Harlock doesn't just borrow Wagner's Ring Cycle, it stakes the entire Matsumoto universe on it, betting that six episodes can contain a war between gods and the last free captain in the galaxy. The ambition collapses under its own weight more often than it soars, but when the operatic grandeur and space combat align, nothing else sounds like this. You watch because Harlock has always been a man fighting something bigger than himself; here, that something is literally mythology made flesh, and he's the only one who refuses to kneel.

Captain Harlock is pulled into a conflict on a galactic scale after the son of a fallen comrade forges the Ring of the Nibelung without realizing what he has made. A deranged outcast leads gathering forces of evil in a war against the galaxy's last remaining superpowers, the final gods. Harlock has to stand against the massed fleets that threaten them and get the ring back before Paradise is lost. The six-episode OVA from 1999 is a science fiction adventure with a strong dramatic streak.