Ginga Kikoutai Majestic Prince

I had not watched anime for nearly a year, and somehow the series I had to end up with is Majestic Prince. If you want a visually decent mecha anime with almost nothing memorable about it, Majestic Prince does the job. At its core, it feels like a less edgy version of Valvrave the Liberator with Hisashi Hirai’s trademark same-face character designs slapped onto the cast.

The premise is as generic as they come: a group of teenagers pilot advanced robots to fight alien invaders led by an ancient humanoid race suspiciously similar to humans. The series plays every mecha trope completely straight and never really attempts to do anything interesting with them. Among the many anime featuring Hisashi Hirai’s character designs, Majestic Prince is easily one of the weaker entries.

The production itself feels like an anime created simply to occupy a seasonal slot so the studio could keep itself running. The ingredients for something better are technically there, but the show constantly gives the impression that only the bare minimum effort was invested into it. The animation is competent enough, especially during action scenes, but there is no real ambition behind the storytelling, themes, or characters. The result is an anime that looks polished on the surface yet feels completely hollow underneath.

What makes Majestic Prince frustrating is not that it is terrible, but that it is aggressively forgettable. It is the exact type of seasonal anime people watch for three months and then never think about again. The only thing that left any impression on me was the main antagonist, who basically looks like Griffith if he piloted a mecha. Even some of the enemy mech aesthetics oddly resemble Gundam Bael from Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans.

In the end, Majestic Prince is watchable if all you want is lightweight mecha action with decent visuals. But if you are looking for a series that actually pushes the genre forward or reminds people why mecha used to dominate anime culture, this is not it. Unfortunately, that applies to a huge portion of post-2008 mecha anime: technically competent productions made with so little ambition that they disappear from memory almost immediately after airing.