Anime Meta-Review
Princess Minerva
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Title Info
- seen: 1 of 1
- type: OAV
- grade: watchable
- made: unknown
- Review created: Recently, but I didn't record the date.
- mod: none
This rather lightweight anime is set in a world of magic and fantasy. Sadly it's an otaku's fantasy, so there's a great number of well endowed women involved. Additionally it seems the `armored bikini' is as popular as always. The plot concerns the princess of a kingdom who is either a want to be adventurer or a superhero (in her alternate form of `cutey kamen') to the despair of both her father and her (once again female) guardian. On a whim she organizes a tournament to choose a loyal cadre of bodyguards to share her insanity. But she gets more than she bargained for with a great number of hero types (the majority of them female) showing up in addition to an insane sorceress with designs on her life and kingdom. It seems she might be needing her loyal friends and bodyguards sooner than she expected.
This is all very familiar. Just enough story to give a reason to introduce a large number of interesting and attractive characters, with weird and flashy powers, and then animate them all. The format of this OAV strongly suggests pilot episode (it's about 40 minutes) but this doesn't appear to have happened. As a result, while the characters are appealing enough, we really don't get to learn much about them. And while the OAV does reach a conclusion the story never gets much chance to impress because it has so many introductions to do. And as if introducing all the characters (about 12) wasn't enough there's also some humor, the princess being ditzy (including doing the cutey kamen song during her arena appearance) and a bit of action to cover in this too short duration. As a result, while it's a pleasant enough watch, this is a fairly unimpressive and unmemorable experience.
The production is exactly what you'd expect from this sort of thing. While it's clearly not the newest animation it's clean and pleasant enough. The character designs are a bit weird, and it gets a little bit over the top at times, but these are probably intended to add to the humor of the piece. Sadly the humor is not original or funny enough to really be interesting. Likewise the action, apart from having far too many magical attacks, is neither sufficiently interesting or impressive to provide a strong reason to watch this. In essence it is just to formulaic, and contains too many elements done competently but not that well, to be a valued experience. The voices are competent but not too impressive, possibly because of the limited dialog per character, although the princess is a bit strident. The music is pleasant but fairly mindless pop music.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:23 WST 2009