Crest of the Stars

Publisher
Beez
Country of origin
Japan
Format
Series
Running time
25
Year
1999

Crest of the Stars - Volume 1

By Joseph (Joe) Wood
28th Apr 06

Space may be the final frontier, but science fiction anime certainly is not. In a genre, that has done pretty much everything imaginable (wither it be live-action or animation), new titles like Crest of the Stars has a lot to achieve in order to impress.

In episode, one we are introduced to Jinto Lin, a young nobleman of the Abh Empire, just about to head to the capital of the Empire in order to learn more of the Abh themselves. Jinto remembers when he was the son of the Prime Minister of planet Martine, when the Abh invaded Jinto’s father gave the planet over to the Abh in order to make him and his son part of the Abh nobility. Episode two sees Jinto meet an Abh for the first time ever, Lafiel a young trainee and the two spend a little time getting to know each other before heading to the capital. Episode three reveals more about the back-story of Lafiel, as well as explaining a great deal about the mysterious. Episode four, Jinto and Lafiel’s ship comes under attack and they are forced to evacuate.

This first volume develops slowly; the majority of time is spent getting to know our two main characters, Jinto and Lafiel. It also covers a lot of background information about the universe, which Crest of the Stars is set. Perhaps too much time is spent on describing unnecessary details, the viewer does not really need to know the intricate details of the spaceship or travel through “plane space”. These explanations do give the show some depth early on. You would hope that by going into all this technical detail, and background of our main characters early on, means that later episodes would focus on the plotline.

Visually, Crest of the Stars certainly does impress in the first volume. Whilst there are no huge epic space battles or great action sequences in this volume, the level of detail is fantastic. There is barely any CGI in the show, and that means that there are none of those cringe-worthy shots of space stations or ships that just don’t look quite right, that you find in a lot of similar anime titles.

Crest of the Stars also features its own created language; each episode is introduced by a narrator giving a little more background to the universe. Whilst this isn’t a new idea it does give the show more depth but also leads to the first volumes largest flaw, the fact that there are no titles for Japanese text that appears on screen (which when it does appear shows place names, minor character names and more). If you put the subtitles for English on then whenever some Japanese text appears on screen, it will be translated, but you’ll also get anything that is being said at the time. This doesn’t present a problem when watching the show in Japanese but when watching in English this can be extremely distracting, hopefully this is something that will be set right in future volumes.

Crest of the Stars volume one is a slow starter and is just setting up the story for future volumes of the series. There is a lot of depth behind the universe in which the show is set but there is nothing in this first volume that sets this series apart from a great deal of similar ones.

R2 DVD Notes

Features: English/French Subtitles, English/Japanese Audio Track, Trailers, Character Bios, Clean Opening and Closing Animation.

Release information: Publisher: Beez Released: April 3rd 2006 Classification: PG Running Time: 100mins

Notes: Not much in the way of extras on the disc, pretty average fair for anime DVDs nowadays.

-- Joseph (Joe) Wood 28th Apr 06

Crest of the Stars Images