Macross Frontier

It's all Kenneth's fault. We were meeting up to discuss about the gaming convention and to purchase the mechs when he took out his laptop to show us the latest bootleg videos of the latest Shoji Kawamori project - Macross Frontier. Now showing in Japan, it's up to episode 5 now, and has all the classic Macross elements.

A love triangle with a twist. The guy in the middle is actually more beautiful than the girls!!! And this time, both girls are very talented singers.

A desperate war with unknown mysterious aliens. Not much is known of the Vajra except they are essentially biological monsters under the control of some mysterious agency. Oh, and singing by one of the characters apparently revives them, though this is only conjecture from the viewer's perspective at the moment.

Cool transformable mecha. In this case, the mouth watering VF-25, which looks inspired from a mix of the Sukhoi-27, the F-18 Hornet, and the F-14 Tomcat for the variable geometry wings.

The final classic element in Macross is of course music. So far, the soundtrack has been astoundingly good, IMO rivaling the legendary Macross Plus soundtrack. The first episode gave us the OP Triangular, which is topping the charts in Japan, the insert songs from the concert Sagittarius@9 Don't be Late, What 'Bout My Star(synth-pop version?) and a stand-in EP Aimo. What 'Bout My Star has two versions, sung by each female lead. The actual EP for the series is actually Diamond Crevasse from the 2nd episode onwards.

Of all the songs, Diamond Crevasse is actually my favorite, with the rock version of What 'Bout My Star from episode 5 being a close second. The single for Diamond Crevasse has been released, and I'm already impatient for the OST for this series to be released.

Looking forward very much to the rest of series. My great fear is that it'd get too bogged down and go all mystical, which is what happened in Macross Zero, especially the ending which made me go "Huh?". As long as that doesn't happen, Frontier should be a confirmed hit.