Difference between revisions of "Infinite Ryvius"

Latest revision as of 00:53, 19 June 2012

Infinite Ryvius
Director	Goro Taniguchi
Writer	Yousuke Kuroda
Format	Anime (TV)
Made By	Sunrise
Episode Length	25 minutes
# of Episodes	26

Genre

• Sci-Fi
• Drama

Sum it up in a Sentence:

Lord of the Flies in space.

Main Description

Set in the year AD 2225, mankind has spread from Earth to inhabit nearly all the planets or nearby moons in colonies and settlements. Space travel has grown and improved to the point of being commonplace. For the inhabitants of the solar system, an astronaut career isn't out of the question, and one of the schools set up to train future space voyagers is the Liebe Delta, a space station positioned somewhere in Earth's orbit. This growth is despite the mysterious phenomenon known as the Geduld, a sea of plasma that suddenly erupted from the sun along the Earth's orbital plane in AD 2137. Stretching from the sun to the edge of the solar system, this area of high temperatures and gravity pressures has never been explained.

Kouji Aiba is a sixteen-year-old boy who packed his bags and left his home on Earth for the Liebe Delta and the training to obtain his Level 2 piloting license. He journeys to the space station accompanied by his childhood friend, Aoi Housen, whom Kouji discovers to his chagrin has enrolled in the Liebe Delta's flight attendant program. En route to the spaceport Aoi gives Kouji the unwelcome news that his younger brother, Yuki, is also to attend the Liebe Delta and in fact the brothers will be in the same flight class together. Aoi ends with quipping that the boys' mother Mrs. Aiba had asked Aoi to look after the brothers while at school. Kouji's unhappy moodiness does not improve.

Once aboard the space station, the students and teaching staff on the Liebe Delta were like any other school, normal and concerned with their own affairs and classes. They even had a vacation period, known as the Dive Break, when the ship ventured near the Geduld for system maintenance. Out of about 1000+ students, about 500 stayed for the break. Unknowingly to all, the space station, in the middle of the routine dive considered so regular that it was entrusted to the elite Zwei cadet class, was sabotaged and the majority of the staff gassed and rendered unconscious. Free falling into the depths of the Geduld Sea, where the resulting gravity pressures would crush the station and kill all aboard. The remaining adults, all instructors, sacrificed their lives to save the majority of students on board. When their heroic actions proved unsuccessful and the Liebe Delta hung on the verge of collapsing, a mysterious ship named RYVIUS, hidden within the Liebe Delta activated itself and surfaced from the Geduld Sea. There were a total of 515 personnel on board the Liebe Delta at the beginning of the dive. Of which a total of 486 were successfully evacuated. Meaning that a total of 29 people were killed in the sabotaged dive. 8 were instructors, 12 were the gassed staff that were later executed by the 2 saboteurs, and 9 students.

Stranded in space, with humanity's governments forsaking them, and within the ship anger, agitation and fear setting in, Kouji tries his best to maintain a semblance of order and peace in a time of crisis. But with fighting his own brother Yuki, dealing with his feelings for the beautiful Uranian aristocrat Fina S. Shinozaki, trying to avoid Aoi, and seeing the strange apparation of a girl in pink wandering the halls, will Kouji be able to help until the Ryvius reaches safety, or will he lose all that's dear to him in the process?

If You Liked This, You Might Like...

• Uninhabited Planet Survive
• Crest of the Stars
• Now and Then, Here and There

Personal Opinions

IShallRiseAgain

Sometimes the show can be pretty cheesy, but overall its a decent sci-fi show.

MoaM

Strangely, this show is fairly light on giant robots killing one another; in fact, I've always found the battles/action/destruction comparable to naval warfare or the lanquid pace of ships skirmishing in Star Trek. Really not a show you would watch for the action in any case. Even though the Aiba brothers come off as a centerpiece in the series, I still regard it as one of those multi-character dramas. Take note: this is drama befitting what the likely angst-filled teen audiences were expecting at the time, and perhaps still do. Despite this, the atmosphere of the show never travels into naive optimism. It's quite dismissive of politics by the end, actually, yet you are still treated to glimpses of class warfare and imperialism/fascism.

As for world-building and all that immersion stuff: the ship itself is unglamorous (the living arrangements for our characters are squalid I'd say), the mecha(s) themselves are complicated and technically demanding (needing a group of operators) and as I said before, space is treated like an open sea, completely with all the dangers and problems you'd expect if you were drifting in the Pacific. In short, this is a world of tension without easy solutions. My least favorite bit is the silent alien-mystery ghost girl whom you get to wonder about from the first episode onwards; I'm not sure it's possible to redeem throw-away characters/mysteries like that, so consider this a warning. Another thing: there is no overt 'big bad' who threatens humanity. The main character does not undergo a grandiose awakening of his 'true potential' and destroy some malevolent evil. If there is any foe to be vanquished during Infinite Ryvius it's our inability to just flat-out work together in times of pressure.

Avoid if you enjoy altruism. Watch if you enjoy pragmatism.