Review for Aesthetica Of A Rogue Hero: The Complete Series

Introduction

You wait for one perverted anime, then five come along all at once. Admittedly it’s the rare anime that doesn’t have at least one booby grope in it, but usually those are rare oases of smut in otherwise tame fan-service shows. You actually have to seek out those anime with explicit nudity, gropage, fondling, booby and panty shots, and with male protagonists haemorrhaging so much from the nose that the thrust of the downward flow actually lifts them off the ground. This summer we’ve had one dose of Ikki Tousen and are getting another next month, guaranteed to fill your ‘fnar’ quotient. We’re also getting smutty anime We Without Wings, we’ve had the first series of High School DxD, which at the time of writing has just had its third season announced, and we get this, Aesthetica of a Rogue Hero. It’s a good time to be a hormonal teen male anime fan!


The world’s suddenly turned into a real life RPG. Portals started opening up, sucking unsuspecting young people into parallel fantasy worlds, where they had the opportunity to do battle and gain special skills, magical powers. The thing is that when they made it back to the ‘real’ world, they kept those powers, which has the potential for altering the balance of power in the world. There’s not a lot an army can do against someone wielding magic spells. This is why the New United Nations created BABEL, an organisation that ostensibly exists as a school for these newly returned warriors to train and hone their abilities, but really is there to maintain the status quo in the world. The last thing they need is a genuine, for real, hero to make it back.


Akatsuki may not be too strong with magical ability in the world of Alayzard, but he’s strong, able to fight, and smart, and he has obtained the ability of Linked Energy Manipulation, which in crude terms means that he know just the right buttons to push to make a girl putty in his hands. He wasn’t expecting to go back either, but when he vanquished the Dark Lord, the Dark Lord’s dying wish was that Akatsuki take care of his daughter Miu. So now Akatsuki has returned to the world with his ‘long lost sister’, and both of them have promptly been enrolled into the local BABEL facility. The only problem for the faculty and the student body is that Akatsuki is that genuine hero. But the female students in the school have a whole other problem...


12 episodes plus extras are presented across 2 DVDs from Manga Entertainment. The show is also available on Blu-ray, but I received only the DVD check discs for this review.

Disc 1
1. New Game Plus
2. Bonds of Holy Water
3. To Become and Adult
4. The Hero’s Back
5. Just a Short Repose
6. Supersonic Sleipnir

Disc 2
7. A Crude Panic on the Beach
8. BABEL’S Ranking Matches Begin
9. On Such a Beautiful Moonlit Night
10. Where I Belong
11. Before Daybreak
12. The World Is Watching You

Picture

Aesthetica of a Rogue Hero gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer on these two dual layer discs. It’s a fair enough transfer, the image is bright and colourful throughout, the animation comes across well without significant signs of compression, but when up-scaled it is a little lacking in detail. Then brightness and haziness tends to overwhelm the image. Of course Aesthetica of a Rogue Hero is available on Blu-ray, which should circumvent such issues. The anime itself is pretty unimpressive, with an obviously meagre budget invested in the fan service and booby bounce, while the character designs and the rest of the animation is unremarkable.

Sound

You have the choice between DD 2.0 English and Japanese, with optional translated subtitles and a signs only track to go with the English dub. The 2.0 only dub is something of an oddity on a Funimation title, but this actually harks back to the US release. They really didn’t create a 5.1 dub for Aesthetica of a Rogue Hero. What little I sampled of the dub seemed pretty typical of the genre, and indeed so did the original Japanese audio, with the usual character stereotypes getting the usual voices. Once again, Manga have a problem when it comes to showing signs and subtitles simultaneously, i.e. they can’t. In scenes where there is on screen text to translate and dialogue as well, the captions flash past consecutively, often too fast to read. This is particularly a problem in the first OVA video, and during a round table meeting in episode 7. The sad thing is that you’d expect the captions to stay on screen longer in the signs only track, but they don’t.

Extras

These are Manga Entertainment authored discs, which is odd as it’s something they only choose to do when no PAL masters are available from Australia, as it’s more economical to use those. However, it seems that Aesthetica of a Rogue Hero was released as PAL DVD by Madman Entertainment. Still, it’s a chance to see how Manga are faring in their DVD authoring, and it seems that issues have improved some. The episodes get separate subtitles and signs tracks to go with the audio, although Manga still can’t get signs and subs to appear on screen simultaneously. They’ve also managed to put the commentary tracks with the correct episodes on the disc, rather than repeating the same episode twice. The episodes are profusely chaptered too, although they just split them into four chunks, instead of chaptering the credit sequences, pre-credits, epilogues, previews, and mid-point eyecatches as would be logical. These are still discrete positive steps forward though.

