User reviews

If you're a fan of the original Starblazers, you owe it to yourself to watch this series in its subtitled glory. It may not entirely have the same voice-acting nostalgia you grew up with, but characters you know and love are still there.

The character designs are not exactly the same either, but it borrows aspects of the original art style so that the characters are recognizable. Everything looks and feels fresh, crisp, and new. But the beauty of this re-make is they've kept all the things that make Starblazers/Space Battle Cruiser Yamato the same...the sound effects from the original series are still intact, as well as re-recorded versions of the classic music. C.G. is added to good effect for the actual ship, without sticking out like a sore thumb (*cough*evangelion*cough*).

I just started watching and I'm instantly hooked. ^_^ Anyhow, this review, work in progress, since I just started watching. And I have to get to sleep soon. So, to be continued...

I watched the original series, like others here. I can safely say that while this series holds true to the original, it stands alone on its own.

The animation is very good. Explosions, lasers, all the sci-fi stuff one expects and done well.

The score is another aspect I found compelling. The music was done well, with great pieces well placed to enhance the story.

Characters, this is where I believe the show really stands out. With 26 episodes characters are well developed, and not just the humans. Many of the enemy characters are given equal treatment, going so far as to show family relationships among the enemy.

Battle scenes, great stuff here. We are treated to some battles that get you excited and anxious at the same time. People die, even many characters who have been developed in the storyline.

Finally, and I know some will not like this statement, any movie containing a battleship is a great movie. The naval themes presented are right up my alley. With everything from ship designations based on naval terminology (destroyers, cruisers, aircraft carriers, etc) and line formations just like watching naval reviews. Much of the ship fighting combat scenes are based on naval warfare techniques from the days of the large capital ships combined with more modern carrier warfare.

To conclude, I have watched this series twice now, and still find it exciting to watch and the characters extremely compelling. I have only found the series with English subtitles and the speaking in the original Japanese. If one is not able to do subtitles, you might wait until a dubbed version is released.

Note, this has also been released at Starblazers 2199. The primary difference I found is calling the ship the Argo rather than the Yamato, as the original Starblazers series did. The original series also changed the names of the main characters, for example Yuki Mori was called Nova in Starblazers. I am unable to explain these changes in names other than fear that a US audience would reject characters with Japanese names and would not want to see the IJN Yamato take on a second life of space flight a mere 40 years after its actual sinking. Space Battleship Yamato 2199 plays no such games with its audience.

I'm rating it 9/10 but personally for me its 10/10 because of the nostalgia factor.

This is a remake of the mid 70's Space Battleship Yamato which was released in the US as "Star Blazers" and dubbed into English. It was so popular in Japan that there was a musical tour of the music from the show. It was equally popular among American children of the 70's and 80's.

This is an excellent remake. They kept what made the series great in the 70's and of course the animation and general picture quality is vastly superior.

First off, thank you Bandai and the production team for bringing this back.

I watched the original when I was 10-12 years old, so on a personal level it was nostalgic. That being said, the story has been modernized in a very technical way to add "onion like" layers to the level of realism.

The combat scenes were the finest space battle scenes I have ever seen in live action or Anime, in their detail, Better than the New Battlestar Galactica IMHO. The CGI and 2D animation was blended masterfully.

The Story has been updated in a way to fill in the realism gaps without stepping on the Original. The Characters have real and individual motives and the antagonists are no exception.

You do not have to have watched the original, the movie, or even anime, to thoroughly enjoy this series.

Like the other reviewer said, this is better than the original. It's an appropriate update of the old "classic" anime that had been imported from Japan in the mid late 1970s.

The old show was a little hard to take at times because of all of the dialogue mis steps the English cast took or uttered, and the animation was typical "get it done fast" off shore anime that often had problems with perspectives and budget restraints regarding the number of drawings that could be used.

Thankfully CGI has freed the budget to allow animators to concentrate on the characters and letting the computers render the various machines, vehicles and devices, making for an incredibly good viewing experience.

It had, at one time in my life, been an ambition to take animation that I grew up with that had good stories but poor animation, and bring up the level of quality with improved techniques. "Space Battleship Yamato" (or "Starblazers") was on that list. And I'm glad someone else had the same idea and ran with it.

All the classic characters are there, including a few new ones adding to the story mix. And most of all the characters themselves are less exaggerated than the previous show.

It's still marginally hokey (a flying space battleship, which has some ultra-right political roots in Japan), but it's still an enjoyable watch all the same. If you've seen the original, grew up with it, have a fondness for it, then you should at least try to watch this show's first episode to see what you think.

