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I am a big Crest of the Stars fan, so discovering there is a new manga out there, and, who knows! - maybe a new anime, - I was very glad and interested to see what was done to one of the favourite stories of mine in this new adaptation.

So, first of all, the material, like previous versions, transmits the story from Hiroyuki Morioka's novels quite accurately. They swap some things here and there, but overall the chain of events is basically identical. Which is good - the storyline of the original is very finely crafted, and can fall apart if not handled with care. ... But this is the only thing I can praise this manga upon.

Artwork kills it. Destroys, eliminates, annihilates, burns to the ground and puffs up a huge mushroom cloud. You see, there's certain atmosphere to Crest of the Stars. It is a rather old-school work. it never rushes, it builds up slowly, it's rather scientifically accurate in its descriptions, and its fantastic assumptions are rather tame and in line with classic science fiction. This all creates certain tasteful atmosphere. Add in the themes of nobility, elegance, beauty in limitation - which is the foundation to Abh art, by the way! And this art takes it, looks at it, and says "Bah! Who cares! Giant robots with swords! UwU" and draws the scene like any other modern manga would be - exaggerated emotions, overengineered structures and objects, overblown special effects. Oh how this contrasts with the anime adaptation, which caught the tone and the ideology behind the style while trying to capture the details from descriptions given in the novels! Thin, slightly curved deadly in their elegance ships of the Empire were counter posed to clunky, simplistically shaped traditionally militaristic vessels of United Mankind. Even the most emotional of commanders would express their feelings with slight changes in facial expressions. Only Jinto and Diaho, the outsiders to Abh, were allowed to emote in full. And Diaho is a cat.

Cartoony expressions all the Abh characters do, ships turned into jagged monstrosities even Dark Eldar would consider ugly, and space battles visually looking like overblown Star Wars parodies on crack. Is the art well done on technical level? Yes, for the most part. But it is actively opposing the stylistic tone, the fundamental ideology laid within its own storytelling and even its own canon. For a visual medium, to allow such a brutal clash between the story and its visualisation is to kill it.

This manga is plain horrible. This manga is worthless. This manga is an artistic crime. It takes a fine sci-fi story and turns it into a bad fanfic. I am hugely disappointed. Please avoid this like a wildfire - better get your hands on novels, or watch the anime version from 1999.

Okay, I'll make an attempt to be brief, but the stuff goes deep. I'll remark that I was not going to write a review here, but some stuff I saw in reviews here made me stumble a little bit and sit down to a keyboard.

So, this anime is far, FAR from perfect. My major gripes are with animation quality and sound direction.
1. Animation is very, very choppy at times. Many animations are clearly reused, others are not there at all, with static images instead of moving objects or whole scenes. Yes, clearly, those are the result of budget being to small. But this is still ... an issue. Luckily, art style and great visual design pull the series off this pitfall, making visual aesthetic do the job.
2. While the soundtrack itself is rather good, consisting of epic orchestral compositions suitable for imperial scale of the setting and the Cosmos itself, with some more melancholic or cheerful themes here and there, it's often misused, with sappy melodies over already too sappy moments. The result feels too tryhardy and kinda unnatural, taking away instead of improving the atmosphere of certain scenes. Luckily, it's not too commonplace, but the stuff is there.
3. I will be silent on English dub, because oh Warp, English dub; this should be watched in Japanese. But there we have Jinto, the protagonist. It seems seiyu was not told the character is a 10 years old boy only in several scenes, not in *all* of them. His voicework just does not fit the character we see. Yes, Jinto can be sloppy, overly emotional, shy etc., but he still is a young man of decisive nature, who is absolutely able to create commanding presence. The gal who voices him cannot, though. And this is a huge failure.
4. The director really, really likes to remind stuff to the viewer, and to place scenes out of order. While in some cases it does work, for the most part it just breaks the pacing, especially when SUDDEN flashback - preferably to something we already saw - breaks an interesting conversation. These are getting more rare as story progresses, but episodes 1 to 3 are a complete mess.

I'd say these issues would kill any media product for me, but in this case we have such an outstanding *rest of stuff*, I cannot even lower the overall score despite what I just said before.

