Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Zegapain – episode 2

April 25, 2006 on 2:49 pm | In Zegapain | 2 Comments

“Cerebrum”

“Cerebrum”

With the second episode of Zegapain done, I’m closer to realising that it shows the promise of many of the things that I appreciate in a robot show.
It also does an admirable task of making up words and expecting us to understand them.

With every tick of the clock, Kyo’s world becomes weirder; reality distorts around him and no one else registers it. Eventually Kyo is called back into Zegapain Altair and is officially made a part of Cerebrum, the robot organisation run by his school’s student body.

I’ll admit that I have no idea who the enemy is in this program, but I’ll say this for Zegapain: it has a love across time, and reincarnation, and all sorts of crazy things that I go for. I like the idea that Shizuno has these epic emotions for Kyo, but that ultimately Kyo “belongs” to Ryoko. The OP is littered with romantic imagery of Kyo and Ryoko riding a bike into the sky, and I would like to see the anime go in this direction.
I see it like this: Kyo might once have been your love, Shizuno, but not on this time plane.

The only problem with this is that time displacement can go terribly awry if handled by the wrong people, and this show could jump all around the place. I don’t like the sound of there being a Zegapain game in the next episode, with Kyo being shocked at how good he is at it straight out of the box. It could spell an undoing of the last two episodes, and that would simply suck.

So, as it stands: potentially interesting love triangle; no clue of enemy’s identity; well-executed time motif; sinister looking teenaged commander of secret robot society (the clue to his sinister look is the anime shorthand of glasses and asymmetrical hair).
I’m on board.

(You may have noticed that I don’t have any shots of the robots in here; my terrible secret is that robot battles bore me, and that I prefer the threads that lead up to and after battles. Plus this show has “hammer space” robots, and I much prefer “realistic” robots based in mechanical principles.)