Shoukoku no Altair

Mahmut Tuğrul is the youngest Pasha in the Türkiye Stratocracy, a title granted to members of the Divan—the council that governs the nation. Haunted by witnessing the loss of his mother and village during the war 12 years ago, he has dedicated his life to serving his country and preventing further bloodshed.

Years after the devastating clash between the aggressive Balt-Rhein Empire and Türkiye, tensions flare once more. Political unrest brews along the border of the two countries as rival factions and skirmishes push both nations closer to all-out conflict, threatening their fragile peace.

As turmoil grows, Mahmut's idealism and inexperience as a leader is called into question and he is stripped of his rank. However, this setback brings about unexpected allies in the fight against the Empire. As war looms over the continent, Mahmut must navigate a web of political intrigue and dangerous battles, fighting to protect the peace he holds dear and prove himself a capable leader.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Tuğrul, Mahmut Main

Murase, Ayumu Japanese

Zehir, Zağanos Supporting

Furukawa, Makoto Japanese

Armut, Ayşe Supporting

Kayano, Ai Japanese

Ulema, Beyazit Supporting

Uchiyama, Kouki Japanese

Al-Kaplan, Balaban Supporting

Nakai, Kazuya Japanese

Şara Supporting

Hikasa, Youko Japanese

Kurt Kurt Supporting

Kimura, Subaru Japanese

Kara Kanat, Süleyman Supporting

Konishi, Katsuyuki Japanese

γιός Apollodorus, Cyrus Supporting

KENN Japanese

Şehir, Halil Supporting

Ogata, Kenichi Japanese

Kamei, Hiroshi Producer

Itou, Youhei Producer

Yokoyama, Shuko Producer

Kyoutani, Tomomi Producer

Reviews

Sep 19, 2023

RESOLVING_POWER

Recommended

I watched Shoukoku no Altair, also known as Altair: A Record of Battles. Here are my thoughts:

This is a historical show set in a vaguely medieval time period. Magic does not play a significant role in the show (if at all – I don't recall any magic but I hesitate to promise its total absence), and overall it is pretty realistic. The MC (Altair) does have protagonist plot armour in some situations, but as a whole I found the story fairly believable.

The setting consists of a variety of nations that resemble those of the historical-Mediterranean perimeter. The MC is a high-ranking member of a pseudo-Ottoman ... nation's government. The MC travels around throughout the show and different nations are featured along the way. Various ideologies of both nations and individuals are explored throughout the story. It is pretty interesting. The show accomplishes an impressive amount of elaborate worldbuilding during its 24-episode runtime. All the different nations depicted in the show were also potent imagination fertilizer.

Overall the story of Shoukoku no Altair is exceptionally well written and clever. The storyline is very intricate and unique. It is complex yet coherent and intriguing. I found the story very interesting and enjoyable. The writing (including worldbuilding and abstract themes) of this anime is its best feature. Most of the plot is related to political and military conflict between (and within) nations.

Beyond the plot, the writing explores themes relating, or at least tangential, to international relations and geopolitics. Themes such as military grand strategy, relations between a nation's culture and its foreign policy, and a wide variety of political themes in general. These themes made the show very interesting. There are often parallels that could be drawn between the story and real-world history.

In addition to being excellently written, the story is well executed. Despite the complexity of the story I never had any difficulty understanding what was happening. Furthermore, the pacing felt perfectly calibrated to me. It is a well-directed show.

One caveat I should mention is that, as you might expect of a manga adaptation, the ending of this anime does not have any finality. Although it does end at a major turning point in the plot, most of the conflicts that the plot is centered around remain unresolved. Personally I don't mind this (and it does signal that the adaptation is faithful) but I know it will bother others. I am very tempted to read the source material to find out how the story continues.

Despite the mature themes explored in the writing, the show does sometimes have a juvenile shounen-ish feeling. It's a very mixed bag though and varies from episode to episode. Generally speaking, I found the earlier episodes felt juvenile more frequently. As the show progresses, the strategy elements start to dominate more and more, and the scale of conflict increases. It takes time for the worldbuilding to develop to a point where the exploration of some political themes is even possible. My numerical rating for this anime increased as I progressed through the episodes.

It's also worth noting that this is not a particularly character-driven show. It is very much plot-driven rather than character-driven. It seemed to me that little attention was paid to depicting the emotions and feelings of the MC and other characters, particularly during the later episodes. This isn't a criticism, just an observation. In a different show this might be an issue, but for a strategy-focused show like this that explores abstract political themes it really isn't. Although there certainly are emotional episodes, some episodes are so devoid of emotion it almost felt like watching a history documentary. Again, particularly during the latter half of the show when the grand-strategy elements really reach their climax. Despite the show's length, there's also not a whole lot of character development, however there is a diverse variety of personalities in the cast, and perhaps more importantly, different sociopolitical attitudes. The show certainly has ideological diversity within its cast.