Enjoy.

If you were a fan of the original series (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0140644/), the 2199 series will be a nostalgia filled experience. There have been a number of updates as other reviewers have posted. The end result is that 宇宙戦艦ヤマト2199 is overall a richer experience and up to par with today's expectations. If you are someone who has never seen the original, this is an exceptional piece of work and fully stands on its own without need for prequel.

If you're a fan of the original soundtrack, you're in for a special experience as the most familiar melodies are there and unchanged. You will also find a plethora of new material that blends well with original 1970's compositions.

The animation is clean and crisp, but full of detail. Typically not what you'd expect to see in a weekly televised series. Due to the unique method of release (episodes grouped and released to theaters first and shortly after broadcast episodically), the production values are very high.

Again for those familiar with the original series, everything is updated but familiar. Nothing went through a redesign so drastic that it would not be recognized. Character designs are updated to more contemporary appearances. The mechanical side of the designs benefit most from the improved animation technology available today. Some elements and characters are new, mostly done to complete the story or add depth. The story is now deeper without becoming mired in its own twists and turns hopefully allowing the viewer to become more emotionally invested with at least a few of them.

The end result is a remake that does not need to rely on nostalgia but embraces and honors its past all while bringing the animation, sound, and story into a more contemporary era.

If you like SCI-FI, this is it for you. But not only space battles and lasers.

This series gives such a great attention to details, and explains pretty much everything (that is how I like a SCI-FI, create new tech while creating the backstories explaining them). I often had to pause to look at things like the very detailed engine or shield monitors, and had to back up to listen back to important information given.

The main vessel of the series, the Yamato, is also very well explored and used, with plenty of different technologies used, from huge cannons to classical WW2-era artillery shells.

The characters are also very well developed in here. Most of them are multi-dimensional and serve their own roles somewhere. This is actually an excellent space opera, and was really drawn into all of the inner stories, even love stories.

The enemies are also very well depicted, and get their fair share of screen time, and are also multidimensional. You get to understand them, and even understand them well, their behavior, and why their are doing what they are doing.

The english voice acting was also up-there, beautiful and well talented voices, fitting the characters.

All in all, this is a 10 for me, up there with neon genesis evangelion series. Looking forward the 2022 part! Thank for that new personal classic.

I've seen a lot of reboots over the last 10-years and nothing compares to this one re-imaging. Not only does it respect the source material immensely, but it actually adds to it in a meaningful and constructive way. I will not spoil the show. I will only say that it should be watched by English speaking viewers in the original Japanese with subtitles to understand the full tone and depth of this Space Opera. It is amazing how much care, and work the SBY 2199 team put into making sure this reboot followed the canon of the original, while at the same time correcting many of the major scientific mistakes and inconsistencies the original show had. 10-stars, and the SBY 2199 team earned them.

As always Anime has the best amount of characters with perfect development, this time with as little superstitious nonsense. Besides some near impossible science and engineering achievements the story is possible, but who cares the characters are real... even the enemies are, some one feels sorry for... all trapped in terrible circumstances. Nobody is pure evil or good, all have flaws and feelings. Shame 2202 was a terrible thing

Now this is how to update a classic TV series. If you look closely at the 2005 Battlestar Galactica, you come to the realization of what doing a "reboot" truly means. It means the creator of the new series had absolutely no respect for the original material. He liked so little of it that he threw out the baby with the bath water. Nothing was worth saving except for the barest essentials - character names and the tiniest shred of the premise. The characters themselves were completely unrecognizable. JJ Abrams' Star Trek movies are the same way. Space Battleship Yamato 2199 is the opposite. It's a remake, not a reboot. The difference is they wanted to fix or modernize a few things, but by and large had great affection for the series and kept as much of it intact as they could.

I really wanted to watch the original Star Blazers, as the show was called in the US, but alas, the time slot wasn't cooperative as it conflicted with the school day and consumer VCRs were expensive and rare in 1979, so I couldn't timeshift it. Many years later, I finally had recordings of the show, but couldn't really get more than a few episodes into it before losing interest. Still, I did eventually see the English dub of the Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato movie and enjoyed that. The live action SBY movie from 2010 again left me cold and I don't think I even finished that. If I did, it was so unmemorable that I've forgotten even watching it through to the end. To me, this remake is the best version yet, good enough for me to binge-watch the whole series in a matter of days.

I enjoyed this military science fiction anime series from Japan, it is based on a remake of the 1970's space opera by the same name which itself is based on a manga series, it could be said to be the Star Wars of Japan and the series which inspired other renowned anime. It's also credited in introducing complex thoughts and mature plots in the Japanese anime industry.

