Wings of Rean Review – 80/100

Remember this one? It’s a six-episode OVA, and got its first episode subbed back in January. The rest of its episodes have appeared in Japanese through the course of the year, though sadly, nobody picked it up. I was impressed with the first episode, so I kept waiting for the subs of the remaining five episodes, though after waiting for months with still nothing, my patience began to run out, and I decided to check the rest of this series out raw.

Before I continue, I must say that this is probably my most biased review yet. Wings of Rean isn’t a series you can watch raw without any problems, which I learned the hard way. The pacing is incredibly fast, there’s lots of dialogue, and to make matters even worse, the dialogues are extremely complicated, making them impossible to understand with my Japanese vocabulary. If I were to watch this series fully subbed, there’s a high chance that the rating will go up with about 10%, simply because the major disadvantage of this OVA is the fact that it’s so damn difficult to understand.

Anyway, the elements which really stood out while watching this has to be the graphics. They look absolutely stunning. The characters look unique, and the creators have come up with really interesting mecha-designs: insect-based mechas. The CG looks perfectly integrated with the drawn graphics, the animation looks gorgeous, and the background art are beautiful. There went a lot of attention and detail into the graphical department. It it’s eye-candy you want, you should definitely check out Wings of Rean.

Then the story. While I didn’t understand much of it, the two major themes did become clear. The first one is most noticeable in the visual side: Wings. All mechas are equipped with either butterfly-wings or the wings of a fly, and the Wings of Rean are a special pair of shoes which sprout a strange kind of wings, enabling the bearer to fly and cross dimensions. The second major theme deals more with the content of the series, and I don’t think I’ve seen many anime who actually seriously attempted the same: the fight between modern military technology and fantasy-steampunk technology. This series features mechas who battle against jet fighters, and battleships who battle against their fantasy-counterpart. It was very interesting to see.

I can’t comment really much about the story, seeing as most of it went by me without me getting any word of it. Like I said, the pacing was incredibly high, and people also just kept changing sides way too much in order to tell who was on whose side. Lots of politics also were involved, making things even more difficult. Still, when the last two episodes arrived, I do admit that the general picture was clear, the characters became touching and the series finished with a very interesting climax. The ending itself was a very strange one, but it actually did leave me with a good feeling.

I’m hoping that this review will give this OVA a bit more attention than what it’s getting now. I really want to see this anime get subbed, as it’ll be very interesting to see what really went on behind the huge amount of dialogue. Overall, it was a strange ride, though I enjoyed it. 🙂