Normally, I'd be feeling bad about rambling on about another thoroughly obscure bunch of titles, but a) it's not as if there isn't worse to come if I don't give up on this madness soon and b) this is the rare post that throws up something I'd never heard of and ended up slightly loving and c) the one title here that's remotely well known is a return to a franchise we'd have been better off forgetting all about. Yes, it's the end of Urotsukidôji - at least for our purposes - and of a journey that began with Legend of the Overfiend practically at the beginning of this series. Can the finale redeem everything that's come before it? Well, let's just say I'm not sure it's the worst of the batch from amongst Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction, Magical Twilight, Gravitation: Lyrics of Love, and Urotsukidôji: Infernal Road...
I remember musing last time as to why no "proper" distributor* ever picked up the two Riki-Oh OVAs that were released in 1989 and 1990 respectively. Well, here, no doubt, we have part of our answer: Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction is abysmal. And normally I hate to pre-empt a conclusion this far into a review, but there's no use dancing around the facts on this occasion, since I'm not going to have anything nice to say. No, wait, the closing song is OK. But that really is it.
It shouldn't need pointing out that Riki-Oh 2 is the sequel to Riki-Oh: The Wall of Hell, yet it's easy to imagine the viewer who could get all the way through the latter without realising it had anything to do with the former. That sort of thing isn't altogether uncommon in the world of manga adaptations, where it makes sense to focus on discreet arcs that are a fit for your running time whether or not they necessarily link together, yet it feels as though there ought to be some connective tissue - heck, the protagonist being recognisably the same in all but a handful of shots would be a start. And this is especially weird given that both share director Dezaki, a creator of modest but definite talents who apparently forgot everything he knew in the span of a year. The Wall of Hell was no masterpiece, but it had style, and that style carried it a long way, injecting energy and tension into some basically schlocky material.
Here he does the opposite, and while I don't think we should be throwing too much shade in Dezaki's direction, it's certainly the case that more could have been done with this setup. It's overly busy and definitely too reliant on coincidence and storytelling shortcuts, but it's not hard to see from what we get here how the material might have played out better, as it no doubt did in the manga. Following his escape from the hellish prison of the first OVA (I presume), our hero Riki is intent on tracking down his long-lost brother (I think, maybe) who he abandoned when they were children. This quest takes him to the southernmost cape of Japan (I'm completely guessing) where, in a distressing bit of fiction foreshadowing reality, a malfunctioning nuclear plant has left a chunk of the country supposedly uninhabitable - though in the world of Riki-Oh, that just means it's been taken over by evil sorts as a base for their vague but no doubt nefarious plans.
Let's cover one example of how spectacularly shabby Child of Destruction's narrative delivery is and move on. It's self-evident that Riki's abandonment of his brother is the beating heart of this material, yet here's how that vital moment plays out on screen: the two are playing hide and seek and it's Riki's turn to hide; as he's running off, a limousine pulls up and the old man inside says, "Wouldn't you like to come and live with me, though?" which Riki agrees to without a second thought; as the car drives off, he sees his brother sitting waiting in the snow and looks mildly troubled; and that's our lot. So far as it's possible to judge by what we're shown, Riki left his little brother to die because he kind of forgot about him, and wouldn't it be rude to ask the kindly stranger who's just effectively kidnapped you if there might not be room in his mansion for another random kid?
With no one willing to find space in a 45-minute OVA to explain the lynchpin of the whole plot, this never had much hope of succeeding on a story level. However, I've had kind words to say about many a narratively disastrous piece of anime before now, and so we return to why I don't know that this shambles was altogether Dezaki's fault, for all that he did nothing to right it: Child of Destruction evidently had no budget, and its animation is horrible, and that horrible animation kills every scene stone dead. There's stuff that could be fun - the action and gore were clearly intended to be - but apparently there wasn't even cash to splash on what ought to have been highlights, since they're as visually malnourished as the rest, constantly relying on the most obvious shortcuts. And that pushes Child of Destruction down from being merely bad to the realms of face-slappingly bad, because what sort of early nineties OVA can't find a few yen to make its outrageous gore and over-the-top fights look cool? Fail that and you've failed everything, which, as I've hopefully established, is precisely what Riki-Oh 2: Child of Destruction does.
In spite of appearances, the reason I swore blind I wouldn't review hentai here and then went on to review quite a lot of hentai is not, in fact, that I secretly just wanted to watch a load of hentai and talk about it in public. No, it's more that, compared with most of what we might categorise as pornography, the boundary between hentai and regular anime is an awfully vague and blurry one, and there's sometimes no sure way to separate one from the other. But on this occasion I'm pushing that argument about as far as it will go, because, yes, Magical Twilight is most definitely hentai, and yes, I knew that going in, and the only real excuse I have is that numerous reviews suggested it was good enough that, if you squinted a bit, you could watch it as plain old anime.
