Considering the recent turmoil at XEBEC, I take great comfort in this announcement. I seem to be one of the few lonely Western fans of the Fafner franchise, and it has been gratifying to see how it has carried on for an incredible 15 years now.. (Evidently it is far more popular in Japan.)
My main question now is when a subbed version of BEYOND will become legally available in the U.S. I would like to add it to my shelf, which already contains the BD releases of the initial TV series and the HEAVEN AND EARTH movie. (If a boxed, subbed set of EXODUS has been released in the West, it has slipped right by me, but I would be a buyer.)
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Color2413 wrote: | Considering the recent turmoil at XEBEC, I take great comfort in this announcement. I seem to be one of the few lonely Western fans of the Fafner franchise, and it has been gratifying to see how it has carried on for an incredible 15 years now.. (Evidently it is far more popular in Japan.)
My main question now is when a subbed version of BEYOND will become legally available in the U.S. I would like to add it to my shelf, which already contains the BD releases of the initial TV series and the HEAVEN AND EARTH movie. (If a boxed, subbed set of EXODUS has been released in the West, it has slipped right by me, but I would be a buyer.) |
Yeah, it took me a while to get to Fafner (somewhere around 2012), but it's definitely a really good franchise. I remember when I first saw Heaven and Earth--I was left thinking the production values were right up there with the more popular Rebuild of Evangelion movies. Fafner Exodus is easily one of the best sci-fi/mecha anime of the last decade (visually and story-wise), even if I felt the last two-thirds of its second season kind of hurt what it had been doing before that point. My biggest problem with Fafner as a whole is how it can't seem to make up its mind. It sets up things, and then they run out of time and episodes, so they reset things, often in rushed ways that awkwardly play against the deliberate nature of its pacing. I would have rather they stopped things in the middle of the action with Exodus and picked up there rather than forcing Exodus to end, killing off a bunch of key new characters in halfhearted ways undeserving of the development given to them previously, and rushing us out toward another time skip.
Given the rather frustrating way that Exodus ended, I'm not sure what to expect from The Beyond, but I'm hoping for the best. It's looking like it might end up being one of the best shows of 2019 that few will talk about. It's just a timing thing, really. Fafner "looks" too much like what was its contemporary franchise, Gundam SEED, and it gives off an impression that it's another Evangelion and RahXephon clone concept-wise. But while it takes things from Evangelion and RahXephon, it remixes them with Macross, and in the process becomes its own thing, having an overall scope and themes that none of those shows particularly do to this extent. (To be honest, I think this series could have gotten more traction in the West if it had had a different character designer, but then it probably wouldn't be as popular in Japan.) The other things holding it back is the general weakening interest in techno/alien-sci-fi and the mecha genre, and the fact that you have to watch a lot of material now to really know what's going on in the franchise.
It's a shame that licensing compilations keep Exodus from getting a physical release in the West. The OVA prequel to the original series, Right of Left, never came over to the West, either. As such, I'm not expecting The Beyond to travel here, but hopefully we'll at least get an official stream eventually, like we did for Exodus.
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