Category: OVA Impressions

Ah, so this episode revealed the genre of .Hack.//Quantum to be a thriller. A thriller with as major villain the cat who in the real world is just a young boy. In true .Hack fashion, a lot of things are different from what they seem. People are really able to create a second identity this way.

It’s a shame that this one is just three episodes long, but I like how the creators found a way to turn this into a dynamic story by revealing that the entire Goal of the Cat was basically for naught. By timing this right, the creators allowed this OVA to evolve in a short time: this episode felt completely unlike the first episode. It’s good for an OVA to be varied.

One thing that I do wonder about was the reason why the creators decided to just reveal all of the major questions in this episode. I mean, this episode left hardly any questions or mystery left unanswered, aside from the Cat’s backstory. Again this hints at a completely different third episode, but that one will be hard to pull off without the mystery.

Also, on a side-note: very short Tsukasa cameo hell yeah!
OVA Episode Rating: 8.25/10

I originally planned to use the shoutbox for this, but unfortunately it’s down right now. Basically I just tried to watch a bunch of OVAs and failed to get through all of them. This isn’t really meant to be a full review in any way, but more a list of short explanations of why I couldn’t bother to finish any of these three.

Gunpla Builders

I already was not very motivated to check the Gunpla Builders OVA out. I lasted only two minutes with this thing. The reason for that was that in only the first two minutes alone, the characters managed to mention the word “Gundam” a whopping twelve times already. I know I’m biased, and the animation was very good here, but I really don’t want to watch this kind of propaganda!

Kuroshitsuji II: Ciel in Wonderland

This is an OVA that consists out of two episodes, putting Ciel in the Alice in Wonderland story (the Disney version). Here, I lasted until ten minutes into the second OVA. In the end, it’s just fanservice: Ciel gets put in a dress and all of the side-characters make an appearance and act weird. It’s full of the kind of humour that’s just random for the sake of being random. That doesn’t remain fun for a full hour.

Fortune Arterial OVA

This one was just terrible. The TV-series was pretty good, but the OVA is just a random side-story in which nothing happens with a climax at an obligatory scene of the lead guy walking into all of the females bathing. YET AGAIN. Stay far away from this one.

Who is Takeshi Koike, and why is he directing Redline? With that question in mind, I set out to check out the other anime he directed: Trava – Fist Planet. It turned out to be a strange OVA, consisting out of four episodes of between 11 and 14 minutes long; it’s a science fiction story about two random guys having to perform some kind of survey on an unknwon planet.

It’s an OVA that’s definitely all about its graphics, and it definitely has a very skillful direction. Just about every shot in this OVA looks nice. It’s full of weird camera angles and it’s got some unique character designs that it puts to good use. There is a ton of eye candy here, and I can only imagine what Redline is going to look like when it has an actual movie budget.

As for the rest, the only other part that stands out is the dialogue. The characters bickering with each other gives them a nice charm. A lot of this OVA is just them nonchalantly insulting each other, which is enjoyable enough to last for the fifty minutes of total airtime. Beyond that though, the story is completely rushed, especially in the final episode, and the characters also all have just two or three sides to them, and nothing more. It’s enjoyable, but doesn’t do much beyond that. But who cares? The graphics and the direction make it a definite interesting watch.
OVA Episode Rating: 7,75/10

In another case of “don’t judge a book by its cover”, we have Angel Densetsu, a silly premise of a guy who has an incredibly scary face, made a lot better thanks to a very capable director. The budget of Angel Densetsu is very low, but despite that the timing of the different shots, plus the impact they make, is impeccable.

If there’s anything that this OVA is good at, it’s creating an atmosphere with minimal resources. The artwork in this series is simple, but it can be downright freaky at times, and the way in which everyone is just completely terrified of the lead character creates a wonderful little atmosphere here.

The story itself is just downright bad though. I mean, the dialogue and the scenario are just terrible and shatter any sense of suspense of disbelief. The story tries to portray this guy with a scary face but a heart of gold, but his inner monologues make it sound more like he’s some kind of deranged lunatic. His naivety also knows no bounds. Even in the most obvious cases, he sees no sense of hostility towards him at all. Heck, this guy makes Sawako from Kimi ni Todoke look like Stephen Fry in comparison.