That's sort of true but mostly not: there's a ton of explicit sex in Magical Twilight and, compared with some of the titles we've covered here, it's hard to imagine how you could snip it out and cobble anything remotely coherent from the remainder. Though for the first episode, anyway, this seems like it might not altogether be the case: the basic setup, with white witch Chippie and her promiscuous frenemy Irene sent down to the human world to accomplish the practical part of their witching exams by ingratiating themselves with a randomly chosen human, could easily be the setup for your standard comic nineties OVA were events played out a little differently. This is less true of the two-part follow up, which relies heavily on Chippie's now-love-interest Tsukasa getting jiggy with every remotely appropriate female he lays eyes on, yet its heart remains in the world of romantic comedy and so does the bulk of the material.
Marking on the exceedingly slidey scale of vintage hentai, the sexy stuff is relatively innocuous, which means there's a bad witch who gets sexually assaulted into giving up on her quest to kill Tsukasa and a teenaged girl who wants to sleep with him because she watched her mum sleeping with him and got awfully horny as a result, and actually, now that I think about it, probably more of the sex is non-consensual than not, though that generally means Irene using her magic to have her way with Tsukasa, and there's no indication that he's particularly traumatised by the experience. Again judging entirely by the standards of nineties hentai, I guess that leaves us somewhere around "only a bit gross"? At any rate, the animation is respectable enough that these look like real people conducting recognisable acts that horny naked people might get up to, which is by no means a given, so I'm willing to suppose that as hentai it's fairly successful, if perhaps a bit on the unimaginative side.
Which leaves us with everything else, and as often seems to be the case, the everything else fares a good deal better. Magical Twilight is fairly half-hearted as pornography, whereas as a comedic fantasy it's entirely solid and occasionally much better than that. The animation is respectable, the character designs are appealing, and there are a handful of properly good gags, most memorably a magically assisted game of ping-pong that gets wildly out of hand. Sad to say, though, it's still too committed to being hentai to make the most of its fun setup and characters and as hentai it devotes a lot of time to scenes that are staged largely identically, and so, at the end of ninety minutes, it finds itself sat uncomfortably between two rather nondescript stools. If a fantasy comedy with lots of generic but competently handled sex scenes is the one thing in the world you're craving, it's hard to see how this would majorly disappoint, but for the rest of us, there isn't enough here that's at all special.
One of the nice things about this whole reviewing-abolutely-all-of-the-'90s-anime deal is that I've been obliged to give attention to a lot of titles that, for one reason or another, I'd otherwise have skipped. And OK, that hasn't always been a positive since some of that stuff was eminently skippable, but it's nice to sometimes have your preconceptions proved wrong and be entertained by something you wouldn't normally have given the time of day. Such is the case with Gravitation: Lyrics of Love, and a cover that does practically nothing to sell what lies within to the viewer seeking anything besides romance between a couple of unusually pretty (well, unusually by non-anime standards) guys.
Now, it's not that Lyrics of Love - a subtitle nearly as off-putting as the cover art! - doesn't offer that. Our hero Shuichi Shindo, lead singer of the band Bad Luck, is certainly head over heels for author Yuki, and though it's not altogether evident for much of the running time, there are clues enough that Yuki feels the same way, albeit in a more stand-offish and cynical fashion. For Shuichi's love is very much of the puppyish, unfiltered kind, and so it is that, as we join the story, a period of coolness on Yuki's part has sent him into such a spiral of misery that he's incapable of writing lyrics for the band's upcoming new album. While that mightn't normally be an issue, since everyone else would be happy to bring in a songwriter from outside, Shuichi is just as outspoken when it comes to his musical career, and he's already bragged to the media that nobody but him can do Bad Luck's music justice.
So we have hot guys being in love, not to mention a fair bit of lust - which is quite refreshing given how much anime of the period tends to veer towards prudishness when it's not being out-and-out hentai - and we have music as a central story element, and all of that you could certainly work out from the DVD art and accompanying blurb. But that Lyrics of Love happens to also, maybe even primarily, be a comedy? That you'd never guess, which sucks when what we have here is among the funnier comedies to come out of anime in the nineties. Indeed, it's all the funnier for being ostensibly not much of a comedy at all, since much of the best humour rises out of situations that aren't, on the face of it, especially humorous. The benefit is that it gets to be wildly goofy at points without ever just being goofy; somehow, the push and pull of extreme silliness and high emotions works in harmony rather than opposition. Were this not a comedy, Shuichi would be a bit obnoxious and Yuki even more so, but seeing a lighter side to them actually makes their tumultuous romance more engaging and sympathetic, such that when, towards the end of the second of its two episodes, Lyrics of Love is obliged to take its plot seriously enough to bring things to a conclusion, it's drummed up ample good will for a theoretically contrived conclusion to be warm and satisfying.
