About Mogudan's involvement in Scrapped Princess:
Well it's not his story -- he was the animator (or one of them on the team), not the writer of the anime's screenplay nor the original author of the light novels upon which the anime was based.
But as for your question ...
About whether Scrapped Princess is any good:
I would say that Scrapped Princess is
good up until the halfway point. This seems to be a common concensus. "Not great, but good. Worth watching at least once up through this point." Then the opinions scatter all over the place for the second half. I found myself in the "wow, this is pretty damn disappointing, I wasted 12 hours of my life watching this show" camp, but there are people who disliked it less, people who liked it, and even people like one of my best friends who swear it's the best anime ever.
I have been told (by that same friend) that the books cover a lot more ground and are 10x better than the anime. IIRC he told me something like "the anime, not counting the ending" (which was uniquely made for the anime so that it could wrap things up) "covers the first two books." And Wiki says there's about
13. I dunno.
The basic premise, in a nutshell, is ... hmm, it's actually a spoiler, I just realized. :\ I'm pretty sure you don't find this out until at least the halfway point, if not even later than that, though I might be remembering wrong. I'll put it like this: "[a very famous science fiction film] but as told in a fantasy setting rather than [the setting the movie was told in]." If you want to know what movie I'm talking about, I'll provide the first five letters of one of the words in its name (which should be enough to identify it) but in an encoded format: J Q 5 4 8 , where the correct letters are located
southeast on a standard QWERTY keyboard.
Prior to that major plot twist, all you know is this (and you learn all this in the first 2 or 3 episodes, so it's not really a spoiler since the show's a 24-episode series): Pacifica is the titular "Scrapped Princess," a girl who was abandoned as a baby because of a prophecy which foretold that she would destroy the world on her 16th birthday (or something along those lines). The man assigned to kill her did not do so, and instead Pacifica was raised by a nobody in the kingdom as though she were his own daughter. He believed that Pacifica would prove the prophecy wrong, that what mattered more was how she was raised and not what some stupid prophecy said, etc. His biological son, Shannon, and daughter, Raquel, are Pacifica's foster brother and foster sister. Shannon is not a knight but he is skilled in swordsmanship, whereas Raquel is actually one of the most naturally-gifted mages in the entire world (though she hardly ever uses her powers save to protect Pacifica).
It's a cool premise. And I don't mind the plot-twist necessarily, it's just ... the anime (at least, if not the original books too) presented it in a really unacceptable fashion. It just ... required us to suspend way too much disbelief. Way more than I was willing to. It felt like a giant retcon, honestly. Oh well.
About good work by Mogudan:
If you want (imo) a good recent story of Mogudan's, I'd highly recommend
Under Ground (which is what he called it on the front cover) or
Neko Panchi Bashi Bashi (which he wrote as ネコパンチバシバシ on the back cover of the same doujin). It was his C74 (August 2008) release, and one of his first full-length non-Rei Ayanami releases in what feels like f-o-r-e-v-e-r. And it was
waaaaaaay hotter than his usual Rei stuff, both the plot and the character designs, and made me miss the old Mogudan who (back in the day) was known for more than just drawing Rei Ayanami over and over and over. :\ Sample picture attached.
