"Sol Bianca: The Legacy" is a pretty, but poorly plotted miniseries.
While the main elements of the original series are present, some details are changed and much of the inferred emotional forces behind the mains' actions are never fully brought to light, leaving their choices somewhat puzzling in many cases.
While this could be a prequel to the original series (May/Mayo is new to the crew here), the presence of Earth (it was an unfamiliar legend originally) makes that unlikely. Given the importance of Earth in The Legacy, having this be a sequel would probably have been a better idea.
The Feb/April dynamic is absolutely critical in this series, but Feb's past, her feelings towards April, and how it all relates to what Feb gave up to become a pirate, remain vague, despite the plot completely hanging off of these details.
Feb is nearly useless throughout Legacy, being far more inactive than in the original series: more of an object than a subject. Despite a bit of gun waving, Feb does nearly nothing except get pushed, pulled, and pursued by others. She is also no longer much darker skinned than the other crew members in this series, which seems a very odd choice.
April faces hard choices in Legacy, but she is still the same person as before. While she has a bit more back-story here than in the original series, most of this added story is fairly pat, a glancing glimpse at best, despite Legacy's main plot arising from it. Essentially, it looks like it was constructed just enough to forward the story, and not developed any further than that.
Jani acts mainly the same for most of the time in this series as she did previously, but reacts here to other people one way, and then another, with no apparent rhyme or reason. Jani's clutching to a male character when threatened (in "The Cleaner") seems very wrong for her, for instance.
Jun seems unchanged. As a prior reviewer noted, Jun's "secret" is only shown in brief flashes, but most fans already know her story (such as it is), anyway.
May/Mayo is a new addition to the ship (more of a passenger than crew) in The Legacy, and does not come into her own until the last episode, being more of a plot device than a character until then.
While it is possible that some of the plot and character shifts and omissions are due to a loss in translation from the Japanese language and mindset to the English language and Western world-view, it seems more likely that Legacy's production studio simply followed a fairly common motif of vague back-story and inconstant details that are fairly rife in anime releases that revisit old favorites. Continuity was never an anime strong point.
Pacing-wise, there is not as much action in this series as there was in the original (or perhaps it simply isn't as well dispersed throughout the story). There is, rather, a great deal of time-consuming posturing and shadowy machinations from the primary antagonist, which becomes irritating fairly early on, and stays annoying to the end.
An Art Nouveau motif was introduced to the Sol Bianca herself (granting a goddess-like image to the ship) in The Legacy; this was quite beautiful but was a bit intrusive, and even hokey at times, due to it's excessive scale.
The series is, as noted, generally pretty, but some of the character animations are weak. Ship animations are CGI and very nice, especially for the Sol Bianca herself, but the SB isn't seen in action (or even just seen) all that much until the last episode.
In conclusion, Sol Bianca: The Legacy is a pretty addition to the original series, but seems a lazy reinvention rather than a faithful continuation. Had the mains' back-stories been a bit more solidly presented it could have stood alone, even as a "reboot", but as it is, Legacy seems an incomplete and blurry snapshot of old friends who have somehow changed and become unpleasantly unfamiliar.
While the main elements of the original series are present, some details are changed and much of the inferred emotional forces behind the mains' actions are never fully brought to light, leaving their choices somewhat puzzling in many cases.
While this could be a prequel to the original series (May/Mayo is new to the crew here), the presence of Earth (it was an unfamiliar legend originally) makes that unlikely. Given the importance of Earth in The Legacy, having this be a sequel would probably have been a better idea.
The Feb/April dynamic is absolutely critical in this series, but Feb's past, her feelings towards April, and how it all relates to what Feb gave up to become a pirate, remain vague, despite the plot completely hanging off of these details.
Feb is nearly useless throughout Legacy, being far more inactive than in the original series: more of an object than a subject. Despite a bit of gun waving, Feb does nearly nothing except get pushed, pulled, and pursued by others. She is also no longer much darker skinned than the other crew members in this series, which seems a very odd choice.
April faces hard choices in Legacy, but she is still the same person as before. While she has a bit more back-story here than in the original series, most of this added story is fairly pat, a glancing glimpse at best, despite Legacy's main plot arising from it. Essentially, it looks like it was constructed just enough to forward the story, and not developed any further than that.
Jani acts mainly the same for most of the time in this series as she did previously, but reacts here to other people one way, and then another, with no apparent rhyme or reason. Jani's clutching to a male character when threatened (in "The Cleaner") seems very wrong for her, for instance.
Jun seems unchanged. As a prior reviewer noted, Jun's "secret" is only shown in brief flashes, but most fans already know her story (such as it is), anyway.
May/Mayo is a new addition to the ship (more of a passenger than crew) in The Legacy, and does not come into her own until the last episode, being more of a plot device than a character until then.
While it is possible that some of the plot and character shifts and omissions are due to a loss in translation from the Japanese language and mindset to the English language and Western world-view, it seems more likely that Legacy's production studio simply followed a fairly common motif of vague back-story and inconstant details that are fairly rife in anime releases that revisit old favorites. Continuity was never an anime strong point.
Pacing-wise, there is not as much action in this series as there was in the original (or perhaps it simply isn't as well dispersed throughout the story). There is, rather, a great deal of time-consuming posturing and shadowy machinations from the primary antagonist, which becomes irritating fairly early on, and stays annoying to the end.
An Art Nouveau motif was introduced to the Sol Bianca herself (granting a goddess-like image to the ship) in The Legacy; this was quite beautiful but was a bit intrusive, and even hokey at times, due to it's excessive scale.
The series is, as noted, generally pretty, but some of the character animations are weak. Ship animations are CGI and very nice, especially for the Sol Bianca herself, but the SB isn't seen in action (or even just seen) all that much until the last episode.
In conclusion, Sol Bianca: The Legacy is a pretty addition to the original series, but seems a lazy reinvention rather than a faithful continuation. Had the mains' back-stories been a bit more solidly presented it could have stood alone, even as a "reboot", but as it is, Legacy seems an incomplete and blurry snapshot of old friends who have somehow changed and become unpleasantly unfamiliar.
