One of the more interesting shows that I’d seen.
What They Say:
Tsubasa Shiina is a 10-year-old girl who recently moved to Hokkaido to live with her father. In school, she is very quiet and unsociable with her classmates. Then one night, she witnesses a UFO crash in the forest near her home. She rushes to the scene and finds the pilot, codenamed “D.D.”, in a barely stable condition. Also in the scene is a Maguar, a hideous alien that hatched aboard D.D.’s ship. As the Maguar is close to taking Tsubasa’s life, an alien lifeform fuses with her body to form the Riberus battle armor Figure 17, which shortly destroys the alien threat. The life form takes the name Hikaru and turns into an identical twin of Tsubasa. As time passes, Tsubasa becomes more open to everyone around her, thanks to her new twin sister Hikaru. However, with Maguar eggs scattered all over Hokkaido, their ability to form Figure 17 is needed to eliminate all hatched Maguars until backup from D.D.’s home planet arrives on Earth.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
In reading some of the broadcast background for the series, Figure 17 very much comes across as a different kind of project. With its airing only one episode a month and the episodes being about forty-five minutes in length, the thirteen months it ran must have made for an interesting audience. Taking in the first three episodes over the course of a couple of days, I can’t imagine waiting a month between each episode.
While the series has a strong science fiction bent to it and has some rather solid alien creature action sequences, the heart of the show really is its heart. It’s the story of one character, a young girl named Tsubasa, and how her life changes due to meeting some new people.
The setting for the story is a most pleasant change right from the start and gives some hint to expect things to not be done the usual way here. Taking place in Hokkaido, we’re treated to some stunning looking background visuals with the mountains and the wide plains around them. Living in this area, we’re given introductions to young Tsubasa and her father Hideo Shiina. This family used to live in Tokyo until a little while ago. Due to her mother passing away, some years after her birth obviously but the illness due to giving the birth, Hideo has decided that he wants to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a baker. So with an offer to be taught and given residence in Hokkaido, Tsubasa agrees (reluctantly) and the two of them restart their lives there.
Tsubasa’s a quiet and shy little introvert. She likes her home life, which while she wishes her father was actually home more, the quiet nature of it being just the two of them feeds her need to not interact with new people. She doesn’t have any apparent friends at school where she still gets teased about being a snooty Tokyo “city kid” who doesn’t need anyone. She takes all of this and just looks away, hiding her feelings. She even gets taken advantage of when it comes to doing the chores and other duties by not standing up to the others and telling them they have to do what they’re assigned.
While she comes across as meek and shy, she doesn’t elicit the standard “grow a spine!” response that a lot of other shows would generate at this point. There’s something different in her performance, the quiet voice and the eyes. The lack of whining about it, even internally, sets her apart from the standard introverted lead character who must be drawn out into the audience.
Into every introverts life, a little adventure shall fall and Tsubasa is no different. Watching something in the night sky fly across and break up before crashing nearby, she wonders what it could be. Before she realizes it, their dog has run off to investigate. Pets are the biggest causes of children investigating UFO’s! So she takes off into the dark forest with a flashlight and tries to find her dog and to see what she can see.
What she ends up with is something akin to a more mature style of alien first contact. Coming across the crashed ship, she finds the sole person inside unconscious under a tree after being thrown about. Speaking only his own language as he wakes up, he takes to immediately protecting Tsubasa against the Magure, the group of creatures he was transporting, from attacking. Due to the crash, the eggs that the Magure were in the form of have spread across the area and have a chance of hatching as it were and causing trouble.
The Magure is a surprisingly interesting race of creatures in their design. Each seems to adapt to the area where it’s born (or there are just different kinds, we’re not really given an answer this early on). With massive jaws that face skyward with a single bulbous eye that can extend out and search for its prey, they’re both equally creepy and fascinating.
The pilot as we learn is actually the equivalent of a police officer and was transporting the eggs back to a safe location. During the transport, one of them hatched and wrecked havoc on the ship, causing him to crash on a planet they’d otherwise avoid completely due to the differences. With his name translating as DD, he tells Tsubasa some of his tale and lets her know that he’s contacted his people to come to help him deal with the problem. Tsubasa takes all of this in calmly and pretty much accepts it at face value.
To make things even more interesting, DD and his people use something called Ribers to create special protective armor suits around them to let them handle all kinds of situations. These Ribers are actually a living liquid metal that adapts to the person’s form and enhances their strength and other skills. Due to an odd set of circumstances during the initial fight, as Tsubasa is trapped underneath the gaze of the Magure, a leaked bottle of Ribers comes into contact with her and she gains the power of the suit, but seeming to be more of a viewer from within who can help direct the action as opposed to being in complete control.
When the armor is deactivated, it typically returns to its casing. But with the Ribers that Tsubasa has not having the casing and having come into contact with Tsubasa in an irregular way, when the armor disengages it takes an identical form to Tsubasa herself – complete with all her knowledge and memories. In the blink of an eye, Tsubasa finds herself with a twin sister who now goes by the name of Hikaru.
Going forward, you can see how it plays out to some degree. DD waits for his people to come to Earth to help but he goes investigating for more Magure in the meantime while adjusting to the Earth customs he’s coming into contact with. Using some mental powers, he sets Hikaru to be Tsubasa’s twin sister who was staying with an aunt that’s come back to live with her father and sister and she ends up enrolled in school and playing a lot with Tsubasa. The two aren’t night and day, but Hikaru is definitely the more outgoing of the two. With her now at school, Tsubasa’s life changes incrementally due to her “sisters” influence.
And that’s where the real story lies for all of this so far. While we do get the entire Magure storyline and some great action sequences and all, we also spend a lot of time with the two girls just trying to figure out life. One episode is spent mostly just on a game called Port Ball at school where we watch as Hikaru tries to draw out Tsubasa’s natural talent as well as some aggressive behavior for the game itself. It’s watching Tsubasa and how she deals with all of this that’s the real story.
In Summary:
This series is done in a really engaging way. Most of this feels so by the numbers in its basics, but just something about the approach really sets it different and I can’t put my finger on it. Each episode plays out like an hour long TV drama sans commercials and builds on what’s come before. Tsubasa is an interesting character to watch grow and react to all of this and in how she deals with the problems their presence creates. With the series essentially being twenty-six episodes but done in longer episodes, there’s a lot more material to come that will change things even more. The core of the story in the beginning is different Tsubasa though and she pulls it off very well. I can’t wait to see more and to try and figure out what it is about it that really has me so keen on the show.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: Tubi
