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Battle Skipper
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Title Info
- alias: Bishojo Yugekitai Battleskipper
- seen: 1-2 of 3
- Series state: Don't intend to watch more.
- type: OAV
- grade: flawed
- Series state: Don't intend to watch more.
- made: 1995
- Review created: Sun Dec 10 14:21:21 EST 2000
- mod: none
I was going to be clever, but why waste what little wit I have... because basically it's going to boil down to the eminently observable fact that this anime is truly awful.
The anime opens with a new term opening at St. something or others private school. And, in short order, we are introduced to what are obviously meant to be cute girls who seem to have been inflicted with archetypal anime personalities (not to mention exotic hair). The blond with the `sailor moon' hair wings is going to be the energetic lead, the blue haired one is the ditzy comedy relief while the brown haired girl is the brain...how easy this all is. While they're standing there they are also asked to move by a `tough' girl (but she asks nicely...so she must be the heroic type). And at the same time a domineering rich woman with powerful corporate connections lands her spaceship in the courtyard while giving orders to her lackey. Looks suspiciously like an evil villainess type to me.
In short order it turns out that there are two clubs in the school. The rich girls debutante club which everyone joins, and the tough girls etiquette club which no one joins...barring the three girls we're following. But they've heard there is a secret behind the etiquette club and, while poking around, find a barely concealed button. Pushing this sucks them into the etiquette clubs mecha lot (after `magically' redressing them in combat leotards) as well as causing any sense of believability to go straight out the window. Yes, it turns out the etiquette club actually sidelines in fighting crime with insanely powerful prototype military mecha which daddy gave them. Indeed mecha so powerful that their secrets must never be revealed, at least until the second episode.
And this is all in the first episode (including their first mission!). It's sudden, and it's brutal and it's very, very, silly. It's another example of all the things that make a title `sell' jammmed into an anime with the barest minimum of logic, plot or writing. It's got cute girls, magical transforms (which change between sets of clothes, they do nothing else), special attacks and mecha action...surely that couldn't fail. Well, it certainly does because the writing, plot and character work is really primitive. There's just a real sense of `minimum effort' about the whole thing that really irritates.
And then you get onto the `mecha action'....ouch. How to describe these mecha? well, start with basically a box. Stick wheels on the bottom and various spikes, wings and weapons on the other surfaces. Then paint it all in bright colors. That's about the level of the `battle skippers' that feature in this show. The ensuing action looks more like some sort of dodgem car game than anything else and is woefully dire.
So in the end it does have everything. Bad writing, stupid plots, overly familiar characters and cheap production values. And then add in that, like a lot of really average anime, this has been dubbed into english with way too much attention paid to lip-sync. It's wooden, artificial, un-cute and makes the dumb dialogue sound even worse. I don't think there is a person alive who won't quiver in pain when they go through their `team speach'. And, to add the final insult, it looks like it comes at one episode per tape. This is anime that deserves to be forgotten.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:15 WST 2009