It’s a combo of two titles this time around, I did this a few times depending if what I got to say for one isn’t enough for one larger video. One is Marco & the Galaxy Dragon and the other is Winter Polaris. Both of them can be summed up with “Well that was an experience” with both its tone and how they’re paced. It’s just that they’re in the opposite sides of the spectrum in both. Basically Winter Polaris focuses more on the tone and the writing. It takes its time to get anywhere and you just enjoy the atmosphere of it all. It has a lot of backdrops and tracks but you’re basically paying for the writing. Marco is bombastic with their pacing and budget yet little worry for its plot. The plot also takes a backseat for the characters. They’re all pretty short and can be finished in like 4 to 6 hours.
Technically this one was going to contain Slay the Princess where it was something closer to a happy medium between the these two. It’s just that I wrote so much about it that it became it’s own post. I’ll go through both without any spoilers, then have a small section near the end for the spoiler stuff of each.
Winter Polaris
Winter Polaris is interesting but how it’s told is rather dry. And that’s kind of a common occurrence with Kataoka’s titles that I’ve read. Even the lighter title “Christmas Tina” still has a decent bit of that. There’s parts where it feels like you’re crawling to get to the next part. And that’s not even a bad thing, it’s the mood and he sets it up well. It’s probably what I find he does best. Winter Polaris is split into two plots: Sweeper Swimmer and Winter Polaris. Sweeper Swimmer is about two people finding something unusual to them and they go off sailing to find what’s actually out there. Winter Polaris is about an epidemic that’s wiping out humanity, but instead of death they’re basically vanishing. There’s more to each plot, but that’s all spoilers and they eventually intermingle a bit.
The vn being split in two sections is both a good and bad thing. Sweeper Swimmer is written by someone else and it’s a decent breather for Winter Polaris. The problem is you could technically remove a huge chunk of it and it wouldn’t really ruin Winter Polaris. I think the idea was that they were mostly written separately to begin with. It also doesn’t help that the two sections aren’t piecemealed at all. You can do like four parts of Winter Polaris and then you’re just blocked off until you get around to Sweeper. It was kind of annoying at times because you’ve already invested time in one and now you’re not in the greatest mood for the other half. It’s still well written so you’ll get over it, but it just could’ve been segmented better. The art is mainly backdrops, it’s kind of a thing with his other titles I’ve read. Everything is to set the mood and keep you trapped in there. What’s around is pretty, but you’re just not going to get a good amount of it.
Overall, it’s a good read. By the end, what’s happening in the world isn’t all that important and it’s heavily character focused. It has a huge listless vibe and how sometimes you need a push here and there to keep on going. Basically they’re just tired of what’s happening to them and they lost their way. I give it around an 8 in terms of writing and tone. It’s closer to a 7 due to the plot split but even that one is pretty fun as a standalone.
It’s one of those things where if around 80~90% of each path wasn’t locked by each other, it’d be a strong 8. The plot has a lot going for it, but you can say there’s 3 plots going on at once and one of the initial ones just gets shoved to the side.
Kataoka has a new title coming out pretty soon so I’m excited for that, it’s called Shinjuku Somei.
Marco and the Galaxy Dragon
In contrast to Winter Polaris, Marco felt like it was written by a crackhead at gunpoint and the deadline is in 10 minutes. This title screams two things, whacky and a massive budget. The tone of this title almost screams kusoge but it has so much passion and work slapped in it. It’s got 63 tracks and what feels like 800 cg. Sure, a good number of them are just alternates of others but even then, it’s still something around 500 of them. You get a new cg like every minute, sometimes a new one after each couple of lines. To put it in perspective, the total cg count for a normal 30 hour vn wouldn’t even cover the first hour of Marco. It even slapped in some little animations in between and it really feels like those office memes where they’re spending the rest of their budget because they’d just lose it otherwise.
On the other hand, the plot feels completely rushed and sometimes unfinished. You can throw out around a third of the cast and it wouldn’t change much of anything. It’s still a fun time, but you’re not going to hear any praise on the plot from me. An easy example is giving a 13 episode anime, but only five episodes had any importance. It’s been awhile but I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what the DMC anime was like. The finale was fine, but that’s based on the chemistry between the characters more so than the plot. And I think that was kind of the point of the title, where nothing is all that important. It’s just getting your ass outside, meeting new people and doing new shit with them before going on your way on your next adventure. So a good chunk of it is mindless nonsense, but it’s designed to be that way.
