ith the release of the final stage of the Armored Trooper VOTOMS television saga, U.S. Manga Corps has finally closed the book on the story of Chirico Cuvie. And it's certainly one heck of a big book.
Taken as a whole, VOTOMS (Vertical One-man Tank for Offense and Maneuvers) is a vastly sprawling space opera, a 21-hour epic centering improbably on a man with only one facial expression to his name. Chirico, an Armored Trooper in the notoriously bloodthirsty Red Shoulder brigade, is betrayed by his compatriots during a covert raid on one of his own army's facilities. Abandoned, recovered, tortured, relentlessly pursued across the galaxy, captured and exploited time after time, he persists in his single-minded pursuit of the strange woman he glimpsed during the fatal raid that started it all.
Chirico confronts his past aboard a mysteriously abandoned spaceship and meets God in the millennia-old tunnels of a once-powerful planet. He fights to save the life of a war-widow who repeatedly tries to kill him, and fights to win a civil war despite his apathy regarding its outcome. He fights faction after faction to win the freedom of the woman he loves, then fights her as well when she stands between him and his ultimate goal.
Mostly, he just fights. Robotically, obsessively, he battles simply to erase the internal horrors of his previous battles. In essence, he's a war junkie, a killing machine. But he has a much loftier destiny.
99 flammable tanks on the wall, 99 flammable tanks...
VOTOMS' central flaw is that Chirico's such an unappealing, unpleasant character. He suffers his many personal horrors grimly and silently, treating the people who love and respect him with the same detached glare he uses on his enemies. It's the universe around him -- and its widely varied response to his utterly unvaried iciness -- that makes this a story to follow.
Like any large-scale series, this one has its high and low points. The drab, flat animation is a definite minus, but the background music makes up for it with a wide range of themes and genres. The fighting begins to drag after a while; Chirico's battle-mania is the central axis of his life, but that alone doesn't make the thousandth exploding khaki-colored mecha any more interesting than the hundredth. Fortunately the story is carried by Chirico's would-be friends, dispassionate captors and frenzied enemies. Their schemes, arguments and brief alliances weave the plotline into a frenzy of Gordian knots for their bland hero to slice through.
This complexity, and the myriad tiny character dramas it enfolds, make VOTOMS a rewarding if severely demanding experience. This isn't a series to dip into lightly; like any well-crafted novel, it needs to be taken as a whole in order to make complete sense. And that's a daunting task, considering the story's scope. But the rewards are as many and diverse as the liabilities.
