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Psychic Force
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Title Info
- seen: 1-2 of 2
- type: OAV
- grade: flawed
- Other elements of this title:
- This title may offend the sensitive.
- source: fansub
- form: sub
- dur: 50
- made: unknown
- Review created: Wed Aug 15 17:19:32 EST 2001
- mod: none
Wow, I'm pretty sure I played the arcade game this is based on. A bunch of anime styled psychic types in a pseudo 3D space (since they can fly). It wasn't that great, attractive or popular. How impressive that they manage to make an anime that captured just those properties.
Synopsis
Aah, this could be difficult. It looks like a reasonable number of powerful psychics suddenly appeared amongst humanity. Due to their awful haircuts and poor taste in fashion humanity called out the men in black and alternately gunned them down or did diabolical experiments on them. Naturally enough, some of the psychics fought back, some with subtlety and others just with raw power. Thus creating an environment full of war and cruelty.
In this environment a psychic on the run find himself `rescued' by a normal youth. And even though the `black hats' are quickly on the scene, menacing the psychic, the youth, and the youths family and eventually forcing him to use his powers, the youth still seeks to protect the psychic. This has a great effect on both of them, even though ultimately the youth fails to protect his new friend from capture. Years later, still trying to rescue his friend, the youth finds that in fact the psychic is now the leader of an emergent nation of psychics. Can he rescue him from what he has become?
Review
It doesn't take at all long to realise you are watching something that is not only taken from a fighting game, but also simply isn't very good. The story is, at best, a bit of a mess. There's all sorts of standard plot elements, some quite extreme and cruel violence and then it's all chopped up into a confusing mess. The story rapidly cutting between events, and quite possibly times, without managing to make a whole lot of sense. Trying to pull a coherent story out of this melange of images and disconnected scenes was quite a challenge.
And then there's the characters. There's quite a few of them, and they've got strange hair, strange powers, strange clothes and strange personalities. This seems to be the standard for anime derived from games. In the game the `appearance' of the character is important, and the `character' has to be fairly simple, which means that they often don't have a lot of personality. Something magnified by the need to include so many characters in a very short amount of time. So as a result they're odd, but generally shallow and the level of dialogue and interaction is low.
The actual scenes are, if anything, even worse. The dialog and action is unconvincing. The scenes lurching from event to event with no great sense of logic. It's really as if someone has just pencilled in the stuff that has to happen and then the writer has taken the absolute minimum path between the two. And many scenes have even less reason, existing simply to put some action in a slow scene or give a character their 15 seconds in the spotlight. The evil forces of humanity, let alone the `psychic nation' are purely token attempts at complexity. The conclusion is awesomely flat and unsatisfying.
I could mention that there is more than a little shounen-ai inspired romantic tension between the two leads. The macho `burn' so very worried about the effeminate blue haired psychic. On the other hand this is likely to offend both fans of this series (existence assumed rather than known) as well as fans of shounen-ai. So I had better not do... oh well, too late. It certainly doesn't add much to the story in any case.
There's precious little assistance from the animation either. It's not bad, but it's clearly on a limited budget and without the style or imagination to cover for it. Oh, it tries, lots of repeated sequences and `generic' shots of swat troops which can be re-used, but it's not entirely successful. This is quite average animation with overly loud character designs, low detail, simple movement and flat coloring. It's watchable, but it's nothing to be excited by. The voices are reasonable enough, although not rich in personality, and the background music is fairly minimal.
Other Reviews
None of my regular sources have a review of this title. Should they read this I doubt they'll rush to add one.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:23 WST 2009