Mixed Feelings
Le Deus (or Ladius, or Makyō Gaiden Le Deus, or Demon Frontier Side-Story Le Deus if you want to get literal) is the anime equivalent of a false front building. Looks nice on the outside, might fool you if you don’t stare at it too long, but behind the façade is something entirely different. That’s not to say it’s bad by any means, but upon finishing Le Deus I was left thinking more of what could’ve been than what is actually there. Let me explain. Our story focuses on the exploits of treasure hunter Riot (Kazuki Yao) and his twin sidekicks Spica (Chie Kōjiro) andSeneca (Toshimi Nakamura) as they hunt for the Eyes of Zalem, a set of lenses that are said to reveal the path to the Rido - a source of infinite energy developed by the ancient Quall civilisation. Their travels have led them to the village of Zigoa where a young woman named Yuta la Caradeen (Yūko Mizutani) is said to possess a lens of her own. Hot on their trail are the Demsters, a mysterious group led by the ruthless Kaiser (Norio Wakamoto) looking to claim the Rido for themselves, and they’re willing to kill anyone who tries to stop them! To combat the Demsters, Riot pilots the super robot Le Deus, a great machine which has the ability to absorb the twins to dramatically boost its combat ability.
The plot isn’t going to win any awards, but it gets the job done. It’s your typical adventure anime, full of ancient ruins, lost civilisations, magical MacGuffins and a comically evil set of antagonists looking to claim the prize for their own. The difference here is that Le Deus adds in some sci-fi and fantasy elements to spice things up. This is probably the anime’s most defining trait, and while it wasn’t the originator of such a concept, it was still one of the first to do it, at least for a robot show.
Animation isn’t anything too spectacular, but it does look great when things heat up. Movement during battle scenes is fluid and energetic, characters are drawn well and there’s plenty of detail in the backgrounds of scenes or in the environments. The final battle in particular, while not movie tier, looks great and has some really cool looking sequences, definitely worth watching this for. There are a few moments where things seem a bit stiff and inactive, mainly during quieter scenes, but these are few and far between. The soundtrack is pretty fantastic, way higher quality than the actual anime. The highlights are the three vocal songs (two by Midori Karashima and one by Yao), particularly the opening theme ‘Midnight Shout’. They’re all cheesy 80s rock songs (or a ballad in the case of insert track ‘Smile for You’), but they definitely give the OVA some extra charm and they’re all good songs in their own right. Mecha design is also pretty good. The trio of enemy mecha that feature throughout most of the runtime are rather generic designs, looking like Mechanical Beasts from Mazinger Z, but the titular Le Deus and Kaiser’s unnamed machine are both fantastic. While they admittedly both look like Dangaioh rejects (especially Kaiser’s mech), they’re still appealing designs with plenty of style and flair to them. Like Dangaioh, this is one of the earlier works in the genre that moved away from the blockier designs most super robots had in favor of something more lean and curved. Maybe someday it might crawl its way into SRW, but that’s so unlikely it’s not even worth thinking about.
On the character side, Riot is a fun protagonist. Generic, but his peppy attitude is charming and Yao gives him a cocky edge that fits him well. Yuta initially adds some humor to the project, as her no-nonsense personality clashes well with Riot’s group, though this falls apart when she gets captured and spends the rest of the OVA as a damsel in distress. Spica and Seneca are… there. Personality wise they’re more or less identical, both simultaneously fawning over and chastising Riot. That’s pretty much it. Shame, because they could’ve been used in a bunch of different ways but the anime doesn’t seem interested in doing so. The really star of the show is Kaiser, a Demster tasked with locating the Eyes of Zalem. At first he seems like a pretty generic tough guy villain, but once things fall into place Wakamoto really starts to ham it up, howling and laughing like a madman throughout most of the second half. If it was anyone else voicing this guy, it wouldn’t have worked half as well. For the rest of the Demster side there’s a trio of guys in these elaborate sets of armor but they don’t do anything of note besides getting their shit rocked by Riot. I don’t even think they have names.