Had this arrived a few years earlier, then, we might be looking at something of a minor classic - but as I'll never tire of pointing out, 1999 was a bad year indeed for anime as an art form and long after the point when OVA meant the sort of budget that got you near the realms of feature-film animation. Frankly, Lyrics of Love barely holds up compared with the TV of the time, and that's quite the damning criticism. I get that not all anime fans are obsessed with the niceties of animation, I do, but there's no avoiding how it hurts the material here, with the musical numbers suffering the most: judging by what we see, there are Punch and Judy shows with more stage presence than Bad Luck. Thankfully, their songs hold up better, enough to be toe-tapping even if not quite enough to convince you they'd be much of a big deal in real life. Still, that leaves us with a musical romantic comedy where all three core elements are good to great and only one significant weakness, which is mostly more of an annoyance, so I think we can comfortably call this a recommendation.
I've frequently been disgusted by the Urotsukidôji franchise, and sometimes angered by it, and often bored, and just occasionally amused, but until now, I can't say I ever felt sorry for it. Yet that was my main reaction to Urotsukidôji: Infernal Road (or Inferno Road, as it appears to be known to everyone but UK distributor Kiseki.) I haven't exactly been quiet about how much I dislike this series, and yet I don't know that even I would have wished upon it such a paltry nothing of a finale. For all that this has been mostly nasty, silly, juvenile stuff, in its best moments, as far as the first two entries go at any rate, there was a certain apocalyptic grandeur to be found, not to mention some really determined cynicism and wallowing in the deepest depths of human ugliness and suffering, and the one thing you'd have a right to hope for from a franchise that sets itself those sorts of goals and intermittently hits them is that it go out with a bang and not the most strangled of whimpers.
But that's not what fans were given in the mid-nineties, and it's certainly not what eventually arrived on the shores of the UK, since the first two episodes of the three-episode OVA were banned outright and appeared merely as scripts on Kiseki's otherwise bafflingly thorough DVD edition.** That leaves us with some 40 minutes or so of actual footage including credits, presumably cut down from the more standard 45-minute run time: a whopping 40 minutes to send off multiple hours of narrative spread over three not-entirely-reconcilable timelines, and boy is Infernal Road not remotely up to that task. Nor is the problem the missing episodes, which appear to have been a self-contained tale that didn't move the main story forward one iota, which is in itself a weird move and probably a clear pointer to what went wrong here: everything was in such a mess by this point that it's almost impossible to imagine what a satisfying conclusion would look like, all the more so since we've already had a couple of conclusions that were about as satisfying as it was reasonable to hope for from a property where apocalypses are practically an everyday occurrence.
I admit that I couldn't remember much of the events of previous entry The Return of the Overfiend, since it was bad and I haven't wasted any thought on it since I watched it, so I guess it's my fault that I couldn't recall who most of the characters were that we meet racing in a tank through the ruined remnants of Japan on a mission to defeat the probably-bad messiah the Chōjin with the aid of the possibly-good messiah the Kyō-Ō. Nevertheless, Infernal Road couldn't possibly do less to reintroduce them or to re-establish their goals or to ease us back into the wider context or to explain who their antagonists are or what their beef is. Indeed, Infernal Road has no time at all for the viewer who isn't 100% steeped in Urotsukidôji lore, which is ironic given that they, presumably, would be the selfsame viewer who'd be most frustrated by its manifest failings both as a final send-off and a story in its own right. For that mission to get the Kyō-Ō to the Chōjin and the various attempts to impede it is really all there is here, meaning a fair amount of violent action and the odd dash of demon rape - but much less of both that in any previous entry, even accounting for the reduction in length - and then an ending that I won't spoil except by saying that I couldn't even if I tried.
Nothing could have saved this material, and given the track record it had to work with and the fact that even the best Urotsukidôji entries were deeply flawed, and taking into account that the taste for this sort of stuff was already dwindling fast by 1993, saving was likely never on the cards; but the one thing that frequently pushed past instalments up to the level of intermittently entertaining is the odd bit of quality animation, so it's a further blow to Infernal Road that it contains no quality animation whatsoever and not much that would pass as basically competent. It's ugly, small scale, and achingly cheap, with a palpable sense of creators who just wanted to get something out the door so they could move onto doing anything else with their lives. So I suppose the only real plus is that, even for the most devoted fan, there's no reason to track this down: on its own merits it's effectively worthless, and as a conclusion to Urotsukidôji's grand, gross, baffling saga, it's truly bad enough that anything you care to make up will likely be better. No, seriously, try it: in my version, the Kyō-Ō and Chōjin hugged it out and ended up living together in post-apocalyptic Tennessee raising demon llamas, and that's still an improvement.
So probably not a great post for anyone else, but a definite win for me in that Gravitation: Lyrics of Love was a nice and out-of-the-blue surprise and I'm at last completely done with Urotsukidôji, although knowing me I'll probably feel the need to pick it up on Blu-ray at some point in the future to make absolutely sure it's as unpleasant and basically shabby as I remember it being, the way I did with Violence Jack (which was and wasn't but mostly was.)
Next up: probably the Gundam special in which I bend the definition of nineties anime far past its breaking point...