Overall, it terms of an experience I’d give it around a 7. Maybe an 8 if you read a decent chunk of vns because it becomes closer to something like FLCL back in the day. Where the stark contrast of what you’re used to in anime makes it pretty cool in its own regard. I think most of my fun with this title was just with the absurdity of how many cgs just get slapped on the screen. In terms of plot, it’s like a 4. The tone and energy is consistent, it’s just that it’s consistently bonkers. The pacing is going through supersonic speeds and the plot is just a setup to get the characters moving because the story beats themselves just give you some whiplash.
These are going to be the spoilers now. It’s going to more all over the place and just nitpicks here and there.
Winter Polaris Spoilers:
For Winter Polaris, there’s a whole setting of a pandemic of humanity disappearing that’s really not used all that much. It’s a setup for the 3rd plot where there’s a minuscule amount of immortals around the world. They generally try to stick by themselves but there’s been times that they’ve grouped up but eventually disperse anyway. There seems to be a limit where they just want to off themselves. We don’t know if that’s a common trait in them, it was only shown once but it was told that this guy met a whole lot more of the immortals in previous eras and all of them might also found ways to end their life as well.
Either way, the plot gets centralized to two immortals using each other as “insurance plans” since there’s a chance that you forget about yourself if you randomly die. In current day, that ended being the male lead but they show times when it was the female lead. And it becomes more of a love story about companionship that anything to due with humanity disappearing. And that’s kind of a missed opportunity but other people might prefer it this way anyway.
Sweeper Swimmer might actually be more interesting because where they’re at in the timeline could be debatable and a good chunk is wondering if everybody they’ve met in their journey were also immortals that forgot their pasts. Most of it is due to them finding all these tablets and smart phones near the end of their plot. Technically, it’s a lot of rotations for the immortals on both plot lines.
The protag was an immortal for a couple of centuries, closer to a millennia from what I remember. He meets Tsubaki, kills her to verify that she’s an immortal. Eventually picks her up, a lot of stuff happened and he made her run away whilst making himself a decoy. He dies and forgets, Tsubaki meets Elena after that. Some more time happens, you finally hit Winter Polaris, Tsubaki dies, revives and remembers her past self. The male lead forgot his memories yet again and the plot becomes about Tsubaki trying to get the male lead back to his old memories.
I’ll skip the next part because it needs a lot of context but basically she goes off and throws all these glass bottles with notes into the ocean here and there. Maria offers to bring them around. She gets shipwrecked, forgets about her shit but remembers about the bottles. She’s saved by Elena. Elena no longer remembers she’s an immortal either, so it’s both of them trying to figure out what these bottles are about. They eventually remember, meet up with Tsubaki. Apparently some of the notes in the bottles were from the male lead so Tsubaki goes back to finding him since he now remembers again. It’s basically like love letters from both of them. So how many years has it been between Winter Polaris and Swimmer, who knows. It could honestly be a century.
So like I said before, the tone of this title is pretty dry and somber. That’s kind of his thing and it scratches a certain itch that not not a lot of titles can. Because these are still characters that have been living for centuries, nothing is really all that exciting once you remember. They’re just either going with the flow or secluding themselves. I still prefer Setoguchi’s stuff, but this guy is also kind of high in my list. More so on seeing something interesting than actually liking all of his stuff. Winter Polaris gives you the bare minimum to keep you going. It lets you infer on what’s happening and eventually gives you a nugget here and there to recontextualize.
Marco and the Galaxy Dragon:
So I mentioned before that most of the characters don’t really matter. And that everything is basically the whole “the journey is what made it worth it” type of thing. You have a goal, you go out to do it but you find all these little events throughout the way that made it memorable. The allegory was kind of preemptively placed in the part where she’s building the gunpla for her mom’s kid. But then the kid is like, the fun of it is actually building it weirdo. Because removing that theme almost none of it was worthwhile.
It’s just a lot of out of nowhere sequences. Out of nowhere there’s an invasion of “Love” but they all have calendars for heads, lol. And the idea is that instead of fighting, they’re just an invasive creature that eventually controls the whole planet by implanting happy memories about them doing stuff together on each character. And Marco and the gang goes on killing them, and eventually kills off the mom. So it lead you to believe that it’s like, of course she was dead and this alien was one of the first before it was spreading. But the mom you met is still alive, it’s just that the alien took her image. So you don’t know when it was the alien and when it was the mom, lol.
Out of nowhere the protag has two sisters. The idea was that the dragon ate all the negative/sad memories from Marco and her mom. Yet for some reason that also applied to both of the sisters. You can get why it’s wiped out of Marco, but what’s the point for wiping the mother’s memory of that.
It’s kind of a theme for a lot of these characters, the “what was the point of that”.
That’s why it gave me a lot of FLCL vibes, because what was the point of almost anything in there. It’s a lot of cool random crap happening that didn’t look like it meant much but by the end it was just a show about a kid going through his shit and maturing to point that he needed.
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