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Title Info
- seen: 1-2 of 2
- type: OAV
- grade: watchable
- made: 1990
- Review created: Recently, but I didn't record the date.
- mod: none
The title is somewhat confusing. I think it might refer to the four previous OAV's released after the movie but before it. The OAV's also have their own titles (Grey Side and Blue Side) although these don't help make anything clearer. The story is a re-start, although the characters of A,B and C-ko remain largely intact. Far in the future A-ko and B-ko are scraping along hunting giant monsters on an un-named sand-planet. Meanwhile, C-ko is the adopted daughter of the owner of a huge inter-planetary company. While C-ko is just as annoying as always it seems someone is interested enough to kidnap her. While ransom seems the obvious motive it may be that they have something larger in scale, and considerably more diabolical in mind. Still, when C-ko falls onto A-ko, and they smell the possibility of reward money, the villains find there are at least two obstables to their plans. And given that A-ko retains her superhuman physical abilities, and B-ko her technical skills, some entertaining action and adventure seems certain.
This title might not quite deserve a worthy rating, but it comes close. And given that most fans openly deride the OAV's that came before this it deserves some respect. Indeed taking the character energy of the movie and tying it into a relatively serious (and suprisingly good) series is quite impressive. Thus while the movie is far from perfect it has a suprisingly good number of character scenes, action scenes and good dialogue to keep the viewer entertained. The story is an interesting combination of character redemption, magic in a high tech world and epic events which builds up to a fairly impressive scale by the conclusion. A-ko and B-ko are more fun when playing off each other anyway, A-ko and B-ko both get some interesting solo scenes (including a strangely impressive tragic romance) and C-ko gets to be evil. Heck, there's something for everyone here. These OAV's are longer than normal, but the story does an excellent job of pacing itself to the time available.
Sadly the animation quality has none of the crispness that made the movie so much fun. Indeed when the animation is trying to be humorous it becomes very crude, and even at its best it is fairly simple. This means that the pretty girl aspect, or even A-ko's tendency towards fan service compatible clothing, is largely wasted. This also interferes with the action in that it is often fairly abstracted or low in frame count. However it holds together well enough, and there is some inventiveness in the action sequences, to keep it entertaining. The voices were not so great, with A-ko's voice sounding almost as crazed as C-ko at times, the music was fairly plastic sounding but energetic and pleasant enough. Still, in my book a reasonable story and solid production outweighs some weaknesses in the animation.i
The folks at THEM are not having a bit of this, calling it base, stupid and unengaging and giving it their lowest possible rating. The review is a fairly amusing hatchet job. It would be nice to have a third review to see if there is a middle ground, or a majority opinion. But at the moment none of my other review source has a review of this title.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:23 WST 2009