George Lucas can take his fran­chise and call it some­thing else, because this is the true Star Wars, and not one of those super-cliched eye-candy. For one, Leg­end of the Galac­tic Heroes (LOGH) is any­thing but the story of the gal­lant hero ver­sus the evil empire, even if those pilot suits look remark­ably similar.

There are no antag­o­nists within the main cast, only pro­tag­o­nists with dif­fer­ent moti­va­tions, tak­ing dif­fer­ent paths to become leg­ends in their own right. There are no stock worlds, only Star Sys­tems care­fully molded to the Author’s needs. Yet just when you think you know what is going to hap­pen next thanks to the detailed fore­shad­ow­ing, the plot tosses a wench at you to spin it in a some­what dif­fer­ent yet com­pletely log­i­cal direc­tion that you should have seen com­ing episodes ago. Char­ac­ter, set­ting, and story, this is when you know the series succeeded.

But that’s not where Yoshiki Tanaka, author of the orig­i­nal nov­els, truly shines. No, it’s the themes of the show, the unbi­ased side-by-side com­par­isons of ideals and morals between the Demo­c­ra­tic Alliance and the Auto­cratic Empire, that allows LOGH is shine brightly even from amongst the best. This is where the series’ orig­i­nal­ity and pro­found depth comes from: the con­flict of ideals that is not only given bal­ance in pre­sen­ta­tion but also expanded to epic pro­por­tions by exem­pli­fy­ing almost every kind of mis­take made by man to date.

If any anime truly deserves a per­ma­nent spot on the MAL top 10 list, LOGH is it, even if it has a few crit­i­cal flaws (which I might get to later in another post). I think any­one who has a taste for explo­ration of the intel­lec­tual, philo­soph­i­cal, and espe­cially in tick­ling moral­ity, would greatly appre­ci­ate this epic story and pile lav­ish praises upon it, as many have done so like here, here, and here. It may have been my biggest under­tak­ing as an anime fan with its 110 OVA episodes of 28 min­utes each (as opposed to the nor­mal 21 minute TV episodes), but many of its 3–6 episode sub­arcs had given me more to thor­oughly savor and enjoy than entire full-season series. Don’t be fooled by the length either, cause this show has vir­tu­ally no filler, and even a sin­gle episode skipped can leave one bewil­dered on a later event.

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