The characters around him also make an elephant out of the tiniest mosquito around him, just to keep the story and the misunderstandings around this guy going. The big problem with Angel Densetsu is that it’s ridiculously forced. Not to mention that it’s based on a much larger manga, and that it just ends right after introducing a bunch of story-lines, making it more a commercial than an actual story. Check it out only if you’re looking for a good atmosphere, otherwise, give it a pass.
OVA Episode Rating: 7.25/10

So, I’ve been told to check this one out because of how notoriously bad it is. After watching it, I can understand why this show is so notorious. It’s not the worst anime I’ve seen, I mean it’s not at Himitsu Kessha Countdown or Gundoh Musashi levels, but still: seriously, don’t watch this. If you want an OVA that’s so bad that it’s good, go for the Garzey’s Wing dub. Mars of Desturction is the kind of bad that isn’t enjoyable at all.

The biggest reason for this show’s notoriety is its ridiculously poor direction. The way that the scenes move follow each other is downright amateuristic. Scenes have this tendency to always go on for a second longer than what feels comfortable, and none of them really mesh well together. Added to that is also one hell of a small animation budget: there is hardly any movement and most of the faces are off-model.

The story itself is simple, but doesn’t make one iota of sense. Especially the big plot twist at the end was just painful: here we have an OVA that tries to be a simple action OVA (very poorly directed action), and right from out of nowhere try to make things not as they seem. You need build-up for that dammit.

To the OVA’s credit, it has brilliant music. But then again, that’s what you get when you blatantly copy and paste some of the most famous pieces of classical music. To the characters’ credits: they could have been much more annoying. If I for example were to have to choose between this and Goulart Knights, I’d label Goulart Knights as the worst. These characters here are simply one-dimensional and not particularly abysmally written. Nevertheless though, there are so many alternatives to this series, it has simply no value at all. Onyl watch this if you really don’t know how to spend 20 minutes.
OVA Episode Rating: 4/10

– .Hack//Sign was one of my favourite series. It was one of the first series I watched and it still was completely unlike any other series I watched afterwards, in the way in which it put a huge focus on the social interaction part of the MMORPG, asking deep questions in the process.
– .Hack//Liminality was a step back, but still quite an interesting look at the real versus the virtual world, even though it didn’t really answer all of the questions.

– .Hack//Dusk was a complete abomination that just consisted out of a bunch of boring and childish random stories with a boy who magically received a godmode bracelet.
– .Hack//Roots had many good points, but for every good point it also had three bad points. One of the major ones was that it was so serious business that it didn’t really feel like a MMORPG that the characters were playing in.

Now, I’m really glad that .Hack//Quantum managed to break that trend and how it tries to restore the .Hack franchise to its former glory. This episode portrayed the lead characters really as a bunch of teenaged girls who were messing around in an online world. It showed how they balanced their online activities with their real life ones, and it all felt very down to earth.

That all made the end of this episode really good, in which in true .Hack fashion the lines between reality and virtual reality get broken. Unlike some of the other .Hack installments though, it doesn’t really try to be thought-provoking, but instead is much more an adventure series. In exchange we got nicely written and down to earth characters with a simple but effective plot.

But then again, I’m not expecting that the last two episodes will have the same tone as this one. After all, this comes from the director of Tokyo Magnitude.; let’s not forget the incredible contrast between the first and second episode of that series… The way in which one of the lead characters got seemingly killed is a very big hint to that, and I’m really curious to see what they can do with that.

The animation was quite good. But alas, I do have to say that the soundtrack is unremarkable at best, but then again .Hack//Sign and .Hack//Roots featured the best soundtracks I’ve ever listened to, so the standards it had to live up here were really high.
OVA Episode Rating: 8,25/10

So, in the end Houkago no Pleiades consists out of four five-minute episodes. You can find the youtube links here. For those who don’t know, this is basically an anime, animated by Gainax and sponsored by car producer Subaru. I have no idea why Subaru found it a good idea to advertise its cars to otaku, but apparently they saw an unexplored market here.

In any case, Houkago no Pleiades pretty much is an experiment in visuals. Gainax gratefully took the budget that Subaru provided to them and just tried to create something interesting looking here, at the expense of inserting a bunch of strange car references here and there. And granted, the action scenes have some pretty visuals and animation. At this point it’s definitely mission succeeded.

In exchange though, the story and characters are all pretty bad. The creators really did not put any effort into them at all: the story is just there to show the interesting visuals and it makes no sense whatsoever, while the characters are all just shallow cardboard cut-outs. By far the worst part of this ova is the parts in which this OVA thinks that it can actually get some drama out of them.

So yeah, this is pretty much a one trick pony. Watch it if you’re looking for some nice eye candy. Otherwise you can give it a pass. I will say this, though: for a car commercial, it could have been much more blatant. The Subaru-references are all kept in the background and we don’t even see an actual car appear during these past 20 minutes. But seriously… brooms that make engine noises?
OVA Episode Rating: 7,25/10