The series is markedly different from the original in many ways. Those include: • The
Yamato of
2199 is bigger than previous incarnations of the ship, because the anime design team now scaled the entire ship to be on proportion with the dimensions of the bridge, hence the
Yamato becoming 333m long (the original is 263m long). Also, the entire ship has been internally reworked to make more sense and it is no longer built in the wreck of the original sunken battleship
Yamato. • In the original series, Queen Starsha had only one sister, Sasha (Astra in the English dub), who was sent to Earth with both Starsha's message and the plans for the Wave Motion Engine. In
2199, the queen has two sisters, Yurisha and Sasha. Yurisha was sent to Earth one year before Sasha with the message and the engine schematics. She was left comatose in an auto accident that left Mori with severe memory loss. Sasha was tasked with bringing the engine's "activation core" to Earth but died in a crash on Mars. Yurisha bears an uncanny resemblance to Yuki Mori, leading to a protracted case of mistaken identity between them (with Yuki even being taken prisoner by Garmilas operatives who mistook her for Yurisha). • The
Yamato departs Earth with a much larger crew of 999 crew on board. In the original series,
Yamato had a crew of 114. This is quite possibly a nod to Galaxy Express 999, another series created by Leiji Matsumoto. • While main weapons remain largely the same, the
Yamato now has missile ports in the under keel to cover that previously assumed "blind" spot. • Captain Okita is much more involved in the storyline. In the original
Yamato series, his illness took him out much sooner and he spent more time laid up in bed. In the remake, he remains in command almost to the end. • In the original series, Susumu Kodai assumed command of the
Yamato when Okita was taken ill. In
2199, Shiro Sanada is the designated XO and takes over when Okita cannot command. Sanada is considerably fleshed out from the original series, with much more back story and complexity to his character. • The Analyzer robot repeatedly sexually harassed Yuki in the original series, but it is much better behaved in the remake. • In the original version, Sanada's limbs were cybernetic. There is no indication of that in
2199. • The
Yamato's main guns can fire projectile shells in addition to anti-electron pulses. In the first series, she never fired shells (which turn out to be critical to the ship's survival in more than one instance). • Yuki is no longer needed in the medical bay, as Dr. Sado has three nurse-medics (and even a full operating theater among other medical facilities) at his disposal, with Warrant Officer Yuria Misaki (one of Yuki's relief persons at the bridge) acting as a fourth medic in emergencies with large numbers of injuries. There are many more women compared to the original series since now one third of the crew is female, including a pilot (Akira Yamamoto) and an intelligence officer (Kaoru Niimi). • The character Akira Yamamoto is made into a woman, and has a much larger role in this part of the story. • There is considerable cordial if tense interaction between Garmilans and humans, something that did not happen in the original series. • We see much more of Garmilas society. Many of its leaders are shown sympathetically to be family men who are more worried about their children than war. People conquered by Garmilas serve as second-class citizens, and are often looked down upon by Garmilans. • Abelt Desler's motivations are much more totalitarian here. In the original series, Earth was bombarded and its atmosphere changed due to his plans to move his people there from his dying homeworld. In 2199, despite him showing a tinge of his motives seen in the original, Earth's bombardment is simply a part of his policy: advanced intelligent species either join the Empire as second-class citizens or they will be destroyed. However, the sequel
Star Blazers: Space Battleship Yamato 2202 shows that Garmilas homeworld is actually on verge of destruction like in the original series. • The Garmilas military and Desler are much more obvious Nazi figures than before. On some of their uniforms, the higher ranks wear a logo on their neck that looks like the
SS lightning bolts, and the names of all of the admirals and generals are distinctly
German-sounding, like Ditz, Goer, Hiss, Domel and Shultz; most of whom are allegories of the top military officers of
Nazi Germany. (Despite this, in one sense the Garmilans do still reflect Americans. The military platoon made up of Zaltzi volunteers, second class citizens of Garmilas, is still called the 442nd Special Operations platoon, a reference to the US Army's heavily decorated
442nd Infantry Regiment during World War II, made up of Japanese volunteers.) The official designations for many Garmilas assets, such as the Stuka Dive Bomber (which features the inverted gull wings of the Stuka) and DWG 262 fighter (which visually is similar to the Me 262), even the names of most of its vessels, bear similarities to their WW2 counterparts. • The suicide run of Mamoru Kodai's command, the
Yukikaze, occurs for a different motive - to cover the retreat of Okita rather than being unable to bear the shame of defeat as in the original. This was the motive given in the
Star Blazers dub, and also used in the 2010 live action film. • The Garmilas fleet has a new ship, the dimensional submarine UX-01, commanded by Captain Wolf Flakken, whom even his peers acknowledge is independent and difficult to control. The sub can hide in another dimension and fire torpedoes into regular space. This establishes the character and submarine in the series well before being seen in the third season 'Bolar Wars' of the original series. • After surviving the Battle of Pluto and being taken prisoner, the Garmilan ship carrying Mamoru Kodai as a bio-sample crash-landed on Iscandar and was rescued by Starsha. In the original series, she nursed him back to health; the two fell in love, and he remained with her on Iscandar to rebuild its population. In
2199, he died before the
Yamato arrived, leaving a recorded message and Starsha bearing a child (as discreetly implied at the end of Episode 24). • While the
Yamato has an all-Japanese crew, she flies as a United Nations ship. The United Nations logo is seen on the vessel and Okita talks to United Nations officials via long range communication, not officials serving Japan (Commanders Todo and Serizawa serve under UN). Furthermore, in
2199, the
Yamato has no contact with Earth whatsoever beyond the heliosphere, even with hyperspace communication relays. • In the early episodes of the original 1974 series, Garmilas characters had Caucasian skin tones. Desler also had a more yellowish skin tone in early appearances. This abruptly changed after episode ten when all Garmilas characters were given a blue skin tone to make them more alien in appearance. The discrepancy remains unexplained. In the
2199 series, the difference is justified by establishing Caucasian Garmilas characters such as Shultz, Gantz, Raleta, and Norran as Zaltzi, a subject race of Garmilas (blue skinned members being of the Imperial race). This also effectively establishes Garmilas as an interstellar empire that absorbs other races into its culture. • The Garmilas Empire is shown using a number of robotic soldiers, possibly another nod to the
Star Blazers dub, which needed to justify the enemy soldiers being shot at in order to make the original series less violent. But most likely they are simply an earlier introduction of the robot soldiers shown in the 1978 original series movie, "Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato." • Starsha reveals in
2199 that the Iscandarians developed the technology used in, and were the first to use, weapons similar to the ''Yamato's'' Wave Motion Gun. No mention of this was made in the original. • In the original, the Cosmo Reverser was assembled during its return voyage. In
2199, Starsha not only had the device assembled in Iscandar, but also reconfigured the
Yamato to accommodate it (which involved plugging the Wave Motion Gun's barrel). • Yuki's death at the end of both series were portrayed differently. • Sukeharu Yabu was portrayed differently in
2199. In the original, Yabu was a deserter who, along with twelve others, perished on an unstable island in Iscandar. In
2199, Yabu is a mutineer, but most of his companions died during the final encounter with General Domel, and one of them died on a prison planet. Yabu, mistaken for a Zaltzi, ends up becoming a crew member of the submarine under Captain Flakken. ==Reception==