he pirate vessel Sol Bianca is a powerful ship with a powerful crew--four dangerous women, each one a paragon of skill, overconfidence and self-absorption. April, the captain, is frequently frustrated with the difficulties of persuading her crew to take things seriously and focus on the task at hand. When they make planetfall to steal a prized flintlock pistol--a relic of old Earth given to April by the aunt who raised her, but later stolen and sent to auction--April can't even keep track of her fractious team. Feb, the crew's problem child, disappears to go drinking and pick up one of the local men. Jun, the sometimes-shy, sometimes-swaggering computer tech, runs out to shop for toys. And Juni, the volatile, impatient weapons expert, gets wrapped up in target practice on the firing range. April, hardly the epitome of responsibility or control herself, sulks, rages and proves generally useless as a leader or role model. Eventually a plan comes together. The four dress to kill, pack enough weapons to kill anyone their outfits miss, and head off to assert their rights to the pistol, flatten anything in their way and blow this pop-stand of a planet.
In the second of the two episodes on this first tape, April and the gang travel to a legendary cursed planet that's rumored to hide untold treasures, though only one man has ever visited the place and escaped alive. April seeks out his advice, smirks at his warnings, and rushes her crew headlong into the heart of a ruined city. There, Jun is forcibly separated from the rest of the team, along with Mayo, a wide-eyed, timid stowaway who seems destined to become the ship's mascot. (What's a pirate ship without a parrot?) Jun and Mayo are forced through a maze of traps meant to emulate Dante's descriptions of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. But Jun, who cringes and creeps around the ship when facing April's potential wrath, proves much more confident on her own, and she waltzes cockily through peril while barely breaking a sweat. Meanwhile, a squad of enforcers from Earth, still chasing the Sol Bianca after April's refusal to respect their authority in the previous episode, turns up and starts shooting.
Pretty, but also pretty irritating
With the Legacy series, animation production company AIC does to the Sol Bianca anime/game franchise what they recently did to Bubblegum Crisis with the Tokyo 2040 series. The new series is not a continuation of the old; it's a new interpretation that starts from scratch while assuming the audience has a base familiarity with the character histories that are being erased and rewritten. In effect, it decontextualizes the characters, reducing them to half-recognizable, unpleasant archetypes whose sheer rudeness is their main draw. It's not clear how these braggarts manage to endure each other from hour to hour onboard a spaceship; they can't get through a scene without fighting. If they had a worthy enemy to unite against, their flaws might be less noticeable, but at present they're the disturbing main focus of the show. And the who's-most-dysfunctional war gets old fast.
The series' strongest point is of course the visuals, which run the gamut from confusing to brilliant, and are at times both. The combat scenes tend to get a bit muddled as they spiral into random, stuttering images of the crew's positions and expressions, while losing track of the larger picture. The digital pans and zooms are distractingly quick and mechanical, and the computer-generated ships are awkwardly integrated with the rest of the animation. Still, the episodes' best moments are all purely visual, and revolve around the beautiful and innovative design and functions of the Sol Bianca itself. The ship has appealingly organic lines and a corresponding organic theme to its computer interfaces and weapons functions. For instance, an attack that causes a gigantic holographic goddess to appear behind the ship and draw a giant holographic bow, turning a weapons strike into a form of divine retribution, seems implausible but is too breathtaking to shrug off as irrelevant.
It's not unusual in anime to see a machine that's more intriguing than its operators, but it is unusual to see such an imbalance in a show that isn't intended for the mecha crowd. Sol Bianca is a more human drama than most mecha tales, but the humans in question are obnoxious, spoiled brats with little going for them but flashy style and cool toys.
