Re-Animate for the Post-Heisei World] Vol. 6: The "Thirteen-Machine Defense Bloc" in the Age of Viral Disasters (Part 2)

As the time period is changing from the Heisei Era to the 2025 Era, the series "Re-Animate for the Post-Heisei World" aims to capture the contemporary landscape through reviews of notable anime.

Continuing from the previous installment, this time we take an in-depth look at the PlayStation 4 game "The 13th Airborne Defense Circle," which was released last year!

Nakagawa Daichi takes a stab at this noteworthy game released in a time of great change.

(There are many spoilers, so please be aware of them before reading the article.)

A variation on the 1990s-2000s taste of psychological drama: Megumi Yakushiji and Ei Sekigahara

In the "Reminiscences" section of "The Thirteen-Person Defense Circle," each PC is assigned a scenario that follows a different genre type of 20th century fiction, and these are released one after another. The basic strategy of skewering these scenarios as time science fiction that travels back and forth between multiple historical settings seems to have been revealed in the tracing of the stories of Juro Kurambe, Gori Fuyusaka, Takatoshi Hijiyama, and Natsuno Minami, all of whom were released in the first stage.

The scenarios of Megumi Yakushiji (CV: Marei Uchida), Noshu Amiguchi (CV: Tatsuo Suzuki), and Ei Sekigahara, which are released in the following period, are roles that, once the general framework of the worldview is presented, shift the viewpoint to those who have appeared as supporting characters in the previous scenarios and promote a multi-layered storytelling as a group drama.

In particular, Yakushiji and Sekigahara are positioned as mysterious opposites with secrets who appear in front of Kurambe and Fuyusaka, who were just "normal" high school students with no knowledge of anything, and become the objects of their respective romantic couplings.

First, Yakushiji, a female student in a neighboring class, comes to stay at Kurambe's house as a sort of forced wife, hinting that she had a special relationship with "Juro Izumi," who seems to be Kurambe's "previous life" persona. This situation itself is also very much in the mold of 1980s wish-fulfillment romantic comedies, but when the scenario in which Yakushiji himself is the PC begins, it turns out that she is actually a future person who lived in the 2020s with her best friend, Usami Kisaragi.

There, she meets and falls in love with Juro Izumi, a pilot from the 2060s, but Izumi suffers serious physical and mental damage in a battle with Deimos, which also attacked her time period, and the world of the 2020s collapses. The leader Chihiro Morimura, who had led the battle from the previous world, and others arranged for Izumi to escape to the world of the 1980s with Kisaragi and others, but the only way to cure Izumi was to overwrite his body with a new personality, so he was given the name "Juro Kurambe," the grandson of Tamao Kurambe, a woman originally from the 1940s, to live at her home while she was away. The truth behind the relationship between Kurambe and Yakushiji is that he was forced to live at Sakira High School .......

Because of this, Yakushiji is one of a group of futurists who share the secret of the coming of Deimos, which will soon strike this era, along with Morimura, who has gone into hiding at the school as a school nurse, and others. In addition, Yakushiji is a woman with a motive to take advantage of the situation. To take advantage of this, a mysterious cat named "Shippo," who speaks human language, appears and offers Kurabe a contract with a group of "wizard" pilots (other PCs) to shoot magic guns at them and drag them into battle in exchange for reviving his memories as Izumi.

Here, in the scenario of the Yakushiji version, a character from the 2020s, which is closer to our reality, rather than the idyllic 1980s juvenile, we have a thoughtful psychological drama from "Eva" to "Puella Magi Madoka Magica" (2011), with absurd situations and rule-setting forced upon them. It can be said that a shift is being planned toward the post-Eva type of dramaturgy of the 1990s and 2000s, which depicted psychological dramas in which the viewer is forced to deal with absurd situations and rule-setting.

On the other hand, the scenario of Sekigahara, whom Fuyusaka fell in love at first sight in a rather odd way, also begins with a suspenseful situation in which he wakes up in a dark alley where Morimura's gunned-down corpse is lying, having lost all memory. Under suspicion of being a murderer, he is pursued by a group of black suits from the Special Mission Agency, and his search for the truth of the unusual situation and his own identity is reminiscent of 1990s-style psychological mysteries. The story of his search for himself and the truth of his unusual situation recalls 1990s-style psycho-stories.

