Shuji (???? Sh?ji?), a high school student in Hokkaido, is the main character. Chise (???), a fellow student, declares her love for Shuji at the beginning of the series. However, Chise is very shy and Shuji has a bitter tongue. Neither know how to express their feelings very well, but they do indeed have them for each other.
One day, while Shuji is shopping in Sapporo, unknown bombers attack the city in broad daylight. He and his friends run for cover, but notice a fast and small flying object shoot down enemy bombers. Separated from his friends, Shuji wanders through the wreckage only to stumble upon Chise. She has metal wings and weapons apparently grafted onto her body. She tells him she has become the ultimate weapon, without her knowledge or consent. However, she is seen by the JSDF as the last hope for defending Japan from imminent invasion by unknown foreign forces for reasons that are not apparent.
This story, as suggested by the sub-title "The Last Love Song On This Little Planet", is primarily a love story. Although war is the backdrop for the show, we are not drawn into the war by extravagant battle scenes, or the intricate details of national politics. The story focuses primarily on Chise's reactions to her increasingly powerful destructive abilities, Shuji's reaction to the same, and the relationship between the two of them.
A number of minor characters, who do not necessarily know of Chise's role in the war, have sub-plots that mostly concern everyday people in the context of war: a woman whose husband is constantly away from home, a school boy who joins the army to protect his sweetheart, a girl whose civilian boyfriend was killed in a bombing, and others.
War
Both the manga and the anime features a hotly-contested war. We are shown battles, and the lives of people on the front, but the diplomatic particulars of the war are not given to the audience. We don't find out why the war broke out, what is the war all about, or what countries the Japan Self-Defense Forces and Chise fight against. However, there is speculation about possible foes. For example, in one episode an enemy plane is shot down near the city and the pilot's one or two lines are in near perfect American English. In the manga, we also see Chise speak to the enemy soldiers, saying that she doesn't know much English, and later in the series we hear enemy soldiers speak French. The OAVs also show that some of the soldiers speak French. This would suggest that there is an international coalition to invade Japan.
However, in the end of both the anime and the manga, Chise remarks that many other parts of the world had experienced "horrendous things", and that "humans have done a lot of damage to this world". This may imply that the invasion is due to the lack of livable land anywhere else other than Japan, which was protected by Chise. This in turn would cause other countries to seek places where people are able to live. On the other hand, Chise could have been referring to her own creation and her part in destroying much of the world.
The only weapons of mass destruction observed in both the anime and manga was Chise herself, who by the middle of the story had the power to destroy entire cities and did so on a fairly regular basis. In more than one battle over a Japanese city, Chise simply vapourized the city and most of the people in it. Coupled with the comments about how the enemy had nowhere to return to and how Chise has been "working" all over the world, it seems unlikely that the invasion by other nations is simply over territory.
Differences between the anime and manga
The anime follows the manga very closely until the end, where it takes a dramatic turn. In the manga, Chise is portrayed as the one who, after having been almost completely replaced by machine decides to "liberate" what is left of mankind from its suffering of having to exist on a devastated Earth. In the anime, Chise tries to save the last of the Japanese population from a foreign attack but fails. In both, Shuji becomes the last surviving member of humanity. The anime ending is rather disjointed from the rest of the story, where Chise is actively attacking and eliminating population centers around the world. It seemed like an attempt to rewrite the much darker manga love story (love at any cost) and Chise, but an awkward attempt as it fails to take into account pretty much everything before the last episode, from Chise's invincibility to her shift towards a Shiva mentality.