The highlight of the series is the story, a tale of aliens attacking Earth and bringing the human kind to extinction, the last hope for the humans is a journey across the Galaxy's, to a friendly alien race who promises a chances for survival. Although the plot itself is simple, it's actually rich with deep conundrum and conflicting solutions. The Journey is full of space battles, drama, inner conflicts on what's right and what's wrong. Another highlight is the vast yet different characterizations, each with their own colorful personalities.

While I found the character animations good, the space battles and the ship itself were average for me, I am not a CGI fan and these were CGI heavy. The sound effects and music on the other hand were good.

I would recommend the series to a those who enjoy Space Operas

Yamato 2199 is a great and authentic remake of the first Starblazers series. However, there is much more revealed about Gamelon politics which adds a whole new dimension to the series.

Space Battleship Yamato 2199 has some nice moments, including well done battle scenes and instances of drama here and there. The overarching story doesn't quite do it though, never really maintaining the sense of purpose to any compelling degree. So it ends up kind of fizzling out at the end, in what should be a far more dramatic moment, instead opting to let a side drama take center stage. It's pretty good overall, but feels more like an opportunity missed.

Yes, this is hands down better than the original 1974 series, which was your run-of-the-mill 70's sci-fi/fantasy show with the only noteworthy aspect being...the presence of only ONE female character in the whole Yamato crew. Luckily they corrected it with this iteration. And if the older anime elitists don't like this because "it gathers to women!111!!" or "it looks like a videogame!!11!!!" who cares. I'll take this 10-20 times over the original anytime. Recommended for the people sickened of Disney treatment of SW who wish to enjoy good quality space opera again.

As someone who hasn't watched the original Yamato series from the seventies, I cannot compare the two. However, it is easy to see that quite a few things were kept the same, even though they now appear outdated.

The premise and general setup are typical for a soft SciFi space opera: After evil aliens have attacked and devastated Earth, the Space Battleship Yamato must leave on its great voyage to the faraway Iscandar to retrieve a device that will return Earth to its former beauty.

The SciFi part itself is fairly soft, not too dissimilar from, say, Star Wars. There's a magical gizmo that allows FTL travel, artificial gravity is an unexplained thing, and occasionally the dialogue mentions a technical term (like 'interstellar medium') that the writers have no idea about. That's pretty much par for the course for almost every SciFi show, but still something that should be easier to avoid now that one can look things up on the internet.

The Yamato and spaceships in general have a charming naval theme going on, where destroyed ships are called 'sunk' and dimensional submarines are a thing and fighter carriers look quite a bit like aircraft carriers. It's a bit silly but works very well.

What definitely has been stuck in the seventies are some gender-specific thing. I'm not really someone who notices these things but, uhh, when the men wear sailors' uniforms and the women skintight, high-heeled bodysuits, it's a bit on the nose. It doesn't help the primary female character regularly plays the damsel in distress, and even the secondary female character (who is quite kickass most of the time) runs away in tears when she sees her crush talking to another woman.

Generally, the characters were a bit forgettable to me, though that's likely due to the amount of them. The Yamato's important crew is comparable in size to that of various other space shows (think the various Star Treks or Battlestar Galactica), but with only 25 minute segments it's a bit difficult to give all of them enough screentime. Still, by the end of the show, I felt for most of the characters. There're some pretty cool antagonists and occasional side characters, too.

The plot... mhh. As said before, it's typical space opera fare that must've seemed new and daring in the seventies. Today, we're just used to other stuff. To be honest, it's almost campy at times: the evil aliens are basically space nazis that look like humans with blue skin. The good aliens are beautiful blonde women that look so much like humans that they even get confused. The wildest thing you'll see is someone with greyish skin and pointy ears, so... But still, the story works out. I didn't much like the first few episodes; they felt a bit bland to me and I hadn't yet liked the characters. I'd say that the story turns for the better in episode ten, and the last ten or so episodes are absolutely marvellous. If it were only for the first half of the show, I'd give it a 7 at most, but in total it's definitely worth an 8.

As for the production values, the soundtrack is fairly good but gets repetitive. If you binge this series, you'll probably get sick of the same five themes repeating ad absurdum but in small doses they're very catchy. The graphics are fantastic: a perfect blend of CGI and traditional cel animation. The (Japanese) voice acting is solid as always. I'd say the direction and editing is nothing to write home about, but I'm not really someone who notices that stuff.

Also, perhaps important to note is that there is pretty much no fanservice, so you can safely watch this with your kids or parents or whomever.