Cross Ange: Rondo of Angels and Dragons - Reviews

Awesome anime, not for children, i like strong woman, this is one of good part of the show a lot of mecha fight, a story with a lot of evolution, nice music, discrimintion and revolution good combination. enjoy watching

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: The art looks amazingly good. With the CG crap being made everywhere it is refreshing to see something like this where the CG does not dominate everything on screen. It is there but mostly to enhance and when it does go all out it manages to hide its presence better than most anime.

I must make a note though of the stock footage used. In the later episodes I noticed how they re-used scenes from earlier episodes. In the series, Ange, fights 2 enemy fleets and these fights are identical.

There was another instance where a bunch of dragons were pulled into a dimensional shift and it was repeated later only it was 'flipped' 180 degrees. In the first shot they were pulled to the right and in the re-used shot they were pulled to the left.

SOUND: Music plays a rather big role here so I took special interest in it. Usually I tend to ignore the music but it plays an integral part in the story here so.... Yeah. It's fine. Like some visuals it gets recycled a lot so regardless of the circumstance the song remains the same throughout the series.

CHARACTERS: Main character is Ange. She is an imperial princess whose life gets flipped upside down when she learns that she is a Norma.

Tusk is the sole survivor of a unit that fought Embryo. He saves Ange on multiple occasions and vows to protect her and serve her as her knight.

Embro is a brilliant scientist who sought a way to end the wars that kept killing everyone. So he killed everyone and started over. He rules over the remaining humans from the shadows.

STORY: The human race is at peace for hundreds of years and people are happy. With the power of mana humans are gifted to do whatever they want. Unfortunately there is a problem in paradise and that is the occasional human being born as a Norma. These humans lack the ability to use mana and even worse is that they can cancel it out simply by touching it. Enter Ange, first Imperial princess of the Misurugi Empire, as she prepares to officially become a full member of the court. What is supposed to become her greatest day becomes her biggest nightmare as she is outed as a Norma. She finds herself shipped out to a secret base where she meets other Norma and is told to fight massive dragons in order to protect the humans. This does not go over well with Ange but in order to survive she must fight. As time goes on she learns more and more about the real world and vows to tear it down.

RANT: This is a deeply flawed anime. There are so many plotholes and glaring errors that it eventually enters the realm of comedy. I watched the first 4 episodes online before I decided to get the DVD set and I'm not sorry I did. There is some good here but also a lot wrong.

Lets start with the obvious. The rapes. Yes there is rape in this anime. Quite a lot actually and some are played for laughs and some are for dramatic and some are not adressed at all.

Let me state here for the record: There is no excuse for rape. It is one of the most heinous crimes a human can inflict on another person so when you use it, use it well.

They do not use it well. When Ange gets to Arzenal she gets a nice body cavety search by Jill, the commander. It is a very dramatic event for Ange as a few days before she was a beloved princess and now she is being violated in a dank cell.

Here is a questions though: Why? As you later learn she is send there to fight dragons with the other Norma. They pretty much throw her into a giant weapon of mass destruction and send her off to fight. So..... I take it they were not searching her for weapons then? What was the point of that entire scene?

Most fun to be had was with Tusk though. At one point they find themselves in the dragon homeworld and it is populated by cute little dragon ladies. They strap him down on a table, naked, and proceed to molest him.

This is where Ange comes walking in as she is drawn by his screams for help as he lies there begging them to stop. She wades through the dozen girls surrounding him and proceeds to beat the shit out of him for cheating on her.

Yeah..... you read that right but let me put it in perspective here. You come home to find your significant other tied to the bed while 12 people a brutally gang raping him/her. (s)He looks up, sees you and thinks that salvation has arrived only to be brutally beaten because being raped obviously equals cheating.

Then there is Embryo. He pretty much rapes everyone but it is cool because he doesn't use violence to do it. His mind powers allows him to violate you mind first so by the time he is done there you'll want nothing more than to suck his love juice out of his dick.

See no violence = just fine. It's like math the way it makes sense.

Speaking of sense. The charactes aren't the only ones being rapes here as the laws of physics get violated as well. Here I'm sort of split in the middle though.

What you have is a series about mecha fighting dragons. The dragons are actually human (dun dun dun). What is wrong with that? Well, there is the small issue of mass when a 70 pount girls transforms in a 2 ton dragon and back again. Physics would dictate that the mass of both beings should be the same. 70 pound girl = 70 pound dragon.

Same with flight. The male dragons are massive and must weigh multiple tons yet they fly. A physics professor once looked at dragons as they are depicted in popular fiction with their bat like wings and started to calculate how flight worthy they were. He concluded that dragons were excellent fliers provided that they flew straight down. Sort of a gravity assisted mode of flying.

I have no problem with dragons transforming or flying and I will gladly ignore any laws of physics that claim otherwise. Dragons are cool and what use are dragons if you are not going to make them fly. This gets a full pardon from me.

What does not get a full pardon is the other crap. There is a running gag between Ange and Tusk in that he lands with his face on her crotch on multiple occasions. This is played for comedy and if you play a drinking game for this that you will not life to see the final episode.

So, the premise is that whenever Tusk falls he will land with his face on her crotch. What is the problem? Well, the problem is that he usually starts out to far away from her to have it happen. Shortly after they meet she pulls a gun on him and warns him to start away. An establishing shot from the stide has them some 20-30 feet apart. They are both standing still. Got that? A crab walks up and pinches Tusks' toe, he screams and flails his feet about shaking the crab lose. He also loses his balans and falls. The next shot has both him and Ange on the ground with his face buried in her crotch.

Now the question is here: How did he get there without breaking several laws of physics? Answer: He didn't.

