Certain series will always hold a special place in your heart because of the time when you watched them. Star Blazers: Space Battleship Yamato 2199 will always be one such work for me. Once upon a time, this was the show that brought me back from a decade-long hiatus from anime fandom. I had nothing but fond memories of it, but I haven't watched it since I first encountered it back in 2013 or so, and never did quite finish the sequel series 2202. With their arrival on Crunchyroll for streaming, I wondered if they would hold up to a rewatch.

I'm happy to report that Star Blazers: Space Battleship Yamato 2199 and its sequel series 2202 are a complete package. The animation is simply jaw-dropping, with detailed characters, backgrounds, and mechanical designs. The music is part touching tribute to the original score and part bombastic reimagining, filling scenes with the tension and gravitas they demand. The characterization adds new layers and intricacies between old and new cast members while retaining the original's unerring sense of forward movement. Despite the three years of in-universe time (and substantially longer in our real world) between 2199 and 2202, the follow-up season continues the trend by exploring familiar territory with a new lens.

These series also show how to handle a reboot with masterful precision. Star Blazers: Space Battleship Yamato 2199 and its sequel series 2202 flesh out the original series without losing sight of what made them special to begin with. Leiji Matsumoto and Yoshinobu Nishizaki's original Space Battleship Yamato captivated audiences worldwide over fifty years ago for good reason. There's the inherent wonder of the operatic elements, of distant worlds and angelic calls for help from mysterious figures. Even space is merely a vast ocean sailed by a seagoing vessel of a bygone era. The tenacious ship-to-ship battles where stellar submarines firing torpedoes from hidden pockets of subspace and ace pilots engage in vicious dogfights. The politicking and machinations of the vast interplanetary empires - as well as Earth's leaders - form a shadowy backdrop to the dramatic clash of duty-bound sailors fighting for survival. It's all there and more, slowly unfolding from a desperate struggle for survival to a rumination on the nature of power, breaking of promises, and whether humanity is any different from the forces arrayed against them. The 2199 and 2202 reimaginings capture this crucial essence.

The most interesting development for me on rewatching both series is how I've come around to the starships being computer-generated. Back when I first watched the shows in the early 2010s, I felt that the computer models for the starships were the one main drawback of the series. It was hard not to think back to the immaculately animated vessels that filled the TVs of my younger days - from Macross to Gall Force - and lament that they could not have hand-drawn ships here too. But with time I've come around on the CG vessels of 2199 and 2202. While they'll never quite measure up to those hand-drawn ships of yesteryear, they are still highly detailed models and they look quite good. It helps that they are generally meant to be ponderous capital ships that don't have a lot of moving parts, but when they need to move around they do so with all the necessary mechanical greebles in motion.

The series is not without its limitations, however. Star Blazers: Space Battleship Yamato 2199 has a bit of a cheesecake factor when it comes to the female members of the cast. Yuki, Makoto, and Kaoru bring some, uh, Significant Military Assets™ to the expedition, one might say. Whether this is bothersome will vary from person to person; it doesn't take me out of the experience as it's certainly not the most egregious fan service I've seen, but it's also noticeably more than the original series. There's also the practical question of why all crew don't just wear the same uniforms, but in a series where meteor shields and star submarines are regular occurrences it's not like realism has much input here. 2202 has far less of this, but it's still present.

There's also the issue of 2202 being a case of more simply being, well, more. There's nothing wrong with 2202 - I think it's a great follow-up to 2199. The omnipresent feeling that humanity has triumphed but perhaps at the cost of losing its soul underscores everything that occurs. Nevertheless, the fact that it is a sequel series means that it loses some of that initial “Wow I can't believe how good this is!” quality that 2199 has. It's like ordering the same meal a second time: even if it's just as delicious, you've tasted it before. Without getting too much into spoilers, I also feel that the finale of 2202 felt slightly more rushed than I remembered the first go around.

Still, Star Blazers: Space Battleship Yamato 2199 and 2202 are monumental achievements that have stood the test of time. They brought one of anime's foundational texts back into the modern era and gave it a level of polish and care that few reboots or remakes can hope to match. It's wild to think that ten years ago it brought me back from a ten-year hiatus, showing that the linear passage of time continues to make a fool of this old man. During the rewatch, I was reminded all over again just why it is so special. No matter how battered we are or how dire things seem, we can rise again and soar among the stars - just like in old times.