In a lot of ways the MC does feel like a generic anime protagonist. Although his lack of character development really isn't an issue, perhaps more effort should have been made to depict his ideological attitudes and their development throughout the show. On balance, I have a neutral feeling towards the MC, but I can understand the perspective of people who disliked him. I would agree that this is one element of the anime where there was room for improvement.

In my opinion, the OST is good. Nice OP and ED songs too. The voice acting is adequate but nobody really stood out to me. I thought the voice work for the MC was a little weak.

As for visuals, some of the character designs are nice. Due to the size of the cast and its cultural diversity, a wide variety of outfits are featured in the show. Unfortunately, the character animation is frequently crude and lacking detail. However, the background setting usually looks great (I took lots of screencaps); every episode has at least a few nice detailed landscape frames to admire. During indoor scenes a lot of the pseudo-Arabic architecture and interior decor is neat as well. The visuals are inconsistent overall, but there are certainly moments where things look awesome.


My overall rating: 8/10
This anime is exceptionally well written. The story is interesting and clever, the themes explored are thought provoking, and it contains some of the most elaborate worldbuilding I've seen in a while. It is rare to see anime handle a topic like political strategy so competently. Furthermore, the anime is well executed and doesn't have any major direction issues. Visually, the setting looks good but the character animation is often sloppy.

This is an underappreciated show that would appeal to a lot of people, including those who aren't typically anime fans. I would definitely recommend Shoukoku no Altair to people who like political/military strategy stories. However, I should warn you that I found the first couple episodes comparatively weaker to the rest of the anime. The show feels a little juvenile at the beginning, but it eventually develops an elaborate world with a rich complex story. Don't judge it prematurely based on the first few episodes.

Also, the manga might be a better way to approach this franchise. I haven't read it, but the fact that the anime's best quality is its writing does suggest that literature is the optimal consumption medium.

I liked this way more than Arslan Senki (a similar anime in concept).

>I will never command a unit of attack-falcon-equipped soldiers in a medieval war between civilizations on the Eastern Mediterranean perimeter
JDIMSA

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Jan 19, 2025

OffColfax

Mixed Feelings

I was just browsing around MAL like I am wont to do, and I came across mention of this political and military drama with favorable associations with the great Legend of the Galactic Heroes. So I, in my infinite wisdom, immediately dove in with great gusto, expecting to be absolutely blown away by this thing I had never heard of.

On a production level, this is stellar. Everything is well animated, with clear action and a good sense of where the characters are in relation to each other. The storyboarding is excellent, the music is amazing, and the sound effects are spot on. The character design ... is clear, with absolutely no mistaking between who is who, and there is not a lot of same-face issue at all. The backgrounding is crisp and detailed, the worldbuilding is thorough, and nary a detail was missed in the presentation. If I was rating strictly on the technical part of the anime, it would be a completely different story.

The issues come from the characters themselves. With only a few exceptions, they are dull and lifeless; merely walking tropes with voice actors attached. There is no real passion involved, particularly with the main character, and the lines are delivered with the finesse and aplomb of a brick wall. Even when there are scenes where the emotional impact is supposed to be evident, the actual impact feels more like someone is telling you how they feel in a raw deadpan voice. It's like, again with few exceptions, the cast had no real dedication to what they were doing and were instead just going through the motions with no personality and even less attachment. I've had other experiences with anime where the voice talent felt like they were just in it for the paycheck, and all of those experiences were horrible. This production quality deserved so much better.

And the issues didn't stop there, as the script was even worse. Drier than the Sahara in June, it made the cut-and-thrust world of warfare feel like an economics midterm. There was no sense that anything really mattered in the end except hitting the plot points as efficiently as possible, and even some of the most crucial battles and events were yada-yada'd like they might as well not even have happened. And the international politics were even more parched in presentation than the warfare, with emotionless conversations about highly detailed negotiations being equally mixed with handwaving away the actual negotiations. And as a worse sin than all of the above, the details of the actual war were reduced to a Powerpoint presentation at the end of the final episode and presented with all the aplomb of a meeting that should have been an email.

So I'm of extremely mixed feelings about this one. Studio MAPPA did everything they needed to do behind the scenes in order to create a beautiful presentation for this anime, but the staff in charge of the bigger picture dropped the ball on what should have been a much better anime to enjoy.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Dec 15, 2017

KevinMckool

Not Recommended

Preliminary (23/24 eps)

This absolutely butchers the manga. So many scenes were cut out and shortened down to almost nothing, and plenty of scenes were changed for the worse. Even some characters are cut from the show. I don't know why they even bothered with animating this series if they're gonna cut out so much from it. The opening songs are nice and so is the animation, as is the soundtrack and voice acting, but this anime bares little resemblance to the manga it's adapted from.

At the start it wasn't so bad, it had the characters and the scenes, there were some deviations but nothing that was ... bad. Around episode 15 and up, it's nothing but shortened scenes and many strange changes, plus the pacing feels strange because of the cut plot. Don't waste your time with this anime, read the manga instead and you'll have a much more enjoyable and less confusing time

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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