{"id":510,"date":"2006-07-14T17:13:45","date_gmt":"2006-07-14T22:13:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=510"},"modified":"2006-07-14T17:13:45","modified_gmt":"2006-07-14T22:13:45","slug":"last-exile-ending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=510","title":{"rendered":"Last Exile: Ending"},"content":{"rendered":"

A lot of dramatic stuff happened in the last two discs. A lot of main characters died. A lot of stuff got blown up. The world itself changed. There was a lot of drama, but for the most part I never got caught up in it because I was struggling to figure out what in the hell was going on. Oh wait. They blew that thing up? I thought they wanted to capture it? No? But what was it anyway? They captured that other thing? Why do they want that? They must really want it, though. They’ve just sacrificed all their ships to get it. No? They have more? But where are they going now?<\/em><\/p>\n

In the last battle I was never clear on what their goals were, so when things happened I couldn’t tell if they were good or bad. Part of this may be due to the fact that I took a three-week break right in the middle of the series and watched some other stuff, but I don’t think so. They had lots of flashback moments to earlier parts of the series, and those never really illuminated things for me. <\/p>\n

At the start of the series I said<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I love watching [vanships] fly. The sounds and the motions are perfect and really convey the speed and intensity of the dogfighting. It reminds me of the thrill I felt the first time I saw X-Wings and TIE fighters going at it. Seriously, it's that good.<\/div>\n

So it was really funny to see them recreate lots of Star Wars moments near the end. There was a scene in which they ripped off<\/del> paid homage to the Death Star assault. They even had a “stay on target” moment. I don’t think I was supposed to be laughing at that moment, but I did.<\/p>\n

I started off really liking Claus, but near the end of the series he became a lot less interesting to me. He stopped taking part in the what was happening, and just wandered around watching events unfold on behalf of the audience. By the end I was more interested in Mullen Shepard and Dio. <\/p>\n

What can I say about the plot? I don’t know. Maybe it would have made sense if I was willing to work at it, but I wasn’t. By the end I was just following the main characters around and waiting for them to win. Maybe if I was Steven Den Beste I could come up with a thousand word essay that would iron the thing out and make sense of it. He did that for The Matrix<\/a> and it retroactively made the movie a lot better. But for crying out loud, explaining the plot is the job of the writer, not the viewer. I wanted to love this show. In some ways, I do love this show. The visuals are top-notch. The characters are wonderful. The world is interesting and inventive. The gadgets are fun to watch. The voice acting is great. (Although they re-used too many voices in the English dub) In short, they had all the ingredients for a stellar show, but it ultimatly fails because the overall story is far too vague. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A lot of dramatic stuff happened in the last two discs. A lot of main characters died. A lot of stuff got blown up. The world itself changed. There was a lot of drama, but for the most part I never got caught up in it because I was struggling to figure out what in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anime"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}