As I've noted before, the flipside of reviewing stuff that's as thoroughly out of print as, say, a title that was only ever released on VHS entire decades ago is that it barely feels immoral to suggest that perhaps hunting down a maybe-not-strictly-legal copy on YouTube would be a bad idea. So it sucks that I've managed to find something that's not even available there and that's it's actually pretty decent. Yup, probably ought to have put some more thought into this whole availability issue before we got quite this far down the rabbit hole! Still, it's much too late now, so why not have a guess at what you'll potentially never be able to watch out of Samurai Spirits 2: Asura Zanmaden, God Mars: Untold Legend of Seventeen, The Girl From Phantasia, and Akai Hayate...
The OVA Samurai Spirits 2 is the follow-up to what was unleashed in the US as Samurai Shodown: The Motion Picture, one of the most irredeemably awful releases we've covered here, and is thus the second anime adaptation of the beat-em-up video game series known alternately as Samurai Shodown and Samurai Spirits. Unlike the film - or, if we're being more honest than ADV were, the TV special - Samurai Spirits 2 has no pretensions to telling a standalone story, and instead slots in between a couple of the games: Wikipedia suggests that it serves primarily as setup for Samurai Shodown 64: Warriors Rage, which is puzzling given that Samurai Shodown 64 came out a year earlier than the date provided by IMDB for the OVA. Frankly, it's hard to be terribly sure on the details given that this second title was never picked up outside of Japan, and the DVD that did eventually turn up in the US appears to hail from Hong Kong judging by the subtitles' alternately loose and over-literal approach to the English language.
With all of that, there's no reason to suppose Samurai Spirits 2 would be anything other than dreadful, and it's frankly ridiculous how much that isn't the case. Really, its obligation to both sequelling a story that it feels almost no need to fill us in on and prologueing a second story that, presumably, was regarded as much more important to series continuity than this one should be quite enough to sink it. And yes, Samurai Spirits 2 is confusing in its broader details, but its script - written by who I don't know because there really isn't a lot of information out there about this one - does an admirable job of filling in the necessary broad strokes and giving each of its cast members sufficient introduction that we understand their essential personality, skills, and motivations. And all of this is greatly assisted by designs that immediately fill in most of the remaining gaps: I may never have understood what precisely the main antagonist was up to, for instance, but I was never in any doubt about how evil, dangerous, and yet flat-out cool he was.
Still, any fighting game should be capable of having instantly readable character designs and building a simple narrative around them: especially by the end of the nineties, that sort of thing was the bread and butter of the genre. That Samurai Spirits 2 has actual themes, though, ones that are emotionally absorbing and resonant, that's a more unlikely bar for it to somehow dive over. Yet as much as it was obvious there was plenty I was missing out on, at its core was a clear and heartfelt fable about one young woman trying to live with kindness in a violent, pitiless world. Nakoruru, the closest we have to a protagonist among a busy cast, finds the former-and-possibly-still villain Shiki and insists on giving her the benefit of the doubt, despite everyone's protestations that death is both the best she deserves and the only way to keep her from further horribleness - and that, really, is our plot for just under an hour.
Arguably, it's not much, but it's enough, and it's delivered with admirable seriousness and restraint, though not so much so that there isn't space for some surprisingly satisfying moments of light-heartedness along the way. And it's also delivered with some genuinely excellent animation, not exactly lavish but full of the sort of thoughtful details that suggest a team who were fully invested in their work, and set against backgrounds that do a marvellous job of portraying an historical Japan that feels distant and threatening and indefinably other. Even the opening and closing themes are a delight, and I really have no complaints beyond the inscrutable references to series lore, which makes it all the more frustrating that I'm singing the praises of something that's all but unavailable to an English-speaking audience. Uh, sorry, I guess, but the alternative would be to not heap praise on of one of the finest video game adaptations I've encountered, one so good that it barely matters that it's based on a video game at all, and that would be a crying shame.
My heart sank as I watched God Mars: Untold Legend of Seventeen, and not because it wasn't good - no, quite the opposite! What got to me was that Masakatsu Iijima was knocking it out of the park through scene after scene, and yet his name didn't ring any bells. Was this yet another anime director who got to prove himself a master of the form precisely once before vanishing into the long grass of TV work or simply disappearing from the industry altogether?
Yes and no, as it turned out: Iijima did get one other stab at directing a feature-length work, and lo and behold, it was Yu Yu Hakusho: Poltergeist Report, which I also praised for being strikingly well-directed. There, what leaped out at me was Iijima's unusual grasp of using 2D animation to represent three-dimensional spaces, and that's certainly a virtue of Untold Legend of Seventeen, though this time around it was far from being all that impressed me. Indeed, Iijima kept coming up with new ways to do that: here a wildly original way of introducing a giant robot, there a sequence of silhouetted figures against firelight establishing a moment of human connection that we know is about to be violently torn apart, and on and on throughout the just-under-an-hour's running time. Moreover, never does the direction veer into style for style's sake. Rather, it genuinely feels as though Iijima has agonised over every shot, figuring out how best to let the visuals support the story and how to stretch the animation accordingly.
