Uchû senkan Yamato III

(This review is for Star Blazers: The Bolar Wars (English version))

Being a huge Star Blazers fan (I was one of the many kids that ran home after elementary school in the late 70's and early 80's so I could watch series 1 (the Quest for Iscandar) and 2 (the Comet Empire)), but I never got to see season 3 (The Bolar Wars). Then in the early 90's I traveling from comic shop to comic shop buying all 26 of the VHS tapes for series 1 and 2, and then buying the DVD sets of 1 and 2 when they were finally released.

So finally after all these years I watched series 3, and all I can say is what a huge drop in quality. The biggest letdown was the story, it was really bad, with way to many elements recycled from the first two series. The new character Jason Jetter is in my opinion the worst character in the Star Blazers universe. Plus, not being able to get the original voice actors to reprise their roles, and having new voice actors was a big distraction. At least the first two series are the masterpieces that they are, so this egg can be forgotten.

I was a massive Star Blazers fan in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I happily sat through the first two seasons and was blissfully unaware of a third. After the release of the live action movie in 2010, I found out quite by accident that there had been a third. I recently picked up the DVD's to take to a friend in Montana that had grown up with me watching the series as well, and we were eager to get into it.

Immediately, we noticed that the original voice actors were not included, and none of the new characters caught our interest. When we tried watching it, we got through about a third of the episodes and were completely baffled, because the Gamilas are called the Gamilons in the American version, and the Galvans, looking exactly the same, were not clearly explained and made no sense to us. We then realized that the entire series was a near-complete copy of the first season, right down to the Argo crew needing to save the Earth within a year.

It took the series FOREVER to even get the meat of the story, it was five or six episodes in and they hadn't even left he planet in the Argo yet, but by then we had lost all interest. This was a gigantic drop in quality in storytelling from the rambunctious second season, and nowhere near the level of the first. It was boring, it was confusing, and it left me very unhappy - Star Blazers has been many things, but boring was never one of them.

I will go back and finish it at some point, but reading other reviews shows that my early opinion was correct - there is a reason it was never released in the United States, and that would be because it is terrible.

Shoot the whole third series with the Wave Motion Gun, immediately..

Space Battleship Yamato III gets frequently overlooked in favour of it's predecessors - I believe a major contributor to this may be the fact that it's English-dubbed version, Bolar Wars, was released years later after Star Blazers and sporting an entirely new voice cast and a slipshod translation which didn't win it any favours.

The original version is, in my opinion, not merely as good as the previous two series but *better*. While the basic premise is pretty much the same, earth is in danger, Yamato heads out to get help...but that's where the similarities end. This time around, earth is in the same predicament as Gamilus was in the first series, and most of the series, Yamato (with several other unnamed ships which are implied to be upon the same task) seeks for another planet for humanity to migrate to. Somewhere deep in space, Desslok is engaging in a war against another superpower, the Bolar Federation, and soon Musumu Kodai and his friends are in the middle of this armed conflict. While Yamato spends much of the first half in battle, the story takes a turn into something far more interesting when Desslok discovers that Yamato is now involved in his campaign, and the story does not let go until the end.

Why does Yamato III rate better than it's predecessors in my opinion? It falls victim far less frequently the kind of stupidity series 1, 2 and especially New Voyage and Be Forever suffered from; namely characters foolishly getting themselves killed or acting just downright stupid for no reason and getting *others* killed instead (looking at you, Mamoru and Starsha).

If you enjoyed Yamato and Yamato II, you're going to enjoy Yamato III as well.