First and foremost - the storytelling here lines up with classic, more "hard" kind of sci-fi. You won't see robots with swords or schoolboys shooting beams of light out of their... somethings. There are people who do their jobs using technology and in-depth training. There are societies, that exist and evolve, and interact separately from each other. Those societies have their interests, goals and ideals some or most of their members pursue, forming cultures and ideologies that are doomed to clash. Said cultures manifest in all spheres of life - architecture, cloth, traditions, technologies, designs etc.

The driving force of the story is a paradox of an expansionist empire. A romanticised vision of Prussia, ancient China, Russian Empire or early stages of forming of USA. How does the empire expand? What does it do to its subordinates and conquered areas? Can an expansionist empire be the force for good? The authors clash several empires in a battle, with motives and methods of each being clear.

We have Abh, formed from artificial slave labour rebelling against their slavery to form a space-faring machine of expansion, with final goal of ending of all wars. We have classic humanity, which is losing the expansion race of post-diasporal unification. Can we blame the Abh, whose actions are dictated by their own nature? Can we blame the rest of disunited mankind for creating them, and then despising and fearing them? Humanity is afraid of Abh expansion for a reason, but they lead their own expansion as well. Whose expansion is more righteous - Abh, mankind, both, neither? The whole reason for the great war is strategic areas for further colonization. Whatever your personal outlook on subject matter is - can the opposing faction be completely dehumanised in order to achieve victory? In history of mankind there were no wars without dehumanisation of opponents; it is in human nature to explain killing of your own with "them" not being humans for one reason or another.

The Abh as a race or faction are a fantastical assumption (i.e., something that has to be considered true within the story for the story to function, like FTL travel or futuristic tech) as of itself - they *do not* treat their enemies as non-humans. On the contrary, the centrepiece of Abh philosophy is based around humanity of both their enemies and themselves. Notice the way Abh engage with the lands they've conquered: whatever their leaders (and enemies) say about their iron regime, they actually do three things: remove anti-space defences, remove ownership of interstellar spacecraft, enforce the right of citizenship. And that's it. No other policies are forced upon the populace. United Mankind and their allies act... Just like mankind does, aren't they? Ideological opposition is eliminated, separatist movements are destroyed, wrongthink is forcefully cropped out by expansive propaganda, and after THAT all the freedoms and democratic way of life are the topic of the day. Whatever country you live in - I assure you, this is the way things are there. It can be done in a more fine way, or brutforced (like where I live), but it is there. All of it.

This is why the Abh concept is so interesting: what if such an entity existed? How would it operate? It's still populated by humans, so they still have their own motives, characters, wishes, dreams and goals. Can the culture built around nurturinh the idea of humanism as its foundation even exist?

You can also draw parallels to Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers with Abh. ST is often considered to be a pro-fascist book, which it isn't. In actuality systems described by Heinlein are active in most societies with access to election limited by several barriers. In this case the imaginary social structure is vastly different and built around a meritocratic feudalism, whatever I just said. As any imaginary concept, this one can barely be supposed to work, as it provides far, far too many ways for abuse, but luckily in sci-fi we have such a beautiful thing like fantastical assumption, which allows Abh history to occur and for Abh empire to be believable, because its core is formed by people literally engineered to be loyal by their creators, and who chose to idealize evolutionary stagnation.

But what makes CotS to be really great is its ability to say "To hell with it" - and instead of being a philosophical work in guise of sci-fi, like mentioned Heinlein's work, it is actually a personal story of people in this implied scenario. The story creates likeable characters with interesting backgrounds. Of course, the centre of attention is the Empire (it's still the thought experiment, don't forget) but what we follow is growing and maturing of people within the researched culture, instead of direct cultural analysis as it is. Jinto, Lafiel, imperial admirals, nobility, commoners, landers and United Mankind representatives - they all are interesting characters first and foremost, and only afterwards they are the tools of author's idea. This is where the good stories are born. And this is why CotS and its sequels are so great to watch. You can easily ignore the large scale stuff and watch the story of growing up of interesting characters in fantastical environment - or you might want to dig deeper and engage the ideas presented here.

It's sad some reviewers either miss the point, or even outright cross CotS out for exactly what science fiction as a genre exists for - allowing unusual, unbelievable concepts based on reality but impossible within it to come through the prism of author's imagination and be shaped into piece of art. And even more sad to see such a great work to be accused of what it is not.