[Xander]

Originally Posted by Scherzo09

You can have your take away, I'll have mine. So far he's just been a rather bland, boring protagonist and I'm going to judge him by what I see.

Then let's get back to discussing him after he's done more on screen first? That seems to be the best option.

I find the length of this OVA strange too. Four episodes seems awfully short for this kind of story, would expect it to be six like Unicorn.

The curious part of your comparison is that even Unicorn, despite being planned for six episodes and having the luxury of working from an already completed narrative in book form, ended up needing to add a seventh episode in order to properly -or so we hope- wrap things up.

Now...the Akito OVA, despite its considerable pre-production time, is more of a work-in-progress but also has a relatively restricted scope. I mean yes, you could ostensibly tell a full season's worth of stories set in the EU after all the attention they've finally given the topic...but the structure of the tale seems like a simple one. Episode one introduced us to the main cast of characters and episode two will see them working together as a possibly dysfunctional team while meeting their first challenge. After they get that shock out of their system, there's at least another 90 minutes to deal with the consequences and arrange a final confrontation within the final two episodes.

But let's speculate a little here. If the numbers are good enough, which is difficult to tell since the sales have started well but honestly aren't quite as absolutely extravagant as those of Unicorn, perhaps Sunrise might end up extending this one a little too, if not in terms of episode count then at least in the amount of running time per episode. I wouldn't be surprised if the last episode or two ended up being 60 or even 70 minutes long instead of just the regular 50. With a lot of luck, we might even get to see episode two increase its length slightly.

And it's part of why I'm so interested in Akito, since it seems to have the tone I wanted from Code Geass from the beginning.

I would say this is where we might come to an understanding. Even with my different attitude towards the show, there were several things I would have liked to see instead of what we got -or at least handled better than they were- and I'm definitely in the camp of those who want to see different creators try their hand at working with this material. Variety is better than repetition. Both the producer and the director/writer duo of the previous show apparently agreed to "expand" the property instead of just continuing it in the most obvious manner, at least for now, and ultimately offered someone else the opportunity to play in their sandbox. That's one of the ways you end up with spin-offs which can easily outrank the original works they're based off.

EDIT: Also I feel the idea that CG was meant to be a comedy is a bit of a Parody retcon.

Calling it an outright comedy is mostly wrong, in my opinion, but I don't doubt some of the most over-the-top and silly moments in otherwise serious scenes may have an intentional comedic or "WTF" value. The characters themselves aren't going to laugh, of course, but the staff certainly isn't as blind as Nunnally and has openly poked fun at some of those parts of the show in several of the commentaries and side materials. I guess you could consider them slightly schizophrenic or just not very serious individuals after all.

Yeah, I like the idea of Britannia not just being British Nobles, but a safe haven for ALL Nobles who were thrown out as revolutions swept Eurasia. I wonder if that Japanese Britannian descended from the Japanese Imperial family or something.

It also explains why there aren't that many English names and surnames in use.

The idea that he could be a Japanese noble sounds plausible, at least, considering that the original show didn't really address the subject and the Euro Britannian knight went out of his way to praise him before getting killed off. There's been some speculation about his being half-Chinese though.