Through such a drama of self-discovery, the plot depicts the conflict of lines within the group of futurists and the doubt and darkness within the narrow human relationships among the PCs caused by the asymmetry of information over the secrets of the machine soldiers and time transfers in the face of the great situation of the imminent collapse of the world. In "Eva," Sekigahara is given the position of Kaji, who is investigating a conspiracy within Nerf.

Meaning of the homage to "Megazone 23

Among the PCs in the first half of the liberation group, who have a post-1990s taste, it is the scenario in the "Melancholy Amiguchi" section that serves as a guide to the critical features that are the main point of this work in particular. Amiguchi, a freshman at Sakira High School in a different class from Kurambe and Fuyusaka, starts out as an innocent 1980's person with no particular information about the world, and through a dream he sees a visual memory of his "previous life" called "Tetsuya Ida," which brings him closer to his true identity and the truth of the world. The storyline is similar to that of the first two.

In this sense, the position of Noshu Amiguchi is similar to that of Juro Kurambe as "another male protagonist," but in contrast to Kurambe, who is flat and quiet (in that sense, he has a strong post-2000s herbivore sensibility), the character of Noshu Amiguchi is a sexy, soft-spoken guy who dares to act like a delinquent and rides a motorcycle, In contrast to Surabe (who has a strong sense of herbivory since the 2000s), the character's portrayal of a young man who dares to act like a delinquent and rides a motorcycle emphasizes the image of 1980s youth.

Rather, there is a clear source of inspiration for both his form and his story that, as the film's director, Moriji Kamiya, has said in several media interviews, is enough of a spoiler for those in the know to name it. Yes, the main staff of "The Super Dimension Fortress Macross" (1982) reunited for the sci-fi robot anime "Megazone 23," which was released as an OVA in 1985, the very same year as the film's setting.

While inheriting elements from "Macross," such as the romance involving beautiful girl idols, "Megazone 23" is an imitation of the "happiest time of mankind" that was recreated in a giant spaceship 500 years after the main character Shogo Yahagi, a motorcycle rider, believed he was living in Tokyo in the 1980s, when he escaped from the dying Earth into space. It was a work that shocked anime fans at the time by attempting a sci-fi variation with the setting that the town was actually an imitation of the "happiest age of mankind" that was recreated in a giant spaceship 500 years after escaping from the dying Earth.

Thus, Amiguchi, following in the footsteps of Shogo Yahagi, also plays a role in confronting the fictional nature of the 1980s in which they live. One night, a new idol, Miyuki Inaba (also following in the footsteps of Eve Tokimatsuri, the virtual idol who holds the secret of the urban spaceship in "Megazone"), talks to Amiguchi over the TV and tells him that this world is actually a residential area only about 30 km in diameter, and he is half-convinced by the skeleton girl he is motioning to, Yuki Takamiya (CV: Yuki Takamiya). He is half-convinced that this world is actually a residential area with a diameter of only 30 kilometers. On his date with Yuki Takamiya (CV: Ami Koshimizu), a skanky girl he is in love with, he attempts to ride his motorcycle through a tunnel that is supposed to cross a prefectural border, but as expected, he is blocked by the outer wall of the "end of the world.

This type of drama that turns the reality of the living world upside down is not limited to "Megazone," but also includes "Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer" (1984) and others, which, despite the tension of the Cold War system in which a massive outbreak of nuclear forces by the U.S. and the Soviet Union could burn the world in a final war at any moment, is a "temporary" drama under that air pocket. The "Amiguchi" scenarios, including the "Amaguchi" version (1984), were simultaneously emerging as an ironic reappraisal of the "fictional age" in which Japan was enjoying a "temporary prosperity" in the midst of the tension of the Cold War regime, which might burn the world to the ground in a final war.

The scenario of Amiguchi's version, through this homage to "Megazone," was given the role of disclosing the truth that the world of "Thirteen Soldiers" itself, expressed in the manner of a stage play, was in some sense a "made-up" space even within the play.

