is a 26 episode science fiction drama series produced by Sunrise.
The character and mecha designs in Ryvius were created by Hisashi Hirai, who later went on to act as the character designer for Gundam SEED.
The series is also noted for its music, a blend of western R&B/hip-hop music with J-pop vocals. This is evident in the opening song, "dis–", performed by bilingual Japanese-American singer Mika Arisaka. Most of the vocal songs were composed by M.I.D. and the thematic background instrumentals by Katsuhisa Hattori.
The anime was originally licensed by Bandai Entertainment in North America before it ended up going out of print in 2012. Following the 2012 closure of Bandai Entertainment, Sunrise announced at Otakon 2013 that Sentai Filmworks has rescued Infinite Ryvius, along with a handful of other former BEI titles.
A two volume manga adaptation was released concurrently with the series in 1999–2000, and was then published in English in 2004. A parody spin-off original net animation (ONA) series, Infinite Ryvius: Illusion, was released in 2000.
Plot
Set in the year AD 2225, mankind has spread from Earth to inhabit nearly all the planets or nearby moons in colonies and settlements. Space travel has grown and improved to the point of being commonplace. For the inhabitants of the solar system, an astronaut career isn't out of the question, and one of the schools set up to train future space voyagers is the Liebe Delta, a space station positioned somewhere in Earth's orbit. This growth is despite the mysterious phenomenon known as the Geduld, a sea of plasma that suddenly erupted from the sun along the Earth's orbital plane in AD 2137. Stretching from the sun to the edge of the solar system, this area of high temperatures and gravity pressures has never been explained.
Kouji Aiba is a sixteen-year-old boy who packed his bags and left his home on Earth for the Liebe Delta and the training to obtain his Level 2 piloting license. He journeys to the space station accompanied by his childhood friend, Aoi Housen, whom Kouji discovers to his chagrin has enrolled in the Liebe Delta's flight attendant program. En route to the spaceport Aoi gives Kouji the additional unwelcome news that his younger brother, Yuki, is also to attend the Liebe Delta and in fact the brothers will be in the same flight class together. The list of Aoi's unfortunate news to Kouji is topped by her quipping that the boys' mother Mrs. Aiba had asked Aoi to look after the brothers while at school. Kouji's unhappy moodiness does not improve.
Once aboard the space station, the students and teaching staff on the Liebe Delta were like any other school, normal and concerned with their own affairs and classes. They even had a vacation period, known as the Dive Break, when the space station ventured near the Geduld for system maintenance. Out of about 1000+ students, about 500 stayed for the break. Unknown to all, the space station, in the middle of the routine dive considered so regular that it has been entrusted to the elite Zwei cadet class, was sabotaged and the majority of the staff gassed and rendered unconscious, free falling into the depths of the Geduld Sea, where the resulting gravity pressures would crush the station and kill all aboard. The remaining adults, all instructors, sacrificed their lives in an act that they believed would save the majority of students on board. When their heroic actions proved unsuccessful and the Liebe Delta hung on the verge of collapsing, a mysterious ship named RYVIUS, hidden within the Liebe Delta activated itself and surfaced from the Geduld Sea. There were a total of 515 personnel on board the Liebe Delta at the beginning of the dive, of whom a total of 486 were successfully evacuated, meaning that a total of 29 people were killed in the sabotaged dive. Eight were instructors, 12 were the gassed staff who were later killed by the two saboteurs, and nine students. The average age of the Ryvius crew is 16, so the story, despite its space-age setting, is more of a coming-of-age tale than anything else.
Stranded in space, with humanity's governments forsaking them, and within the ship anger, agitation and fear setting in, Kouji tries his best to maintain a semblance of order and peace in a time of crisis. But with fighting his own brother Yuki, dealing with his feelings for the beautiful Uranian aristocrat Fina S. Shinozaki, trying to avoid Aoi, and seeing the strange apparition of a girl in pink wandering the halls, will Kouji be able to help until the Ryvius reaches safety, or will he lose all that's dear to him in the process?