Aquarion

Alt titles: Genesis of Aquarion, Sousei no Aquarion

TV (26 eps)
3.483 out of 5 from 5,556 votes
Rank #6,457

Long ago there was a battle between angels and humans, which ultimately ended with the angels’ retreat. Twelve thousand years later, the angels have become active again and have begun harvesting humans for nefarious purposes; and only the pilots of the ancient mecha known as Aquarion are able to oppose the angels' tools of war. The pilots have special powers, but the secret to defeating the Angels once and for all lies with the reincarnations of the two beings who defended humanity against the Angels in the past: Apollonius, an Angel who turned his back on his kind in order to protect humanity; and Siren, his human lover. Only Apollonius can awaken the true strength within Aquarion that is needed to defeat the angels; but who is the reincarnation of Apollonius?

my anime:

User Stats

16,601 users are tracking this. to see stats.

If you like this anime, you might like...

Reviews

tollie01
4

Right, it's confession time for me. If you have been reading my reviews than you may have noticed that I tend to rip the anime a new one. There is a reason for this though and it has to do with the fact that I can't turn my brain off when watching anime. I can't ignore the stupid shown in the anime and this is a problem as most anime are very stupid indeed. In this case I'm not talking about a 90 pound girl catching a multi-ton cruise missile and throwing it back. Yes, it is stupid but it is a stupid that I'll allow. It's anime. Things like this are normal here and I'm pretty much fine with it. It annoys me to be sure but I will not rant about it. So, having explained this lets rip into this anime shall we? Just a heads up: There will most probably be spoilers. The more I hate an anime the more spoilers there will be. ART: Kind of confusing. With this I don't mean that the art is weird or something like that. If I'm honest I'll have to admit that it is above average but I just didn't care for it. The confusing part is that I can't put my finger on why. As mentioned, if I'm honest, it is good enough and above average and you'll never be confused about what is going on or who is who. SOUND: ..... I got nothing. As I've said many times before this is not a bad thing. Not for me. It means that the music was at least not bad our oustandingly great. CHARACTERS: Main character is Apollo. He's essentially homeless and after an attack by Angels he is also cityless. It is discoverd that he can pilot Aquarion and he gets roped into joining DEAVA. He is very animalistic in his behavior which often has him butting heads with the other members Silvia and Sirius are siblings and of noble descent. Sirius immediately hates Apollo as they are complete polar opposites. His sister Sylvia joins him in the hatred but is also intrigued by Apollo as she is strangely drawn to him. Toma is a powerful Angel and he dedicates his live to the destruction of DEAVA. He sees in Apollo the main advisary that he must destroy. STORY: 12.000 years after the end of the human-Angel war it becomes clear that the Angels are once again back to destroy all of humanity. The only one able to stop the Angels is the organisation DEAVA. Collecting special humans from all over the world who can channel elemental power they train them to pilot the Vectors. These 3 craft are ancient aircraft that are powered by their pilots. Not only are they very powerful they can combine into a huge mecha called Aquarion. In the last war it was Aquarion that turned the tide and defeated the Angels. Because of this they are the number 1 target of the Angels. RANT: I really liked the concept of the anime but I hated the way the anime turned out. There is very strong hinting about reincarnations and you quickly know who the main characters are. Wich makes waiting for the characters catch up to where the viewer is very tedious and annoying. The episodes themselves are just as tedious en formulaic. Every episode begins with the DEAVA people getting issued a problem that they need to solve by their CO. They fail and right then they get the call that there is an Angel attack. They head out and quickly realize that in order to beat the Angel they need to solve the problem that they were given at the beginning of the episode. This is almost every episode and gets tired very quickly. Most of the series is structured like this and with a few exceptions most arcs are episodic. In the background there is overall arc that works towards the final Angel fight but slogging through the show getting there is a chore. It also takes out all of the suspense out of the series as you can see pretty much everything coming. You already know what the solution to every fight is going to be before the fight begins. One of the positive things is the character interaction. The characters are actually pretty well worked out and you can see why some characters are butting heads as much as they do. Downside is that some characters can be very two dimensional and don't really change as the series goes on. Then there also the weird stuff that goes on. This brings me to the one thing that truly pissed me off. It is eventually revealed that there is a child Angel. The last Angel to be born who is a mere 12.000 years old. Despite his age he looks and acts like a teenager. Upon hearing about Aquarion he decides to have some fun with him and heads down to Earth and fuck around with them. By fun I of coarse mean wiping a few cities off the map and killing pretty much everyone there. That is tens of thousands of people per city and he destroys a number of cities. Men, women and children I might add and all the while little Futaba is laughing and having a grand old time. Meanwhile the older Angels look on shaking their heads muttering something about 'that darn kid' and stuff. None of them lift a finger to stop him at any time. So he gets caught and Aquarion hands him over to the UN like organisation that leads the war. They are understandably a wee bit pissed off by the thousands of dead and since this is the first Angel ever caught they go docter Mengele on his ass. This greatly disturbes both the Angels and the members of DEAVA because one simply does not do this shit to chldren. Even enemy ones. Meanwhile I'm looking on wondering why DEAVA is so hung up on what they do to Futaba at the research station. It is made very clear that this must not be done to children so as viewer you should be shocked by this brutal torture. While I sort of agree that it is wrong I can't help thinking about the THOUSANDS OF DEAD HUMANS THAT USED TO LIVE IN THE NOW DESTROYED CITIES! Seriously the deathtoll is staggering and we are supposed to feel sorry for the little shit? I would personally blown his fucking head off if I had caught him and let them experiment on his corpse.

