Heroic Age begins with a human (I'm sorry, "Tribe of Iron") exploration starship approaching a strange planet, which appears to have had about 1/3 of it blown away. A landing crew hits the surface and meets a young man known as Age, who has been living on the planet seemingly his whole life, with his only companions being the computer system in the crashed starship in which he lives, and a land-squid creature. The leader of the humans, Princess Dhianeila, talks Age into leaving with the humans, as they have been searching for him for a long time. This is because Age is linked to a surviving member of the Tribe of Hero, and the humans need him to keep from being annihilated by the Tribe of Silver, a bunch of pretentious pretty boys (and a couple girls) that take their self-acknowledged superiority over all other life forms very seriously.

I have absolutely no problem with an in medias res beginning to a story, but this one threw me for a while. Why is Age's planet partly blown up? Why does the Tribe of Silver hate humans? Why are the humans called the Tribe of Iron? What is up with this Tribe of Hero that gets mentioned? If you like your stories to make sense up front, this show will bother you. The background to what is going is only explained in snippets at the beginning of the first 13 or so episodes, so it can take a while to really get up to speed on the story. It also doesn't help that the first half-dozen episodes are really repetitive, with each episode essentially proceeding the same way. See, every episode has Age doing random stuff as he gets used to living with other humans, then the Tribe of Bronze show up, then they try to fight off the Bronzies with regular weapons, things look bad, Age flies off, transforms into Belcross (the member of the Tribe of Hero he is linked with), punches the big rock spaceship of the Bronzies, it blows up, and everyone flies off into the sunset. Every. Single. Time. It is pretty boring, actually.

Thankfully, the show picks up as it nears the halfway mark. It turns out that Princess Dhianeila has two brothers who have lofty political ambitions. They end up initiating an offensive against the Tribe of Silver, which actually introduces new plot elements, and helps make the show interesting by moving past the tired "aliens show up, Age/Belcross punches them, the end" plot that the show has subsisted on since episode one. Other characters get added as well, and you start to get the feeling that there is an actual universe out there, and more is going on than just this one spaceship fighting random Tribe of Bronze aliens. Because of this, the show ends stronger than it starts.

The story to this show is OK, and the character designs are OK, and the acting is generally OK. It is pretty average in most aspects. It does excel in one area, though. This show has some of the best space battles I have ever seen. I generally watch sci-fi shows to see large space battleships shooting missiles and energy beams at other large space battleships. And, boy, does this show deliver on that front. The large battles will have literally thousands of ships on each side merrily blasting away at each other with everything they have. It looks great. The most inventive parts of the show are in the space battles, as the tactics used are interesting, including a really unique use of a planet.

I also like how each of the tribes is visually distinct from each other. The Tribe of Iron has regular spaceships as we are used to from other sci-fi stories, the Tribe of Bronze uses hollowed-out asteroids as ships, as well as being able to fly through space on their own (in addition, they all look like huge insects, which visually differentiates them even more), the Tribe of Silver makes their own oddly-shaped ships using psychic power, and the Tribe of Hero transforms into large mecha-like creatures.

In the end, there is barely enough good stuff in Heroic Age for me to recommend watching it, but only if you are into space battles with thousands of starships. If you are into deep character dramas, or romantic comedies, or harem shows, or even mecha shows, there really isn't enough here to scratch those itches. It is dead average in all other areas, but this show totally does huge space battles right.

Thanks go out to FUNimation for the review copy.