I’ve always enjoyed anime about big robots, I haven’t watched as many as some people *cough* (sideswipe) but I was very limited in what I could find before I had the Internet (yes there was a time before the Internet).
One of the first series I watched on VHS…yes VHS was “Kishin Heidan” a alternative timeline based story about Germans and giant robots, it was very good and had some great steampunk style giant robots who fought aliens who fell from the sky in weird egg shapes (sounds a bit crazy but was well done).
I then watched “Gundam Wing” one of the many iterations of the massively popular Gundam series. I could devote a whole post to Gundam but I need to get to the point of the post and that’s Macross.
I’d somehow missed Macross in all its forms, I knew it existed but for some reason had ignored/missed it which was probably down to not having any way to buy copies of it and the seasons tended to be quite long.
Macross like Gundam re-appears every now and again in a new updated form but unlike Gundam which reinvents and changes the universe in which its set Macross sets all its series within one universe and each series just takes a different time period to be set in.
Now if you completely new to Macross and want to watch the amazing new series “Macross Frontier” I’d recommend you watch the below in the order shown, I’ve marked which series are required (you’d be better off watching these as your enjoyment of later series would be effected without them) and which are optional. Feel free to disagree but this is the order I watched them in and is only my opinion.
To start off I’d highly recommend watching
Macross: Do you remember love? – A film version of the main events from the original TV series (called “Super Dimension Fortress Macross” which was later badly edited into Robotech). You could watch the entire series but it is quite long and I think the film is enough. The film itself is really nice and surprisingly holds up very well despite its age (was made in 1984). Without watching this or the series as a whole you’d find allot of future events a bit confusing (you’d be like “why is that farmer a giant?” etc).
This is an interesting game, every magazine online and off gives it huge scores and yet apparently it hasn’t sold well at all outside of Japan. I have to admit, I played the demo and wasn’t that impressed. I can tell Sega exactly what went wrong though, the demo was not focused on what should have been the main selling point – the phenomenal story. I haven’t got to sleep before 3am since getting this… 