theSentinel
8.5

I will not be doing this review the same as my more structured ones, to bring out the key ideas: pros: -the prob of the day style was fun and funny        -the characters started off separated but the relationships built well into the last          couple episodes.        -the characters became lovable        -the enemy and story were pretty interesting cons: -prob of the day style removes any chance of a flowing masterpiece of a storyline         -the end kinda got weird, super love blast of justice, lets all just be friends even         though you killed all my other friends, some kind of weird philosophy about how         love is going to save the world, we just have to understand each others pain.        -on top of the lovey dovey corny wierd sh*t that just makes none of the anime real        or reasonable any more, the end ends up feeling rushed into "OMG THE WORLD IS        DOOMED, WE MUST SACRIFICE THE MAIN CHARACTER AND LEAVE HIS LOVER BEHIND        TO MAKE THIS ANIME GOOD AND NOT TOO PRESUMPTUOUS".  which is stupid.  Im rewriting this portion after some time and thought partly because I began watching Aquarion EVOL Problem of the day style usually annoys me.  Not many animes do this episodic style and get away with it looking clean.  Often times it takes up too much time that could have been spent on the main plot.  However, Aquarion actually built in the essential character building into each episode with small advancements in the plot over time.  Closer to the end they accelerate the main plot and finish the anime. Now I had to rewrite this review after watching some of EVOL because at first I hated hated HATED this ending, for a similar reason that Guilty Crowns ending kind of erked me.  However I then realized after about 10 episodes of EVOL that it is a continuation of the story from Aquarion.  Then suddenly I realized the awesomeness of this series.  The style of both were similar, episodic, but with some really nice character building.  Similar to Samurai Champloo you can just sit back and kind of enjoy the flow of the anime. While the ending could have been more smooth and less corny, they did an ok job at least.  If they had ended the story there it would have kind of sucked, but there is more to it.  Aquarion EVOL picks up down the road and you will find that the ending for this one was not so horrible. I reccommend this anime, it is pretty good, but you need to watch it for Aquarion EVOL because that one is a must watch.

See all reviews

Related anime

Related manga

Characters

See all characters

Staff

See all staff

Discussions

Custom lists

See all custom lists