Vision of Escaflowne

 By this time i think i have seen many wasted potentials throughout Japanese animes and Mecha genres always had these series with awesome concept but falls apart when executed. Just like anything, the greater the hype an anime brought to the viewer, the greater disappointment the series will be when it didn't live up to expectations. Vision of Escaflowne would have been a Great Fantasy Mecha Anime as it had really promising start but somehow in the end fail to make use of its amazing production value. Escaflowne had Shouji Kawamori's design, Yoko Kanno's music score and it did its own thing which would have been a winning combination.  While i dislike Shoujo element of the series it wasn't the dealbreaker.  To me the moment Escaflowne went downhill is during halfway of the show as if something put a halt to the world-building effort which in the end we got a half-baked series. The biggest disappointment to me is that Escaflowne could have been a genuinely perfect marriage between Fantasy and Mecha and proved the genre can be something more than a Kid's toy commercial. I think the series would have fared better as OVA instead of running tv series as the latter tend to distort the original materials alot due to demands from many side. In any case Maaya's Sakamoto performance on the opening was really stellar considering it was her first leap to the industry.