This show is a weird one. Ancient Girls Frame is absolutely a mecha show, but it’s only really arguably an anime: it was produced by a Chinese studio. But it gets listed on MAL and other anime sources, and it’s not like I haven’t reviewed more dubious entries on my blog, so while I don’t intend to make a habit of it, I’m going to let this one go.
So, what is Ancient Girls Frame about? Well, to avoid drowning you in technical terms the way the ad copy does, it’s the sort of story where humanity is under siege from unreasonable space monsters, and fends them off with super mechas we found under various rocks. In this setting, we follow a girl who wants to become a pilot of some of that ancient lostech in part to search for her sister, a former pilot, who went missing in action.
Sounds fair enough, but a concept only gets you so far.
The show starts with said main character, Reika Minamiya. She’s the daughter of the man responsible for most of the modern energy system, called DG (for “Divine Grace”), but said dad has turned his back on such inventions, claiming that’s what really killed the elder sister, Reiu.
Thus, it’s under her family’s nose that Reika tries out to join the Ancient Girls Corps, a unit that exists because those ancient mechas that humanity has excavated can only be piloted by young women with certain genetic factors. The captain of the unit isn’t very inclined to let Reika join, due to having hangups about Reika’s big sister, but after a Nergal raid hits Earth and the most recently excavated mecha picks Reika up to be its pilot, the brass overrules her.
Thus, Reika starts her life as an initially subpar pilot candidate. The cast (at least the important parts of it) consists of that captain, Judith; her friend Luna; Arabian stage magician girl Arjena, and magical mystery girl Air. At first, Reika can’t repeat her performance of doing magic piloting, but when a real crisis arrives she both gets in the robot and discovers that it’s an awesome combining robot with two extra friends who come to power her up.
That battle sees the brass detect a signal from out at Jupiter, originating from the lost mecha of Reika’s sister. The active pilots are thus assigned to a cool space battleship in order to get out there and see what’s up, possibly turning the tables against the Nergal along the way.
They don’t have the best start, getting attacked on launch and having to fight in extremely low orbit. Reika and Judith work together to save the ship, but Judith ends up having to sacrifice herself to boost Reika back to safety. We’re not shown Judith blow up and she’s called “missing in action” but it’s pretty strongly implied she burned up in the atmosphere saving the sister of the friend she couldn’t.
The ship stops off at humanity’s lunar base for a shakedown. There, we find that a larval Nergal has infiltrated the ship and is targeting its DG generator core. Said core is also the legendary “white giant” mecha, which is kind of cool. The Nergal doesn’t manage to take out the ship, but does do some damage before getting offed. This means that the fancy ship can no longer solo a Jovian run.
Luckily, it’s revealed that Air is a member of the Niburu race, who created all this ancient ultratech (and possibly humanity) in the first place, and that there are Niburu ruins on Mars where they can pick up some on-brand spare parts for their incomprehensible super mech engine.
After a space battle episode just getting there where Reika learns an important lesson about going ahead and saving people no matter how dumb some angry military lady thinks it is, and some time bonding with her mech’s maintenance engineer (the other girls ship it, though it’s implied and eventually confirmed he had a thing with big sis instead), we get to Mars and investigate the Niburu ruins
There, we find the history that the Niburu first crashed there, and then sent the lifeboat they could for Earth, hoping that those folks would get things going and then come to the rescue. The inevitable history murals that every alien race always leaves around also relate how they came here from another solar system, and that the Nergal were their enemies and pursued the Niburu to Sol.
Unfortunately, Air is a bit late as a relief party and only gets to interact with a hologram of her sister, whose mummified form is the last of the Martian Niburu. Air has a little breakdown, but because this is also an episode for Arjena, it turns out that Sumerians (and their descendants) are descendants of the Niburu as well, letting Air come to terms with the fate of her people. This is a bit of a sideshow to getting those parts, which the engineer mercifully does before it turns out that Air absorbing her sister’s information cache triggered a ruins self-destruct mechanism.
It’s not quite a Mars-shattering kaboom, but it’s pretty good. With info and capabilities, it’s time to continue the quest into the outer solar system.
They get to the asteroids where the grand battle was had, but there’s nothing there but weird puffballs, one of which gives Reika some weird dreams before Air sets it right. Then, as the ship heads on to Jupiter, we cut back to Judith deorbiting and get an episode about salvaging her and her mecha from the deep sea. It was a little early to totally kill her off and they quite pointedly only called her MIA so I think the most surprising note is that, in addition to Reika’s dad being on the case, they’re working with Dr. Wiley. And he’s kind of a perv.
Somehow he provides most of the good plans this show.
