Galaxy Angel has an unusual history. From the research I did, it seems that the anime was created to advertise a virtually simultaneous game release. Both from Broccoli entertainment. There was just one issue, the game got delayed, the anime didn’t and the anime staff didn’t have any information about the game except for the character designs and a few basic character traits. So they decided to just forget about the dating sim continuity and just do whatever they wanted with it. The end result was that the anime and game became set in alternate universes. How did that work out for the anime? Let’s take a look at the first series and find out.
Galaxy Angel quickly abandons even the pretense of a story. After the first three episodes you can watch the rest in any order and not have any problems. The setting is that a group of five girls go on bizarre military missions, hilarity ensues. Is the anime funny? Very much so. It has a very fast-paced, zany type of humour. Which is used to great effect in virtually all of the episodes. The only exception is episode 14 which is inexplicably serious. I don’t know what they were thinking with that one. It doesn’t make sense to have a serious episode in an absurdest comedy series. It would be like having a random comedic episode in the middle of Berserk. That aside, the situations are creative and they’re fully taken advantage of.
The characters are a quirky group with a lot of energy and they interact well with each other. The cast isn’t complex but they are charming and a great deal of fun. You could say that they’re a microcosm of what to expect from the entire series.
The art is good. There are a lot of impressive details in the various objects that the characters encounter, the backgrounds and backdrops are lively. The art is also the only indication that you get that the characters come from a dating sim. The characters have interesting looks but there’s also some fan-service, albeit not much.
The voice acting is well done. Yamaguchi Megumi, Sawashiro Miyuki, Tamura Yukari and Shintani Ryoko all do really well in their roles. The entire cast exaggerates at times, but they also use subtlety quite a bit, certainly more than I expected from a zany comedy, and it works to accentuate certain scenes and downplay others which actually strengthens those moments where things go from mildly to insanely zany. Like the series, the music is high energy, nonsensical and fun.
The yuri factor is a 3/10. There are some slightly homo-erotic moments, most of them involving the boy crazy Ranpha oddly enough, but, like everything else in the series, they don’t go anywhere. There also aren’t enough to establish a pattern.
My final rating for Galaxy Angel is an 8/10. It’s a great series. It may not be complex or have a story, but it does have a lot of high energy, creative comedy. It’s a series that knows what it wants to do and runs with it. If you want a good laugh you really can’t go wrong with Galaxy Angel. Just skip the fourteenth episode.