Eureka Seven: Ao

Alright, I'll start off by saying this. Eureka Seven: Astral Ocean is in fact, a GREAT anime. Branching off of it's predecessor Psalms of Planets Eureka seveN, it took things in a different direction then anyone had thought it would. I won't spoil it, but don't expect a continuation of the ending from the original anime. Now, as of now, only 19 episodes out of the slotted 24 have been released, so I can't say it won't answer questions from the last. Anyhow, this one is more of a spin-off, featuring an all new cast of characters. They have a nice variety, and are great characters, the music as well is fantastic. Some of the best I've heard from anything. Now for the fans reactions. As of now, many people have complained and have said this anime is not good, and it's a terrible representation of the series. The problem is, people aren't getting what they expected. AO needs to be looked at as it's own entity, not compared the the original. While there are ways it hasn't met up with the prior series, it also has completely different themes, and is doing things completely different. So before you throw this one away, just give it a chance. If you think of it as it's own thing, maybe, just maybe you will enjoy this masterpiece that Bones has produced.

Thus series was a bit much for me. A lot of confusing plotlines as it deals with parallel universes and just throws you into the middle. Much of the viewing time is spent catching up to the explanations of events and characters. Not a worthy sequel in my opinion.

Eureka Seven....that was a brilliant series, so i couldn't wait to see the sequel when I heard that there was one! Despite what i'd heard of some fans not liking the sequel, I thought i'd chance it and hope that they were wrong, for me they were not. I know why.

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In my opinion the thing that I really loved about Eureka Seven despite the great story, was the characters, that really made it all for me! So I was quite disappointed when I found out that none of the GekkoState crew were in the sequel. Eureka herself was only vaguely in it, for only a few minutes at most per episode, only for a few episodes. Then I found out that Renton only shows up in the last 2 episodes, yet again for only a very brief amount of time...

Although you could argue that it IS supposed to be about 'Ao' Eureka and Renton's son, I didn't really enjoy that very much either. As I felt that he spent more time trying to figure out what the "scub coral" was and what the "secrets" were, when I was there thinking...why isn't he going in search of Eureka at least, after all, it's been mentioned a fair few times by a couple episodes in about this mysterious woman that apparently is his mother, that came and saved people before and that every single government and person wants to seem to find ...but for some reason, he doesn't really do much about it. It's almost put as a background sub-plot.

As predictable as they may have thought it, they could have at least made it a good story about "Ao" trying to find his family. After all, isn't Renton and Eureka the main characters everyone wants to see through the whole thing?

Then I found actual story line to be quite confusing and basically spent a few episodes building up what felt like to me "dead end twists". Like when Ao decides to join the Allied forces instead of Generation Blue, which wastes like a whole episode of him joining them, only for his former team mates to fly over and ask him to come back, which he does....felt like a bit of a waste of episode time.

Also it spent so much time going on about the Japanese government vs US vs UN vs Okinawa, etc. etc. etc it just got boring. I kinda zoned out all about the government stuff throughout as it just felt like a load of filler.

And it didn't really have a whole "family reunited" kind of happy ending, it just had ***MAJOR SPOILER*** them reunite for like 30 seconds just for Ao to send his parents to another universe. And what's with making a fairly happy upbeat romance series all sad with Eureka and Renton's baby daughter dying, that's really sad. It would've been better if they could of found a way to not kill her off.

Overall, fairly disappointed, as they had the potential to make one heck of a sequel here. But I felt they chose the wrong story and plot, if only they had made it just a tad more about Renton and Eureka, maybe add in the rest of the Gekkostate crew, even if just a small bit, it would have been better. I haven't mentioned everything that I didn't like here, because I could just go on. They may just be able to save it if they made a really good sequel to this that not only finished happier, but also explained a lot of what was going on in this.

Oh yeah! And they really mess it up by confusing you with parallel universe and time travel stuff! In my short experience watching films, don't ever stick time travel in a film, it just sets you up for confusing your fans and making loads of plot holes.

All in all if you want to kind of enjoy it, i'd probably say read a little bit about it then just watch the last 3-2 episodes, you will still gather a fair bit of whats going on and it'll save you watching 20 or so fairly confusing episodes. And you'll actually get to see Renton & Eureka!