You might have noticed a recurring theme with these characters, and it’s that there isn’t much to say about them. That’s a key problem that runs through all of Le Deus, I’m afraid. Barely anything is explained or explored with much depth, and when it is, it’s skin deep. I don’t mean that in the sense that the OVA is confusing or nothing makes sense, but the world and overall setting feel extremely barren and undercooked. Character motivations are either given the bare minimum or not mentioned at all. To give an example, Spica and Seneca are revealed early on to be “Planas”, beings comprised of artificial cells who were made specifically to assist Riot on his journey. And that’s it. We know nothing else. The term is never brought up again and we know nothing more about the concept, outside of the fact that they eat these foul tasting nuts to gain energy. They can also interface with Le Deus to power it up, but we know even less about that thing than the girls. It’s a robot that Riot pilots and that’s it. Who built it? How did Riot get it? How can the girls interact with it? Why does it appear out of a giant whale-sea serpent-thing? Give me something. Anything! It says something that Yuta has a better defined background than the actual main characters, and she spends most of the runtime under lock and key or screaming for help. The Demster are also blank slates. Dialogue implies they’ve been fighting Riot for some time, and Kaiser is seen answering to another (voiced by Show Hayami) who seems to outrank him, so there’s evidently a chain of command, but that’s all we get. Now Kaiser himself has his own ambitions, but just what the rest of his group are doing is anyone’s guess.
Characters aren’t the only problem though, as the setting is overly vague and ill defined too. Sources say it takes place on a post apocalyptic world, yet this isn’t mentioned in the show and your only hint that this is the case are the skyscraper ruins dotting most of the backgrounds. The story could take place on Mars for all I know, it’s not like it would make a difference. For some reason they do establish weird little factoids about random shit here and there, like how the nuts that the girls use as energy give off a pheromone that lingers in the air, but next to nothing is said about the rest of the world. Y’know, the actually important stuff. Of course, this might all be intentional. The very title of the OVA includes the word ‘Gaiden’, meaning it’s a side story to a much bigger tale, but considering this is all we got and there doesn’t appear to have been plans for anything else, I’m left to wonder if they really wrote all this with the intent of never exploring it. You don’t need extremely intricate lore and development for something to be good. I know what I’m watching here, it isn’t Shakespeare. BUT it stings because there’s outlines of some really cool ideas all throughout the anime. This cool world blending over the top sci-fi, low fantasy and Indiana Jones style adventuring. Genetically engineered android girls. Lost civilisations. Giant robots. All of these are neat concepts, but none of them get any real focus or attention. But that isn’t the biggest problem with Le Deus, oh no.
The absolute biggest issue with the OVA isn’t the animation, or the story, or the characters or the voice acting. It’s the editing. Editors rarely ever get their dues, which is a shame because they’re often just as important to a project as the director or the writer. A good edit can dictate the quality of a piece of work dramatically. If it’s good, it’s rarely noticeable because the team did their job and made a coherent and consistent cut. A bad edit, however, can tank your enjoyment. Le Deus isn’t a total trainwreck in this department. The story is in the right order, voice and music are synced up, scenes begin and end where they’re supposed to. Basic stuff. But there’s also a noticeable amount of sloppy errors strewn throughout the runtime, from the edges of cels being visible or misaligned, shots framed strangely, and in one instance Riot being cut off mid-word as the shot abruptly changes. You’d expect a couple of errors here and there from something like this, but to have it happen several times and be so noticeable is an entirely different matter. I really don’t know what was going on here or if the project was rushed out the door, but some of these mistakes are outright amateurish and not what you’d expect from something that clearly had a decent budget.
Le Deus is something I want to like more than I actually do. I still enjoyed my time with it, but it’s the little things that end up affecting the overall quality of the OVA, which is a shame because this could’ve been a real hidden gem if the background and characters were fleshed out more and the editing wasn’t so all over the place. As it is, Le Deus is a fun watch, but it’s just way too underbaked for its own good. Then again who cares? It’s a 50 minute one-and-done OVA. It doesn’t matter.