The rescue is managed, so it’s back to space and on to Jupiter. The entire planet turns out to be a Nergal hive, and when the ship falls into the clouds, they find the frame with Reika’s sister, where the poor girl seems to be used as a terminal to relay a message, threatening whoever hears it for drawing energy from other dimensions, which is apparently bad news that could wipe out all realities and thus provokes the wrath of higher-order civilizations, commanding folks to stop or be wiped out.
If this whole setup with the DG tech and dad’s dedication to other solutions wasn’t already similar enough to Vividred Operation, it would get reminiscent here. But then, I really liked Vividred Operation, so leaving it out might be best for letting this show stand on its own.
The crew escapes Jupiter’s atmosphere after a chip sent by Reika’s dad is unwittingly unplugged, allowing the engine and mechas to start back up again. The cast figures out that the little DG suppression gadget does what it does with admirable speed, and also that while it’s in effect, the Nergal are passive.
Reika uses this to make a daring rescue mission against orders. This retrieves sister and mech from the depths of Jupiter, but the Nergal seem to take this badly, opening a warp gate and beginning to zerg rush Earth in their full numbers.
Rather than using their biomech space squid suicide bomb attack that they’ve previously been fond of, the Nergal’s presence just seems to suck energy away from earth, causing freezing temperatures the world over. This might be due to there simply being enough of them to blot out the sun, it’s not particularly clear.
A plan is hatched by the ship commander and Dr. Wiley to draw the Nergal away from Earth and seal them outside time and space, but before it can be enacted, that giant boss Nergal arrives, making for a rather more fraught final sequence.
The plan… mostly goes off right. The girls fight, the Nergal are lured, and a giant portal to the Shadow Realm is formed in orbit that sucks them all in, even the really big one. Even big sis and Judith manage to get in on the fight, the former recovering from her coma and the latter taking off from the surface.
At the last minute, it seems like the rift won’t just go away nicely, so Air (controlling the White Giant that has the power to make it) sacrifices herself to ensure it closes and doesn’t gobble up the Earth. That’s right! Despite the reveal that the Nergal were a sending from higher powers trying to stop universe scale calamities, the answer this time is just plain violence. For the life of me I can’t decide if this is more lazy or refreshing.
Time passes, humanity seems to be getting along fine, and the gang has a reunion to send us off.
Judith is on the left with the Sitar. On the right, left to right, are Luna, Arjena, Reika’s friend who went with but who never got in a robot or really contributed to the plot, and finally Reika.
There, we learn that humanity is now using DG unchallenged, but maintains defenses against the return of the Nergal while researching alternatives that presumably don’t come with risk of multiversal catastrophe. Also, the cause turns out to be the wedding of big sis and the engineer guy, so that’s nice. Thus, with ambiguous hope, the show ends.
Before I get into really breaking down Ancient Girls Frame, I have to mention that it comes with a bit of a caveat right now – the most accessible version (on Crunchyroll) presently has subtitles significantly out of sync with the actual action on screen, such that it’s extremely hard to watch. There are alternatives that work, and that’s how I got through the show, but it’s not likely that this will be fixed any time soon. So put that asterisk next to any recommendation I give.
On the whole, Ancient Girls Frame is a very basic but entirely functional mecha outing. It has fighting and blowing up of alien squids, it has some mild attempt at doing character drama, and it resolves itself in twelve episodes without feeling squished when mecha often goes to twenty four at a minimum given the scope of the stories folks want to tell with giant robots.
There’s no real reason to hate Ancient Girls Frame… but I also struggle to find a reason to really promote it. The pilots all being girls is kind of cool, like that’s not something that’s been done a lot in the Mecha genre, but at the same time not much is done with that so it’s just set dressing that has little qualitative impact on the show as a whole. The mythological references are kind of neat, but they’re about as shallow as the Lovecraft references in Kissdum. The backstory of the Niburu and Nergal is interesting, like it has layers to it with the Niburu being both benevolent precursors and unwitting instigators of doom while the Nergal seem to be some self-proclaimed authority’s autonomous clean-up crew, but that’s not really dug into on either side. Instead we just sort of shrug off the Niburu even more than SDF Macross does the Protoculture. And as for the Nergal, I’ve already mentioned if you want that story line done right you want Vividred.
I guess the characters have at least a little charm, but really, Ancient Girls Frame is the picture of a C outing, one that doesn’t go above or below bog standard. Which, in a bizarre way, makes it a kind of fun watch, because it has a different aesthetic and a weird production history to go with it as accents. I’d say check it out, but that caveat has to haunt this review, so all I can really say is that if you want to go through the effort of digging this thing up, at least you’ll have a semi-competent show at the end of it.