, which has a functional biosphere, would make it possible for the people to truly flourish, since they would have air to breathe and food to eat that couldn’t just cut out whenever one of the masters of Aldnoah willed it. As much as Slaine resented what Saazbaum did to Asseylum over that grudge, he clearly took the truth to heart, hence his populist and meritocratic continuation of hostilities.
On Earth, we get a plot arc where one of the Martian counts holding land, a fairly kind leader who’s been taking stewardship of the world seriously, is targeted by the Earthbound forces and ultimately taken prisoner. Inaho interrogates him and finds out that he’s a dyed-in-the-wool royal loyalist at that, and they share information regarding the Princess and how Inaho has determined from ‘her’ broadcasts that she’s beein impersonated and Slaine is behind it. This rings fairly true for the count, and Inaho conspires (with Rayet as an accomplice, because Rayet is best girl… or more likely because she can keep her mouth shut and not Inko because he’s trying to protect her) to spring the count from prison and return him to his Landing Castle so that he can go to orbit and start to investigate things in earnest. It’s not that the count will be working for Inaho, it’s that Inaho trusts that he’ll be working enough in the best interest of Asseylum (the real one) to start the house of cards toppling.
The house of cards, is, as previously stated, a fairly impressive one. Lemrina and Slaine end up in a situation where they declare themselves the leaders of a new Vers splinter kingdom, with Lemrina (as Asseylum) declaring that she’ll marry Slaine and the two of them working out that issue themselves, in a scene that’s pretty good and makes you really feel for how Lemrina has taken Slaine’s former role as the show’s emotional punching bag. Of course, this is when the real Asseylum wakes up from her coma. There’s something of a comedy of errors, trying to keep her in the dark about the awful things being done in her name while also attempting to keep Lemrina in the dark about the fact that Asseylum is back in order to forestall her not-misplaced jealousy (not that Slaine isn’t quite divided between the two by now). The former secret is less hard than it might have been because she starts out with her memories scrambled and full of holes (quite understandable, given her massive injuries and long-term coma), but as she regains more of her experiences she starts to notice how bloody wrong everything is.
This is finally kicked into a final stage when Asseylum recovers all her memories, thanks to a trinket passed from Inaho, through the count Inaho interacted with and Asseylum’s maid to reach Asseylum herself. She’s ultimately confronted by Lemrina, and the two of them challenge Slaine… who has them put under house arrest. Again, it’s clearly something he regrets, but also another step he’s willing to take, imprisoning both the girls he cares about in order to see his vision through to the end. However, his lies and manipulation get even harder to maintain when a representative of Mars (a young count named Klancain, the son of the one who was Slaine’s keeper at the start of Season 1) arrives.
Concurrent with Klancain’s arrival, the Earth forces launch an all-out attack against Slaine’s moon base, with a main mission objective being the assassination of Princess Asseylum (who the brass believes is the real one, and the war hawk mastermind), and in the midst of a pitched space battle, Inaho assigns himself the task of slipping into the moonbase and rescuing Asseylum (the actual real one) from both her Martian keepers and the Terran assassins. He’s fairly successful, all things considered, having a shootout with Slaine and getting away with Asseylum.
Before Inaho can extract, though, his body gives out from strain, and while unable to move, the AI in the artificial eye takes over. The AI proves to be quite a friend to Inaho, doing exactly what the real one would want: it gives Asseylum instructions on how to get away, and reassures her (by lying) that help will come for him and everything will be fine. She hurries along, but not before asking the Eye AI to pass on a request for a particular favor, which the audience isn’t allowed to hear.
The planned pickup doesn’t rescue Asseylum from the airlock she goes to, but Klancain does, putting her in friendly hands. Inaho recovers and escapes the moon base, and the Terran forces close in, hoping to end the war in a single stroke.
Slaine has a similar plan, calling for an all-out assault that would catch and obliterate the Terran forces, but his orders are interrupted by Asseylum. Her announcement has three major points. The first is, owing her grandfather’s extremely advanced age rendering him incompetent to rule, she is relieving him of his duties and taking the title of Empress for herself. Second, she wants a ceasefire with Earth. Third and finally, she’ll be marrying Klancain and not any of these other jokers.
