When Ao is two years old, his mother, Eureka (still the amazing Kaori Nazuka), mysteriously disappears during a Scub Burst on his home island of Iwato Jima in Okinawa.
Ao is born in 2012 without a father, on an Earth eerily similar to our own but for the mysterious phenomenons known as Scub Bursts, where Scub Coral mysteriously appears out of thin air, followed by huge black monsters known as Secrets which then destroy the Scub and everything around it. Dig a little deeper, and you realize that everything in Ao's world is the way it is as a direct result of the end of Kōkyōshihen, and that there was no happily ever after, after all.īefore I get to that though, here's a quick run down on what Astral Ocean is about. As it is, there doesn't seem to be much of a link to the original series at first, but then we learn that Ao is Eureka and Renton's biological son, and that his parents seem to have come from another world entirely (a separate dimension, to be precise, connected to the Land of Kanan by the Scub Coral's Quartz). Everything is different, more political and down-to-Earth than the flowery Eureka Seven, and it can be difficult to tie them together instinctively.
Instead, the head writer on the project, Aikawa Shou ( Fullmetal Alchemist, Un-Go), gave us a whole new world (literally), a new set of characters, a new plot, and a new protagonist in the fantastic Ao Fukai (newcomer Yuutaro Honjou, in a riveting performance). They wanted to see how the Land of Kanan (the planet in the original series) had changed since the Second Summer of Love, and they wanted to have another atmospherically and philosophically rich adventure.
When people heard about a sequel to Eureka Seven, they expected Renton, Eureka, Holland, Anemone, and all the rest of the characters we came to know and love. Even so, I do think the series suffered commercially from its risk-taking, and it also suffered artistically from the loss of Dai Sato as head writer of the Eureka Project.
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