A friend showed the first episode of franchise installment Macross Delta during “anime night” some time ago and I thought, hey, I should buy this on Blu Ray. So I did. And I’m working my way through the series… slowly. A couple episodes at a time.

Because that’s about all I can really take, honestly.

I’m eleven episodes in. I have some thoughts.

I am nothing even remotely resembling a Macross show expert. I grew up on Robotech and I watched Macross Frontier (the predecessor to Delta) when it was airing. So maybe this show is doing something brilliant that I’m just missing, and that’s fine. Not everything is for everyone. And I don’t hate the show! It’s more that I can’t really connect with it.

One of the strong points is that they are 1000% committed to the music side of things. I’m not even a dozen episodes in and I’ve probably heard at least that many distinct songs along the way. Yes, some of them get reused here and there but this isn’t one of those cases where the production committee “splurged” on one whole insert song and you have to listen to parts of that one song over and over again. The soundtrack for this show must be substantial. And it’s decent stuff! Not wholly in my strike zone but I certainly don’t mind hearing it.

Related to that, Delta tries to “explain” the “science” of how the “power of song” works… and yes it’s all kind of silly which is why I’m using all those quote marks, but at the same time it’s kind of necessary to tell the story they want, so I’m glad they’re sketching it in at just the right amount to make it work. Macross has always been the “power of song (and transforming airplanes)” franchise, they’re just kicking that up several notches. Good on them.

I like the distinctive settings of the key planets. The writers put some real effort into the worldbuilding and it shows. They also give us plenty of scenes where folks are just kind of hanging out, especially at the heroes’ primary base of operations. It’s not all spaceships and laboratories and cockpits and conference rooms.

We get a colorful array of side characters as well, which makes the scenes of hanging out with them that much better.

Note that I pointed out how much I enjoy the side characters. Yeah.

So… there are some things that don’t work as well and they’re almost all centered the leads: The pilot, the singer, and the obligatory third wheel of the obligatory love triangle (who’s far and away the most interesting of the three while being clearly earmarked as “destined for the friendzone” by the overall presentation). The pilot and the singer are both firmly, even after more than ten episodes into a twenty-something episode show, still in the “I’m a screw-up but I try real hard!” mode. Look, y’all, I can only take so much of this thing where main characters are only competent when there’s a crisis and they Try Really Hard at the right moment. Usually accompanied by shouting.

And there’s two of those in this show. Two!

Hayate (the pilot) and Freyja (the singer) spend a lot of their time being bewildered by the events they’re in the middle of, and that goes on a lot longer than it really should. Their primary roles in the story are basically “do heroic thing at the most dramatic moment” and “be so clueless that other characters have to infodump at them (to educate the viewing audience).” It gets old, I tell you. Sure, that’s only two characters out of a vibrant cast of dozens, but it’s the two characters who get far and away the most screen time, and that makes it a problem.

A lesser complaint, because I have very mixed feelings about it, is that sometimes the show goes out of its way to remind you that it is, in fact, a Macross show. I’m not going to spoil a particular major event that’s built up to and concludes right around episode 10, but if you’ve seen the original then you can probably guess what kind of event I’m talking about. And I could see it coming an entire astronomical unit away. It was inevitable. And they didn’t subvert the expectations. It just had to be sat through. Really? Why? It’s such a tired ancient trope and they could’ve made so many other choices instead. Which isn’t to say it was badly done, just… once that train was on the tracks there were no surprises about where it ended up and it felt like I was just watching the show going through the motions of getting there.

It’s taken me a couple of months to watch even the eleven episodes I’ve made it through so far. There are high points mixed in among the slogging bits but the main structure is built from so many clichés that I have to work up the energy to park in front of the TV and tackle each installment. I’m not engaged, I’m just getting through this to see how it ends.

And as of episode 11 it looks like they’re setting up for what in a 12 or 13 episode series would be the final battle, so… huh?

I guess I’ll find out. Eventually.