Yeah, for all the love triangle tension between Asseylum, Inaho, and Slaine she ends up with the guy who only shows in the last couple of episodes. I guess Inaho has Inko and Slaine did end up rather committed to Lemrina, but it’s still somewhat humorous, from a meta point of view.
In any case, while many of the Orbital Knights are quite loyal to Slaine, this throws enough of them into disarray that Slaine sees the writing on the wall – the battle and the war are both lost. He has noncombatants evacuated from the moon base (including saying his goodbyes with Lemrina. It’s subtle, but you can see that he does really care about her in particular), and orders his men to surrender to the Terrans in order to spare their lives. Slaine’s closest retainers decide they’d rather follow him to hell, and divert from escort detail once Lemrina and the other civilians are away in order to die in glorious battle. Slain himself gets in the robot for one last ride, and of course ends up in a duel to the death with Inaho, pitting Inaho’s calculation and cunning against Slain’s precognition. This ends with Slaine defeated and on a collision course with Earth, and Inaho sacrificing his mech to make sure that both of them make it to the ground alive. Out of their wrecked mechs, Slaine, thoroughly defeated makes the same “Aim for the head and finish it” gesture to Inaho that Saazbaum made to him at the end of season 1, and we time skip to our final denouement.
After that final battle, pretty much all of the war (even the parts that weren’t him, like the initial assassination attempt and disinformation campaign) has been blamed on Slaine, regarded as history’s new greatest monster and recorded killed in action. As Empress, Asseylum is working to build bridges, sharing Aldnoah technology with Earth in exchange for things that Mars needs, like food and other resources. Inaho has become mostly a regular civilian, giving up his awesome cyber-eye in favor of a badass eye patch that won’t potentially burn out his brain. Slaine, in reality, is held in some sort of maximum security secret prison, caged and alone, because the favor Asseylum asked of Inaho was to spare his life.
I… don’t exactly know what Asseylum’s endgame is with this, whether she means to keep him in a concrete box but technically alive as a kindness for all the good things he did do for her, or if she’s got some other plan like shipping him and Lemrina on a slow boat out of Sol to Space Australia (I’d like to think this, mostly because it would throw Lemrina a bone for once in her existence), but in any case the realization that Asseylum doesn’t hate him even after all this brings Slaine to tears but leaves him somewhat hopeful looking towards the future, along with (in their own places) Inaho and Asseylum.
So, how does Aldnoah.Zero hold up? Honestly, there are a lot of ways in which this is a truly great show. The way it handles a massive, sprawling cast (which I honestly only followed the tip of the iceberg of) is brilliant. Its handling of a complex war with points and reasoning on all side is great. Slaine, and his descent into being the show’s true antagonist, is a masterclass in the “Fall from grace” arc that’s so often done so very badly in media that has to compress the timeline more.
But it is a flawed show. It is chock full of “random encounter” level battles that are fun to watch because the action and animation are both good, but which don’t necessarily add a whole lot to the greater story. There are moments, most notably with the “wind” in space, where you can be thrown out of the moment, putting a dampener on what might otherwise be good scenes. Perhaps most critically, in a show full of brilliant and dynamic characters like Slaine, Rayet, Asseylum to an extent, and loads of the secondary sorts that I didn’t bother bringing up – characters that get great, complex, and moving arcs – Inaho is a static character, essentially the same guy at the end of the series as he was at the start. I guess there’s some possible indication that his interactions with Asseylum and how much she meant to him put him more in touch with his emotions, but since he doesn’t emote you don’t really feel it. This is alright in abstract, but it’s also somewhat disappointing that the most central and important character is the one who doesn’t get a chance to really be changed by his journey in a way that we can see. And, while the sprawl material is good, there’s an extent that the vast amount of material I was able to cut from my summary without reducing the completeness or accuracy of an account of the main plot is something of a strike against.
For all that, though, Aldnoah.Zero is still one of the good ones. It takes a fairly simple concept, pitting the two halves of Mecha against each other, and spins it into an epic that’s, for the most part, both emotionally and intellectually satisfying. The show gets an A, and if you’re interested in an action war epic, I’d very much recommend checking it out and getting into the tangled web that’s waiting for you.