Both discs get animated menus, although the transitions between menus get a little tiring after a while.


Disc 1 begins with an audio commentary on episode 2, with voice actors Alexis Tipton (Haruka), Monica Rial (Kuzuha), and Felicia Angelle (Miu). Three high pitched women on a yak track with supreme giggler Monica Rial doesn’t bode well, but this commentary gets its ear-bleeding moments out early, and is comparatively toned down and reserved, and easy to listen to.

You’ll also find the Textless Credits here, and of most interest to those hormonal teen males, the OVA episodes. There are six of them, averaging three minutes apiece. It’s pure saucy silliness, with no stupid plot or characterisation to get in the way. That’s a whole extra 22 minutes to enjoy, although unfortunately there’s no Play All Option.

Disc 2 offers an audio commentary with episode 8 with voice actors Joel McDonald (Motoharu), Ryan Reynolds (Chikage), and Eric Vale (Akatsuki). It’s one of Funimation’s patented ‘a bunch of people having a gossip’ commentaries.

You’ll also find 5 Promo Videos, 3 character promo videos, and the US trailer.

Conclusion

How can something so full of action, so full of tits and arse, and so full of harem comedy be so full of dull? Aesthetica of a Rogue Hero is the most boring anime I can recall viewing in recent times, and it’s all down to one issue, that of the ‘perfect’ hero. Perhaps we ought to applaud Aesthetica of a Rogue Hero because it does something different with its male protagonist. For far too long, the usual anime harem comedy revolves around a central male character ill-suited for the position. Countless girls will fall for the charms of a hapless teen male, mostly oblivious to the attention, ill-equipped for romance, and liable to trip and fall face first into a cleavage full of boob, the only physical contact he will ever have with a woman, for which he will apologise profusely, backing away at the speed of light, before being pummelled into insensibility by the girl for having the affront to be in her presence. When it comes to actual romance, it will never go beyond the faltering breathlessness that comes from the prospect of sharing a drink from one can... the all conquering indirect kiss.


After years of such shows, you’d be forgiven for wanting a hero in an anime who actually has a pair. Akatsuki is that hero, forthright, vocal, confident, and able to make girls melt into orgasmic delight simply by pushing the right energy points in their nervous systems. He’s Ace Rimmer, without the ironic dorkiness. And he’s as boring as sin, and a total dick, whose special move is stealing girls’ underwear with uncanny swiftness. This anime wants him to be James Bond, but he hasn’t got the suave, raw male charisma. He’s more of a pervert sex criminal, who believes that fondling boobs is the right way to relax a girl. The crappy thing is that the way that this show is written, in this world, grabbing a distressed female and giving her some severe gropage is the right way to make her feel better. It’s total dickhead male oriented fan service, and it actually has me worried for the people who are entertained by it. Oh yeah, watch out for the scene where Akatsuki gives a masterclass in how to wear a bra, totally educating the lingerie shop worker in the process. Oh God! I thought I’d forgotten the synchronised ‘poke in the bladder’ induced peeing scene, as girls that pee together in stressful situations form better bonds of friendship...


There is a story to it, something about parallel worlds and magical powers, politics and machinations. The set up for the show actually is pretty interesting. It’s only let down by the writing, and the central male character (the rest of the characters conform to the usual anime tropes). I can’t tell you all that much about it though, as even though I watched this show for review during daylight hours, I still slept through the last ten minutes of the last six episodes (skipping back is no way to watch a show), it was that boring! And the story is never really revealed, just a whole lot of preliminary goofing around with the main characters, saving all the actual plot for the last 10 minutes of the show, ending on a ‘Please, please give us the budget for a Season 2’ plea. Hopefully it’s a plea that falls on deaf ears, as Aesthetica of a Rogue Hero is a dire, waste of disc space. If you truly want something similar in style, wait for The Devil is A Part-Timer, also coming out later this year from Manga Entertainment, it’s infinitely more fun than this turgid nonsense. Seriously, heroes need to be flawed to be interesting. And if you can’t manage that for your harem comedy action fantasy, then just stick to the usual hapless teen male punchbags. Heroes like Akatsuki are worse than the villains for engendering the contempt of the viewer.