I was really hoping that the second Votoms OVA, Big Battle, would be just as good as the first. But meh, this one’s just as cheesy as the title makes you suspect.
It’s quite likely that this is the worst thing that Ryousuke Takahashi has worked on. His series usually are amazing, but I have no idea what he had in mind here. While the Last Red Shoulder did a great job of creating extra background, Big Battle instead is just a silly side-story that even goes against the continuity of the series.
The bad guy is just a joke. He’s a cheesy terminator with a formulaic back-story. This guy should be the villain of an action flick, not a series as complex as Votoms. I also loved how in the TV-series, Fyana (the lead female) was much, much more than a damsel in distress. Now guess what this OVA reduces her to.
Shako’s character is ruined to a personality-less one-dimensional side-character, going completely against his motives in the TV-series. The Balalant army does things in this movie that made no sense whatsoever considering their actions in later.
The Votoms franchise has always had a lot of action, but it was always meaningful. With such a terrible story and cheesy villain who can’t stop smiling, there’s nothing about this OVA that makes it worth watching. Do yourself a favour, watch the Last Red Shoulder, skip this one. Are the rest of the Votoms OVAs like this as well? I hope not.
| Storytelling: | 5/10 – Pathetic. Just a meaningless action story. |
| Characters: | 4/10 – Destroys once beloved characters by reducing them to silly one-dimensional stereotypes. |
| Production-Values: | 7/10 – Decent, although the main villain looks incredibly stupid. |
| Setting: | 4/10 – Doesn’t care about continuity. |
Big Battle was kind of stupid. But do make an effort on getting Red Shoulder Document: The Roots of Ambition, which shows Chirico’s induction to the Red Shoulder (the characters you saw in Last of the Red Shoulder will also are here as well). In a way, Palsen’s Files is a direct sequel to Roots of Ambition.
Thus far, NO one has taken up to translate Shining Heresy, the ONLY direct sequel to the television series itself.
Shining Heresy is supposedly incomplete and not entirely what the director/creator originally intended, or so say the rumors. Still, I’ll watch it someday once I get far enough into Votoms.
Have you ever considered that maybe that cyborg was an early experiment for the technology that would later create Teitania?
And that this episode was intended to be pure fun and action, which it was to near perfection?
And I don’t really understand how you can say that Votoms is a complex series ; I’d say that its main quality is its simplicity. Simplicity in its construction (it never goes in a million directions at a time like a Gundam series does), simplicity in its characters (Chirico, good lord, talk about a protagonist), simplicity in its messages, in its direction (remember that sequence when Zophie follows Chirico in the desert? and all that came out of it? it’s “The Gods Must be Crazy”-level simplicity-genius).
And here you have a short little OVA called “big battle” which provides… a big battle…
That battle was exciting, with the main fortress constantly moving and everybody attacking it from different directions. It’s pure 80s style and action, with smooth animation, great direction (sense of location and proportion, continuity in points of view, I dare anyone to have the same kind of headache watching this OVA than from watching The Dark Knight).