The whole story follows Ledo, a portrayed "perfect soldier" who only knows about fighting deep space warfare. The first scenario for Gargantia is an epic battle for survival as it appears humans are in a large scale attack on some sort of plant organism enemy that shoots large lasers. What I loved about this fight was the different style of lasers and bullets. The lasers looked more like smaller precision energy beams, rather than your typical over the top massive artillery shown in most mecha shows. One of the weapons seems to be a massive black-hole-like projectile that pretty much destroys anything in its path, which I thought was pretty badass.
As things turn for the worst, Ledo eventually lands on Earth, which is a fabled planet said to be the only planet where humans can naturally live, and thus the show ends.
I really appreciate how the entire story and characters are introduced, we aren't bombarded with information before mindless action, but instead all the necessary background information as to what is going on is embedded within the entire battle sequence. Ledo awakes from deep sleep to fight in what appears to be the most important battle of the war. Thankfully Ledo's personality and actions do well to define his character, in fact nearly all of the characters shown are defined by their actions and general conversations, rather than forcing some sort of info dump on us to establish everything.
Everything is shown through Ledo's perspective, and the entire episode does wonders to immerse us within the story and events that unfold, as well as experience everything at the same time as Ledo. When Ledo arrives on Earth we are kept in the dark about the planet as well as what is happening, and as Ledo explores his situation, we are treated to a wonderful understanding of the situation Ledo is in, purely from his experience to his surroundings, rather than heavy dialogue to explain it.
This episode shows huge promise and I find myself putting all my other downloads on hold in order to get the rest of the available episodes faster. While the characters themselves reveal nearly nothing, they have already established some interesting personalities. Another thing to note is the art, I really like it, plus the show itself has great pace.
~Djr7
