This episode took this OVA in a completely different direction. Seriously, Chirico finally makes his comeback, but the way in which the creators did it. I really have to applaud their guts. There’s no fancy entrance, he’s just there. We still have no bloody idea what he’s doing, other than the fact that he’s running away from what looks like the cult of the Brilliant Heretic, but the scale of this episode was just so small: it was pretty much all about Sophie. Yeah, that woman. I completely forgot about her, but it’s great to see that the creators ended up giving her so much character-development.
I mean, this entire OVA has been chock full of character-development. Especially for anime, how often do you get to see a time-skip of more than thirty years? I really like how Sophie changed over those years: throughout the tv-series, she really seemed possessed by this thirst for revenge, even though she couldn’t do anything about it. Right now she’s just an old woman in her seventies, and apparently, she still remembers the past, but right now she doesn’t really care for this revenge anymore.
Meanwhile, Chirico’s development has been more subtle. He’s still pretty much the same as he’s ever been, though you can really see that he’s grown older. He’s no longer the young boy that he was at the beginning of the TV-series. I think that the biggest difference is that he doesn’t shy away from people anymore: he still doesn’t say much, but he lost the air of “don’t bother me, I want to be alone”.
Overall, when you put everything of Votoms together, you get one heck of a well rounded and varied whole. I mean, no part in this franchise is the same as any of the others, it’s constantly evolving and changing. The Gen-ei hen was again completely different, but at the same time I loved how it also pays homage to the original Votoms series. Heck, this episode even brought back some of the most iconic background tunes that created that bleak atmosphere in the earlier incarnations. I mean, this isn’t even a homage, or a modern version: they took the exact same songs here. That really turned out to be a wonderful way to bring this series back to its roots.
My only complaint about this episode was: how the heck did Vanilla, Goto and the others find Chirico? I mean, they didn’t know about what Chirico did when he was up in that space ship, so in god’s name how did they track this guy down?
OVA Rating: 8,75/10
