I've pretty much used up the supply of "Why in hell did I download that?" titles in my archive, so I'll abandon that particular conceit. But I think I'll continue the Mystery Meat series intermittently, albeit with stuff deliberately downloaded, but nonetheless rather obscure.

Today's Mystery Meat is "Tactical Roar". And the version I downloaded's AAC sound track made my copy of Zoom Player lock up. (Someday I have to figure out how to fix that.) So Media Player Classic gets my business today.

Anyway, the first ep starts with mediocre cg depicting a battle at sea mainly fought with missiles. But all the voiceovers are women; apparently the fleet being attacked has no men working on it.

Cut to some plot exposition. The world's weather has changed due to the development of a permanent circular storm similar to Jupiter's Red Spot. This rotary storm, kind of a super hurricane, is in the western Pacific and it's known as the Grand Roar. This has had significant effects on the weather of the rest of the world.

Simultaneously, world trade by sea has exploded, and piracy is also on the rise. To cope, it's become common for cargo ships to be accompanied by armed escorts. These are not navy; they're privately owned and crewed by civilians.

Looks like the Grand Roar also made some serious changes in humanity's fertility. So far we've seen fifty women for every man to show up -- and nearly all of those women are young and shapely, or younger and still developing. Did I mention that this is a fan service show?

And cut to a bathing scene. Somewhere in here we're going to start getting a story, I figure, but half way through the first episode all we've gotten is confusion and fan service.

After some more hijinks at the bath, we finally get to it. Our hero, pretty much the only guy in the series, is an engineer who has been assigned to the ship belonging to all these women in order to upgrade their combat systems. Seems as if he knows the ship's captain -- he calls her "Nana-nee" -- but she doesn't show any sign of recognizing him the first time they meet.

They seem to have an interesting idea of discipline. Everyone on the crew calls the skipper "Shorty". There's probably a story behind that.

Episode ends with our hero on the Pascal Magi, the ship he's supposed to work on, at sea for three days. He's supposed to be doing upgrades, but the ship comes under attack by "escort hunters". Not yet clear what that means.

In terms of size and armament, the Pascal Magi seems to be what the US Navy calls a "guided missile frigate".

She has guns, but they're anti-missile turrets, CIDS. Main offensive system is missiles.

Ep 2: They've determined that they're being attacked by "escort hunters". The pirates aren't trying to capture, or destroy, the cargo ship they're with; the pirates want the escort ship sunk. (Engineer mode: doing that is expensive and doesn't net the pirates anything in the short term. If Piracy is a large and organized force, then it makes strategic sense, in that fewer escorts means piracy is easier. But from the scenes in the other ship, it may not be like that. Ah, well; it does make for exciting story telling.)

The first and second attacks are stopped without damage, though only just barely. The cargo ship they were escorting has escaped, and the attackers are following the Pascal Magi. The skipper decides to flee into a near by storm, an eddy spun off by the Grand Roar. Three of the attackers, evidently little more than missile boats, veer off. But the largest of the attackers follows them in. With the storm causing everyone trouble, the attacker's ECM and other protections go down, and Pascal Magi finally gets some decent readings.

Turns out the attacker is a brand new naval ship which was hijacked during sea trials. Her weapons are state of the art, and well in advance of anything the Pascal Magi is carrying. And they want Pascal Magi sunk, and everyone on it killed.

The skipper decides their only chance is to engage the attacker at close range on the far side of the storm, during the first few minutes after it emerges from the storm before its electronics can be rebooted.

This show has a Ruri, although for the moment no sign of sarcasm. Her name is Miharu, I think it was.

Anyway, half way through the second episode they manage to hit the enemy ship twice. Not clear if it sinks (I bet not; they seem to be the series villains) but enough so that Pascal Magi can escape, largely unharmed.

Back at port, the captain is under arrest. While they were at sea, a supervisor from the company (older man, fat, stupid, obnoxious) ordered the captain to try to negotiate with the pirates and to buy them off, and she refused the order.

Also, the navy is pissed off. Their ship, albeit under enemy control, was equipped with the latest electronics and it should have been impervious to the weapons of the Pascal Magi, so they're peeved that their ship lost the battle.

She's being driven to a hearing by another supervisor, more sympathetic. The rest of the crew is under arrest on their ship. Part way there, her car gets hijacked by a woman with frilly pink panties and a gun. As they arrive, lots of explosions happen in the building, and one of the pirates, a woman with strange marks on her face, runs out.

A bit more commotion; the pirates are about to shoot the captain and the supervisor when Tsubasa (evidently the eventual love interest) swoops in with Pascal Magi's VTOL and causes enough commotion with it to allow the captain and supervisor to scoot.

The one with blue-green hair is the Ruri.

You know what? I bet this is a Gonzo show. It feels like one. (...and now to check the ANN listing.) Nope! Bandai.

I'm actually enjoying this; I think I'll watch more of it.

UPDATE: End of ep 3, and he's finished his upgrades to their ship and gone back ashore. Obviously he's going to end up back on the ship again; I wonder how they'll contrive it?

Ep 3 was mostly fan service. Beach episode. And Tsubasa, the tsundere and obvious romantic interest, is already past tsun and heading towards dere.

UPDATE: I suppose that the unintentional-compromising-situation is a staple of this kind of show, but I do grow desperately tired of the contrivance.

Ep 4 and he's back on board again. Seems his company is impressed with the Pascal Magi and wants to use it for field tests of their new designs. He's on board to observe and advise.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 04:59 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 1149 words, total size 7 kb.

1 Hah... finally managed to register with Pixy, after 3-4 tries over the course of a few months.  If you're watching TacRoar in english, that's probably my translation, since I think Y-F was the only group to do the show in English.  You're in for a treat, TacRoar is an underappreciated little gem that few people have ever seen.  Hope you like it!

Posted by: Adam54 at November 19, 2009 09:25 PM (pJ1uW)

2

The torrent says that it's from someone called "Yoroshiku". That you?

Anyway, I'm watching it in Japanese with English subtitles, which is how I always watch anime if it's at all possible.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 19, 2009 09:58 PM (+rSRq)

3

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 19, 2009 10:04 PM (+rSRq)

4   Yup, that was me! 

I wrote those scripts 3-4 at a time, during the late late shift at the campus tech support line, so I apologize in advance if there are any issues with it. 

Posted by: Adam54 at November 19, 2009 10:49 PM (pJ1uW)

5 Adam, sorry about the trouble you had registering.  We had a couple of issues after moving to the new server that weren't noticed for a while.

And thanks for your translation efforts!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at November 20, 2009 05:59 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment