I've been trying my best to keep the number of VHS-only titles I cover here to a minimum, since I'd rather focus on stuff that people might conceivably want to watch and / or be able to get their hands on, but the truth of the matter is that there really isn't much left that falls into either category. And the even truer truth is that - whispers! - I'd actually rather be delving into that particular rabbit hole; it feels like a return to the earliest days of Drowning in Nineties Anime when I hadn't a clue what I was getting into and every new watch was a strange and baffling adventure. Plus, it occurs to me that these truly hard-to-find titles are actually really easy to find if you don't mind heading over to Youtube, and while I've been snarky about their exceedingly lax approach to copyright theft in the past, it's hard not to view the way people are finding a home there for releases that would otherwise be long lost as an act of cultural preservation.
Mind you, whether they're worth either watching or preserving is a whole 'nother question! And one I'm about to have a go at answering in regards to Panzer Dragoon, Dark Warrior, Gude Crest: The Emblem of Gude, and Iczelion...
For once we can do away with our usual opening question when it comes to these titles that didn't make it past a VHS release: the reason Panzer Dragoon never got as far as a DVD is that it's all of about twenty minutes long minus credits and crap. So let's begin instead by bemoaning the fact that, of all the video game series there have ever been, it's hard to think of one that would have offered better material for an anime adaptation, and this, this, is what the Panzer Dragoon universe got served with. I've only ever played Panzer Dragoon Orta on the original X-box, so I can hardly call myself a series expert, but that entry alone offered up one of the richest, most elaborate, most intriguing fantasy worlds I've ever encountered in a video game, and all somehow delivered mostly through the exceedingly limited means of an on-rails shoot-em-up. Only as I started researching this review did I discover that there's an actual Panzer Dragoon RPG, in the shape of Panzer Dragoon Saga, and the idea of an RPG with the sort of world-building that Orta got up to is a mouth-watering prospect.
But none of that helps Panzer Dragoon the anime. Okay, not entirely none of it: if there's anything going right here, it's that the world design hints at a vastly more interesting setting than what we're shown. However, those cool designs are rendered almost entirely in some of the worst CG that's ever made its way into anime, and this at a time when CG was never what you might, from our present perspective, regard as good. There is, it turns out, bad CG that you can smile along with because, hey, it was the mid-nineties and they were trying their best, plus it probably cost the budget of the average small island nation and took eight months to render, and then there's bad CG that just makes you want to slap the creators for ever thinking people would pay money to have their eyeballs seared by such ugliness. The models, in fairness, are just about passable, but the backgrounds ... my goodness, the backgrounds are horrible to look upon, and I refuse to believe there was ever a point in history when anyone would have believed otherwise. Though I can't verify the theory, I think it's likely the CG assets in Panzer Dragoon the anime are in fact the CG assets from Panzer Dragoon the Sega Saturn game from way back in 1995, and what would have looked perfectly okay in that context looks every sort of ghastly in an anime from 1996.
Should I talk about the story? I don't really want to, plus there basically isn't one. Our protagonist - Kyle in the godawful dub - gets attacked by a black dragon that kidnaps and kind of semi-absorbs his girlfriend Alita, who, in the closest we get to a vaguely distinctive angle, is blind, though practically nothing will come of this detail. Another dragon, this one blue, turns up and recruits Kyle as its rider so the pair of them can stop the black dragon getting back to a big metal tower that we saw in a brief opening sequence and thus doing bad stuff. But can the blue dragon be trusted? After all, it immediately kills a bunch of folks and ... wait, no, that plot thread gets dropped in all of about two minutes.
Again, I can't say there's absolutely nothing here, though Panzer Dragoon comes perilously close. The vehicle and dragon designs, as I've mentioned, are theoretically pretty neat, if you pretend they look how they're obviously meant to look and not how they actually do. The character designs are rather good on paper, which makes it all the more irritating that they were instead brought to life with computer animation that was hopelessly inadequate for the task at this point in history. There's an ever-so-slightly endearing bonus feature at the end showing how the concept art became the final product - spoiler alert! badly! - and the music that accompanies it is much nicer than anything in the finished product as it was released in the West, leading me to believe ADV mucked with the soundtrack, lest a beautifully sung track in Japanese highlight how their voice cast couldn't even handle stringing simple sentences together. And now I've run out of good points and I'm off to start a petition to persuade Sega to make an adaptation of Panzer Dragoon that isn't in the running for worst anime ever. Wish me luck!
This isn't, I realise, a terribly useful way of starting a review of Dark Warrior itself, and possibly that's me deliberately ducking the issue, because Dark Warrior feels ever so slightly review-proof. I could tell you, for instance, that it features some truly abominable animation, and I wouldn't be lying: I don't recall the last time I saw this many genuinely dysfunctional shots*, wherein, say, a train jolts around a corner without any inbetweening or a whole conversation takes place without anyone on the staff remembering that people's mouths move when they talk. However, for all that, the bulk of the animation is perfectly serviceable and it's clear this wasn't the work of incompetents: there's the odd bit of nice character design here, the odd standout background there, and most of the really egregious stuff is confined to the first episode, with the second, by its end, veering dangerously close to looking quite decent.
Likewise, I might suggest that the plot is hackneyed crap of a sort that any vintage anime fan will have seen so often they could predict its every development, and stripped to the essentials, that's true. A part of me would prefer not to spoil it, for reasons I'll come to in a moment, but since the back of the box couldn't care less, it would be foolish of me to. In fact, let's just quote that box, because life's short: "Joe Takami had it made ... Then he found out that he WAS made ... And that the people who made him want him back!" Joe, you see, is actually a clone and for some reason that gives him superpowers, which basically mean he punches real good, and the evil organisation who made him are fascists set on creating a new master-race of humans (that the opening prologue is narrated, without context, from their point of view is an alarming way to kick things off!) Hackneyed crap, as a say, but it helps that Dark Warrior doesn't seem to realise and so busies itself with strange digressions that arguably make it more watchable than it might have been. A large proportion of the first episode is devoted to setting up a mystery the box has already given away, and I found myself quite drawn in, perhaps because Takami is a novel character as far as vintage anime is concerned, as though someone thought that what The Guyver really needed was Bill Gates for a hero. Genius software developers aren't exactly common protagonists in nineties anime, but that aside, Joe is self-absorbed and prickly, and a mass of contradictions in a way that proves to be nice foreshadowing: having established that he spends most of his time talking to the AI he built, it's puzzling when he declares that what matters most to him are his friends and family, but the incongruity will make perfect sense before the episode's done.
All the same, I suppose I'm largely commending the first volume of Dark Warrior for being better than it might have been, and often it's not even that: once it settles on being violent shlock, there's no option except to compare it with endless similar titles and conclude that most of them did the job better; in particular, there's a rape scene that feels like the most horribly shoehorned-in attempt to be shocking and leaves a very sour taste. So it's probably fair to say that most of my goodwill toward Dark Warrior arises from the second volume, which is arguably more familiar fare but does everything that bit better. Aside from the much-improved animation, the self-contained plot has enough odd grace notes to make it feel like its own thing: Joe makes friends with a young psychic girl in a manner that's actually quite sweet, a giant cloned killer whale is a major plot element (Dark Warrior really doesn't seem to have the faintest idea of what cloning actually involves!) and the action is more ingenious and relies less on gory punchlines. Really, then, the fair thing to do would have been to review the two volumes separately, and I would have, except it's a stone-cold fact that no one gives a damn about Dark Warrior and, for all that it kept me moderately amused for a couple of hours, there's no reason they should.
Gude Crest runs to forty minutes sans credits and has enough material - if perhaps not quite enough of a story - to cover twice that length without breaking a sweat. It opens with one of those narration-over-still-images prologues that were all the rage in fantasy anime at the time, probably because they were an easy way to save a bit of cash, except that in Gude Crest's case, the prologue isn't done by the thirty second mark as was invariably the case. No, instead, when we get to what feels like the natural cut-off point, our trusty narrator moves on to another topic, and then another, and before you know it, two minutes have gone by and you've been introduced to a whopping slab of fictional history spanning entire millennia.
Whether or not we choose to consider this as charmingly committed or hopelessly naff, it's a fair indication of where Gude Crest's head is at. As I suggested, the story, cut to its bare bones, is pretty slight, but the sheer volume of stuff that goes on around it and the numerous plot diversions that serve more to build character and add colour than to move things forward and the intricate window dressing that's strung over every aspect are all so involved that it feels like more than it is - at least until the end, which inevitably winds up seeming a touch rushed and anticlimactic when Gude Crest has invested so much energy in engaging us with its clichéd but elaborate world-building and its familiar but appealing heroines.
Those two are sorceress Efe and swordswoman Jira, and if there's any wrinkle in their Dirty Pair-style characterisation, it's that Jira is the rough one but also a former princess whereas what little we learn of the somewhat more refined Efe suggests she has a much more ordinary background. So points for slightly subverting a trope, I suppose, but points immediately taken back for how the two voice actors never quite find the spark their relationship requires, unaided by a script that has the feel of bantering dialogue without much in the way of actual humour. Still, for all that Gude Crest has the air of a comedy, that's not where its heart lies, and what we get instead is a certain energetic light-heartedness that's probably better suited to the show's busy fantasy milieu. A serious attempt at comedy would be one element too many for something that's already on the verge of being dangerously overstuffed, and anyway, the business Efe and Jira finds themselves mixed up is hardly the stuff of high humour, with an evil cult to be defeated, lots of politicking to be unravelled, and three identical-looking siblings to be defended (though one of them is dead before the five minute mark, so maybe not so much that last one.)
Not much else sets Gude Crest apart, though director Kikuchi is a bit more engaged and imaginative than you might necessarily expect; it's evident, anyway, that he was making actual choices about how to frame shots and such, and often those choices are good and eye-catching, which does a lot to stretch an obviously less than stellar budget. And even without Kikuchi's going the extra mile, Gude Crest looks pretty nice, with lavish backgrounds and quality character work that does much to plug some of those gaps the script never quite gets to. All in all, however, it's the ambition and attention to detail that really separate this short fantasy OVA from all the many other short fantasy OVAs from the time, and the earnest, mostly successful attempt to squish a novel's worth of material into so short a running time. For me, it worked more than it didn't, enough so that the result is one of those rare cases of a VHS-only title where I'm genuinely at a loss to explain why it never made it to DVD: ADV would certainly put out much worse than this charming, jam-packed little adventure.
Oh what a tangled mess the Iczer series is! For Iczelion, AKA Iczer Girl Iczelion, is indeed, as the name sort of kind of suggests, a part of said series, which began with Fight! Iczer 1 and continued with Iczer Reborn, released in the UK and reviewed here as Adventures With Iczer 3. However, Iczelion is also much more of a reboot, though it has in common with the previous iterations a character called Nagisa, only now she has a different surname and hasn't much to do with the Nagisa we've come to know and tolerate besides being quite useless.
In Iczelion, that's more of an issue than it was in prior entries, since Nagisa has been promoted to protagonist, though the show will forget this regularly over the course of its two roughly half hour episodes, perhaps because it was a terrible idea. Nagisa, you see, is a high school girl with no special qualities except for a befuddling desire to become a professional wrestler in spite of how she's terrified of violence, and barely have we met her but she finds herself caught up in a scrap between a goofy-looking robot and some sort of alien aggressor. That robot, as it turns out, is more of a sentient armoured suit kind of deal, going by the name of Iczel. And Iczel's convinced, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary, that Nagisa is just the sort of person it should be bonding with to defend the Earth from the evil space villains who plan to destroy it.