The Structure of the World Revealed through the Confusion of Time and Space──Keitaro Miura, Yuki Takamiya, Toshiki Ogata, and Usami Kisaragi

Thus, the "Reminiscence Arc," starting with Juro Kurambe in 1985, continues with the seven characters up to this point: Keitaro Miura (CV: Kaito Ishikawa), who, like Hijiyama, is a potential pilot in the 1940s and falls in love with Minami, who has traveled across time; Takamiya Yuki, who is a childhood friend of Minami and is forced to reluctantly become a Special Service Organization investigator for the Kihei project; and Yuki Miyazaki (obviously inspired by Saki Asamiya, played by Yuki Saito in the drama version of "Skeban Keisatsu" (1985)), Toshiki Ogata (CV: Tomokazu Seki), who is also a Showa-era zipper but is actually the son of an executive at Shikishima Heavy Industries, and who becomes deeply involved with Ogata after being caught in a time shift to the 2020s in his hometown with The story of each PC, Usami Kisaragi, a futurist, is released sequentially in an omnibus format, with the timeline moving back and forth in a complex manner.

By synthesizing their scenarios, which are zapped back and forth between the different eras through the transition gate, the following further truths emerge.

First, the PCs were zipping back and forth from the future to the past, escaping monster attacks in five different eras, 40 years apart: the 2100s, 2060s, 2020s, 1980s, and 1940s (however, after 2025, for one reason or another, the year 1945 skips one era and As revealed in the Amiguchi section, each of the five sectors is numbered "Sector 1 to 5," starting from the earlier era, and coexist as a residential area with a population of about 1.2 million people.

In each sector, 300 meters underground, there is a central computer facility "terminal" in the shape of a disk about 30 km in diameter, suspected to be an alien UFO, which is responsible for the "universal control" function to collectively manage the bio-IDs of the residents, and by accessing and hacking this facility, it is possible to transfer from one sector to another through a gate. By accessing this terminal and hacking into it, it is possible to transfer between sectors at the gate. The first catharsis of the "Reminiscence Arc" is the solution to this mystery discovered by Tsukasa Okino, the developer of the Kibyo, who mainly leads the Hijiyama Arc, and takes the initiative in tackling it.

In other words, contrary to the production of the analog clock hands spinning at high speed during the time transition at the gate, there is no time paradox or divergence of world lines in the worldview of this work, as in "Back to the Future" (1985) or "STEINS;GATE" (2009), where time itself is operated in a variable manner. The game system of this title does not cause a time paradox or divergence of world lines. In the same way that the storyline does not diverge in the game system of this work, the flow of time is only a single path, and the written world of each era, virtually recreated as in "Megazone," has been prepared for five sectors.

What, then, are these sector-divided worlds, and who prepared them and for what purpose?

The clue to this second mystery is gradually revealed in scenarios such as Kisaragi's version, in which he and Ogata explore sector 3 (2025) after the collapse and discover traces of Shikishima Heavy Industries in the wreckage of Deimos, and Minami's and Miura's versions concerning BJ, who somehow kept video records in earth orbit in "2188," a year even further in the future than the five ages. It is gradually revealed in the scenario.

In other words, it is suggested that Deimos is apparently a runaway terraforming heavy machinery for planetary development manufactured with technology far in the future than that of Kisaragi's time, and that in 2188, adults with the same names as the PCs (mainly of middle-aged and older generation) are planning to use autonomous deep space exploration vessels to It is also hinted that in 2188, adults with the same names as the PCs (mostly middle-aged and older) were promoting the "Ark Project," which aimed to sow human beings on another planet by means of autonomous deep space vessels.

The five sectors where the PCs live are colony settlements built inside huge spaceships, just like in the "megazone," and in order to ensure the survival of the human race, which is on the verge of extinction due to contamination of the earth by a war using nanomachines, the PCs are trying to start history over from the "best possible time" without having to commit such foolish acts. It was a false past that was emulated. The surviving human beings were divided over which era was the "best era," and in the end, five different eras coexisted, which is how each sector came to be.

Therefore, the year 2188, which was thought to be the most future era, is the most ancient era in the film, and the 13 PCs were part of the few survivors of the human race who were entrusted to one of the many arks that were released into space in search of a new world and traveled through the ages.