Alderamin on the Sky

Alderamin on the Sky

Alderamin on the Sky anime cover art featuring the main characters
Alderamin on the Sky Cover Art

Overview

Alderamin on the Sky is a fantasy war anime. It’s about some warring countries who use things like swords, as well as magical guns powered by elemental spirits. Honestly, it didn’t make much sense to me. They could have gone without the magic and it would have been a perfectly fine anime.

The setting is basically magical World War One which can be seen from the guns and zeppelins that are used, as well as the continued use of swords in some situations. Really the one thing that changes this anime is the magical spirits that are used to power the guns for some reason. I guess in this timeline we discovered those rather than gunpowder.

Maybe you could tell, but I don’t really like this anime and I’m not entirely sure why myself. If I had to try to narrow it down though, it would probably come to a combination of magical spirits which are unnecessary and make no sense, and the characters whom I found to be uninteresting.

Characters

From what I remember, there are only two characters who are decent. The first is the protagonist Ikta Solork. He’s a lazy soldier who doesn’t believe in doing anything that isn’t necessary. However, although he is lazy he is a master strategist.

He reminded me of Shikamaru from Naruto. Unlike Shikamaru, however, Ikta is not against sacrificing a soldier or a few hundred if it means securing his victory. This is probably what I found most interesting about his character. He’s the protagonist, but he doesn’t have irrational ideas about war. He knows there are going to be casualties and so he uses them in the most effective ways he can.

The other character I didn’t mind was Yatorishino Igsem, although for different reasons. She’s the female lead and Ikta’s best friend from what I remember. She’s one of the strongest soldiers and generally wields both a sword and a dagger instead of a rifle.

She’s a decent character not because of some interesting character trait, but simply because she’s cool.

Besides those two, there’s a medic named Haroma Becker, a sniper named Torway Remion, and what I can only assume is a grunt soldier named Matthew Tetdrich (he doesn’t have anything special going on). Out of those three I’m indifferent towards Haroma because I can’t remember what she does.

Matthew, I remember annoying me because he was just like a less competent version of Ikta and I didn’t know what his purpose was. Torway probably annoyed me the most because he doesn’t like to kill people and so the solution is to just kill people from farther away. I don’t know why this angered me so much, but it did so he’s the worst character.

Finally, there’s a princess who joins the military with these other characters for some reason. I think her goal is to make the empire a better place from the ground up or something. She kind of came out of nowhere just like the use of magic for things that should already be possible so we’ll just pretend she doesn’t exist.

Yatorishino Igsem fighting with her sword and dagger from the anime Alderamin on the Sky
Yatorishino Igsem

Conclusion

So I don’t like Alderamin on the Sky, but what does that mean for its rating? Well, it gets a 4/10. I’m sure I could come up with some arguments as to why it should be increased to a 5, but I generally like to stand by my first impression of an anime after watching it so I’m not going to change the rating.

Somehow the rest of MAL has concluded that this anime deserves almost double the rating I gave it, so if magical World War One is your thing then maybe this show isn’t so bad.

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