I realise it's a fool's game to criticise nineties anime for not making a lot of sense, but boy does Iczelion not make much sense at all. And I'm not even talking about the whole Iczel / Nagisa relationship, which, for some fifty minutes of the running time, involves Iczel attempting to persuade Nagisa to do anything other than attack monsters with wrestling moves or run away, and Nagisa determinedly doing whatever the dumbest thing might be in any given scene. No, that I found quite charming, given that I suspect most of us, as much as we might prefer not to admit it, would deal with such an outlandish situation in similarly dumb-ass ways, and Nagisa is more an engine to move the plot forward than an actual protagonist. Rather, the part of Iczelion that's flat-out nonsensical is how there are already three other girls out there who've bonded with Iczel units and all know each other and have even had time to give themselves colour-themed names and personalised special moves and whatnot. I mean, how long has this alien invasion been going on for? The implication as we first meet Nagisa is a matter of minutes, but the fact that there's an entire squadron of Iczelions kicking about implies weeks or months.
Am I nitpicking? Probably. Is there any value to nitpicking a two-episode OVA from nearly three decades ago? Possibly, but not when it comes to Iczelion, because everything that makes it kind of awesome comes from the Iczelion squadron, who surely ought to have been the focus from the off. Far more so than Iczer Reborn, Iczelion harks back to what made Fight! Iczer 1 such a treat, or parts of it at any rate. The gross-out horror and general weirdness is still largely absent, but the overload of imagination and the neat fight scenes are very much back, and most of the latter involve the rest of the Iczelions, rather inevitably given how fight scenes don't work when one of the participants is legging it toward the horizon. And fortunately, Iczelion is also something of a technical return to form: if the animation's good rather than great, it's enough to sell those many action scenes, and for bonus points we get a score co-written by the great Kenji Kawai, who could have breathed extra life into this sort of material in his sleep by this point in his career.
I don't know that solid animation, a neat score, and ingenious fight scenes are really enough to qualify Iczelion as legitimately good, but then, I'm not sure that was ever the goal. For one thing else that's returned from Fight! Iczer 1 is the sleazy, pulpy tone, and whatever you might think of sleaze or pulp, it seems like the right fit for this material. It's exceedingly trashy - I'd struggle to think of any anime where the transformation sequences were so wholly an excuse for a spot of gratuitous nudity! - but then it's hardly pretending otherwise, and I seem to recall praising Fight! Iczer 1 for much the same approach, which is to say, accepting what it is and trying hard to be the best version of that.
You can knock the Iczer franchise for plenty of things, most noticeably starting on a far better note than it would ever hit again, but the results remain an appealing oddity. Despite sharing the same director, the hugely inconsistent and occasionally brilliant Toshiki Hirano, they barely feel like they belong together, yet the plus side is that they all have their own specific charms, albeit not all equally. I've warmed up a bit to Iczer Reborn since I first watched it, having seen it in the original Japanese instead of Manga's preposterous dub and with the context of Fight! Iczer 1, but I'd still rate Iczelion marginally higher. Its biggest fault, other than arguably focusing on the wrong character, is that it's too short, stopping just as it's about to get going. Still, this is definitely a title whose failure to reach DVD makes no sense, and I for one would be happy indeed to see this strange, inconsistent franchise be rescued from the rubbish heap of time.
-oOo-
So there we have it: four reviews and only one title that categorically didn't deserve to make it to DVD. Okay, probably two, objectively Dark Warrior was fairly dreadful, and I probably ought to stop falling back on "but worse stuff got released!" as an argument given how astonishingly low that particular bar got on occasions: not being Sword for Truth isn't grounds for a recommendation! Nevertheless, that still leaves us Gude Crest and Iczelion, both of which are genuinely quite good and feel like strange omissions, especially the latter. Probably the explanation lies in how each segment of the Iczer saga found itself with a different publisher, but that's hardly fair on poor Iczelion, is it?
Next up: not another post of VHS-only stuff, I promise! Well, promise is a strong word, but I'll see what I can do...
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