As my previous section proved, I don't mind the laws of physics being broken but it must be for a reason. This is plain stupid and it is used to often in series like these that it just plain pisses me off. Please just stop doing it.

Dragons are humans? Another plot twist that got ruined. Please note that this human/dragon war has been going on for 500 years so what is wrong with the dragons being human?

Well, the reveal in itself is not the problem. The problem is what it does to the rest of the story. Shortly after Ange joins the team fighting dragons, things change. They start to fight smarter dragons who lay traps and fight intelligently. Then the reveal hits of them being human and you realise that they have been fighting for 500 years like mindless animals.

The greatest advantage of humans is their intelligence. It allows us to overcome our surroundings by building houses, cultivating fields, etc. It also allows us to wage war much more efficiently and brutally. Dragons are human so them fighting intelligently should have started almost immediately and NOT AFTER 500 FUCKING YEARS!

There is much more stupid but I stopped caring. At some point I just stopped caring about the stupid in this anime. There is simply to much to list it all such as Ange arriving in a city destroyed 500 years ago and turning on the tap to show it still producing running water. Or later after Tusk and Ange did the nasty you see them lying next to each other looking up and you can clearly see that Tusk has no dick. Or when Tusk saves Ange by sending her away on his airbike while he fights an immortal Embryo eventhough the bike is a twoseater and he could easily escape with her. Or Ange getting out of bed because she is thirsty and she is desperately searching for water while a massive rainstorm rages outside the hut she is in. At some point the anime just broke me in that regard.

If you like your anime looking good with lots of stupid and even more fan service then enjoy this because it has plenty of it all.

Well, let's start with a summary: Cross Ange wasn't quite as bad as I thought it was going to be. Now, it certainly wasn't good, but I must admit that despite a bad first impression, I enjoyed watching it just the tiniest little bit.

Speaking of first impressions, this show did not make a good one. The establishing scenes set up the titular main character Ange as the princess of a eutopian society built around magic and also as a wicked good player of a game vaguely resembling Quidditch. However, various events transpire that see the Ange stripped of her station, branded a 'Norma' (someone who can't use magic) and summarily exiled to an island for other Norma. She is then immediately welcomed to the island with a bit of tasteful prison rape. Oops, did I say 'tasteful?' Because what I meant was something more like 'utterly devoid of good taste.'

That's a good way to summarize the major faults of Cross Ange... at times it is totally lacking taste or restraint. Sunrise courted controversy recently in Valvrave by playing the rape element and it got them a lot of attention. Apparently, they figured that was somehow a good thing and decided to do it again...sigh. On the other hand, I thought they did a surprisingly tolerable job handling the sexual relationship between Ange and the other main character Tusk (an unbelievably rare topic in anime, given the volume of romances), at least after the initial fan-servicey tsundere phase in the middle of the show. This show's treatment could have been a lot worse. And moving on from the topic of explicit sexuality, let's also mention the fan-service. Oh lawd, there's fan-service. A LOT of fan-service. And it's often ridiculous, including panty shots, actual nudity and even multiple prison orgy scenes. I'd like to emphasize that I chose to use the word 'titular' earlier as a deliberate bad pun, because we see plenty of Ange's... tits. Hurr. 

The excessive fan-service is however often punctuated by extreme seriousness. People dying horrible deaths, others struggling to deal with living on while their comrades have died, family betrayal, the aforementioned rape(s), genocide etc. Cross Ange visits all of these topics and plenty more and occasionally does so in a way that is a bit interesting. The sort of weird oscillation between elements that are mildly interesting and mildly depraved were what really threw me off with this show. I would find myself starting to take interest in the plot, only to be suddenly bombarded with such a wave of ridiculous fan-service that it derailed any building appeal.

I will say that the overall plot of this show is complete, stark-raving lunacy. The core plot of the first half is a prison island full of magically-impotent lesbians that get in giant robot/motorcycles to fight off dragons. The second half isn't any less bonkers, involving the appearance of a guy who walks on water and raises people from the dead, time travel and a whole stream of other unspeakable insanity. Now that I am sitting here writing this, it occurs to me that the level of weirdness achieved is probably what I sorta liked about this show. It was amusing to watch it unfold and it managed to stay relatively coherent, which is impressive given the depth of insanity reached.

Let's close with a quick runthrough of the technical aspects of this show. The music is mediocre and bland, standard fare. The animation is very slightly above average, with nice bright colors and fluid motion, but ugly 3D effects and lacking detail. Characters are similarly so-so, they look distinctive but fall into the typical pattern of color-coding (there's the yellow character, the blue one, the red one, the green one etc.). Also I think the mecha are silly and ugly, is Sunrise running out of ideas?

That's all I have. Don't watch Cross Ange unless you're in the mood for something utterly bizarre and have a strong stomach for tasteless fan-service. If, however, you happen to be in the mood for exactly that... well there you have it.

This anime is one of the best examples of "it's so bad, it's good"

honestly this anime is entertaining in a different way

anyone who watches this anime be prepared for parody and plot holes

very pleasant and I would watch again

If you can get past the first 2 episodes and not be upset by abuse this is a really good anime with a great Heroine.  The first 2 episodes deal with Ange privialage life and drop from grace and I'll admit I fast forward through it.  Then it starts to build her back up with major set backs along the way.  It is always developing her character along the way. Then there is Magic, Super Tech, and Dragon's all woven into a great story.  There is a lot of abuse but it is the character of the world created by the twisted God.  The abuse fits the story.  But if you don't like abuse this is not for you.   Nudity a plenty but it is rather tame and used to lighten or with a abuse develop the charater's.  Sex scenes are really not there it is more like 2 nude people holding each other usually used to develop the character.  There is fan service but nothing of High School DXD ranking.