Uchuu Senkan Yamato
Space Battleship Yamato

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People who enjoy vintage sci-fi will enjoy this. I'm not saying this is the greatest or even the most entertaining manga ever, but it is one that feels quintessential of the time period. One of those things where reading it almost transports you back to the 70s. I can hear Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Aerosmith, AC/DC and The Rolling Stones in these pages. I can imagine being a child reading this and going in line to see Star Wars. As it is about 50 years old, there are some things that don't necessarily age well in that it has a simple good guys vs. bad ... guys with nothing really complex about it. I was also caught a bit off guard when this manga also felt more like a pilot for the mega franchise it spawned in particularly in its non-ending. The pacing doesn't give the audience any room to breathe and kind of jumps around. Nonetheless I enjoy the characters. They are mostly archetypes of 70s sci fi characters and some don't quite standout but the main cast is iconic. The best aspect is the art. Where Leiji Matsumoto feels limited in his writing, he more than makes up in his art. Some battles a little difficult to make heads or tails of, but he knows how to make the universe seem big. He draws space as more than just a black background. He also presents interesting concepts of space travel such as warping which puts the ship through portals to weave through showcasing more world building. People who only follow the trendy manga like Chainsaw Man and My Hero Academia may not find much of value here, but the ones who like studying the history of manga and reading the foundationals such as Astro Boy, Golgo 13 or Lupin III will also enjoy checking this out.

Space Battleship Yamato, a classic that shaped Japanese military sci-fi fiction, a work that would later me remade and reimagined many times, her is where it began. Question is, how well did it age?

Among the first things that one could notice is that the original manga has only 3 volumes, while the first adaptation has 26 episodes. While I haven’t seen the anime yet, I can say that the manga does feel a bit bare-bone, like a draft for future works. There is a feel of absence of “fillers”, something to add between the start of the journey and its end. The plot is too ... streamlined, and in this case some extra material would be welcomed.

The world-building also lacks, as the reader is told only very little details when being thrown into a story, which feels like a part of larger franchise instead of an isolated story. Well, to be fair it later became a larger franchise, but chronologically speaking when released, it lacked. The end too feels abrupt and non-concluding, which is the main reason I have given it only 6 out of 10.

That said, it certainly wasn’t a bad read and I was entertained by it, it’s just that this title should be seen as more of a prototype. Which is even a reason to read it, its historical significance as a point of origin. The art also isn't bad in any way, it's simple yet effective.

Besides being obviously outdated, which can't be helped, it feels weak even accounting for that.
It could be nice for an easily impressed kid that loves space exploration, but then the manga format and the length doesn't help much on it being lively for anyone younger than your grandpa.

Manga is well-illustrated and printed in excellent paper (newpop prime PT-BR), and can be a window to the past regarding art style and what people of that time expected for the future. So it could actually be used in art studies/references in some very specific cases.
"Battles" feels off and dead, it doesn't capture the movements too well.
Character ... proportions are off-putting and not constant, to say the least. Sometimes they're ok, in other's a captain has a head-to-body proportion of a young child. I'm not sure if in a particular scene it was on purpose or not, but I imagine it makes more sense just being a mistake.
Plot is weak, which is understandable since the original was a tv show and it focused on action and speech, which weren't properly made impactful in the manga.
Translation was ok, but feels like source material was weak.
Immersion is broken by mixing different units, authors not knowing that in a tridimensional space you need two angles and one distance, extremely generic names for places and technologies (which is a residual from an tv show, understandable).

So not recommended, unless it's a gift for someone that already watched on TV and you want to gift it out of their nostalgia...

Review based on newpop prime's version in Brazilian-portuguese.