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Battle Athletes
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Title Info
- seen: 1-6 of 6
- type: OAV
- grade: worthy
- genre: sport
- made: unknown
- Review created: A while ago, i'll revise it eventually.
- mod: none
In the future mankind is finally united by a global catastrophe that interrupts the war everyone was involved in. This gives humanity a chance to get into a war with an alien race that is only solved, eventually, through victory in sports competitions with the aliens. Since the aliens turn out to be 8 foot tall everyone is very impressed by this, and sport becomes a new religion amongst humanity. This gives us the chance to follow a group of young girls as they compete, on an immense sattellite, to become the poorly named `cosmic beauty' through excellence in sports. If you like this sort of `sport as faith' attitude you'll get a good fix here as there is a spiritual side (as well as emotional) to the tale. You'll also get to see what can happen when sport becomes so competitive, possibly the better lesson.
The characters are good fun, the design is dodgy and the animation is clean and modern. The problem is that the creators have covered their backs through certain `changes'. These include that we only follow the females, that their sports gear is suitably dramatic and that the sports are definitely not classical, of which combat lacrosse is a good example (and hence the title). This is the only show I've seen where the running events are contact sports. Still, the story is sufficient to carry the interest and some of the supporting characters are very good including a lunar spiritualist and a cat-woman (who doesn't get enough screen time), as well as the, um, interesting principal of this school. The lead feels very familiar, drifting between good natured airiness and iron determination (in this case to equal her mother) in the well respected anime tradition.
There is a sizable and good review of this title at Akemi's AnimeWorld. The Anime Critic was more impressed than he thought he would be, but still rated it as only above average, and also noted the difficulty in believing such a rapid improvement in Akari in this Review.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:15 WST 2009