Without that, I don't know that there'd be half so much here. Certainly, it's easy to imagine a take on this basic content that didn't distinguish itself at all. Released six years on from the TV series, God Mars: Untold Legend of Seventeen is a curious creature, part reboot, part retelling, and part prologue. Throughout the first half, I assumed it was simply that last, since the focus here is on protagonist Takeru's brother Marg, who was so ill-served by God Mars: The Movie, and particularly on his life as part of the local resistance that's battling, with obvious futility, against the evil Emperor Zul. Perhaps simply by virtue of being new material, or as new as that old chestnut a resistance drama can be, this first half proves to be Untold Legend at its best, leaving the last twenty minutes with nothing to do besides retell crucial moments we've already seen before.
Even there, though, Iijima proves triumphant, since his take on what should be overly familiar scenes is so much better than what we've previously had. And while that's partly due to the visuals and partly to the somewhat modernised designs and greatly to do with the grittier, harsher atmosphere, it's the character psychology that benefits most. I'd struggle to explain how that's the case, since all the cast are still essentially cyphers on paper, yet everyone benefits - bar Zul, I guess, since there's less place here for him and his cackling lunacy. But Marg, unsurprisingly, feels a thousand times more fleshed out, Roze gets more of a satisfying arc despite appearing for maybe a total of five minutes and hardly speaking, and Mars / Takeru, with even less screen time, benefits perhaps the most, getting to be believably heroic and confused and grief-stricken in what's little more than a cameo.
There's simply nothing here that's not an improvement: ReijirÅ Koroku's lush orchestral score takes on much of the emotional heavy lifting while being gorgeous in its own right, and Keisuke Fujikawa's script is admirably light-handed given the material, rarely spelling out what we can be left to figure out and feel our way into ourselves. The closest I have to a grumble is a strikingly abrupt ending, and even that turns out to be purposeful, as the film briefly, tragically, flicks back to an earlier moment, adding in one last layer of grief and humanity to Marg's short, cruel life. So the only real problem is that to get the most from Untold Legend you'll have to at least watch God Mars: The Movie, and while much inferior, that's still pretty decent, so things could be worse.
I'll say this in the favour of The Girl From Phantasia, the ever-inconsistent ADV put in some genuinely impressive efforts. That's most noticeable in the picture quality, which is positively mind-blowing for what was only ever a VHS release - and yeah, I know the image there says DVD, and no, I don't know why, but if you'd sat me in front of this and told me it was a DVD, I wouldn't have questioned you. Then there are the subtitles, which are actually applied with some ingenuity in a fashion I can't say I've come across elsewhere, and while the translation was too loose for my tastes, it was readily apparent that some thought had gone into figuring out how to make jokes work in a different language. Heck, even the box design is quite nice, and that was something ADV got wrong as often as not. And perhaps most astonishingly, there are extras at the end, and they include the entire storyboard, a bonus that must have been practically unique at the time and yet goes oddly unmentioned on the back of the box.
And if all of this seems like a weird angle to focus on, then it's because I have nothing much to say about The Girl From Phantasia and suspect that no one else would either, because it's all of a standard TV episode in length and as boilerplate as boilerplate can be. If there's one aspect that distinguishes it from a hundred similar titles, it's some nice animation from the company that would go on to become Production IG and not long after this would produce some of the finest work in that field the world has ever seen, and while we're roughly a million miles from that point here, their fingerprints are evident in the unusual care and relative realism that went into the character animation, the standout feature of an OVA that generally looks that bit better than you might expect.
But a show about a dorky guy whose life is invaded by a cute but annoyingly supernatural girl that's he alternately bickers with and lusts after is, let's face it, something that's going to need rather more than good animation and nice presentation to make it stand out from the crowd, and The Girl From Phantasia has more or less nothing. There are hints of interesting world-building, but inevitably they never get to be more than hints, because how much can you really set out in 25 minutes? And in fairness, Kamiya and his team cram in a fair old bit, enough that there's actually a story here with a beginning, middle, and end, some mildly engaging conflict, a dash of characterisation and even a character arc of sorts, and a brief but action-packed climax: this surely must have been intended as the setup for further adventures, but it's not obnoxiously obvious about the fact. Other than the extreme familiarity, and the brief length - and, care of ADV, an added dash of misogyny that was the main thing that put me off the subtitles - there's nothing here that's actively bad, and while it's happening, it's all quite charming. It's just that there isn't a single reason to seek out The Girl From Phantasia thirty later when there are so many titles that did the same but more so and better.
Akai Hayate starts with a pretty neat setup, and I only wish I'd known going in that it would dump that setup after one episode to chase off in other directions for two of its four episodes, because perhaps then I wouldn't have found those two episodes quite so frustrating. Still, for the first thirty minutes, things run smoothly and intriguingly enough, as we're introduced to the titular Hayate and his sister Shiori, who are on the run due to Hayate having just murdered their father for reasons we won't learn until much later. And while patricide is generally frowned on, it's an even bigger deal when you happen to be the scion of Shinogara, a secret organisation of ninjas who've been running Japan from behind the scenes for hundreds of years. As we join Hayate and Shiori, they and the two companions who've decided to go on the lam with them have just been caught up with by those assassins in creepy masks that seem to crop up in most anime that features ninjas, and in the subsequent ruckus, Hayate is mortally injured saving his sister's life. Possibly figuring she owes him one, he decides that the only solution is to use his powers to transfer his soul into her body, so that he can possess her if she's ever in trouble, which inevitably she is before the first episode's done.
Needless to say, all of this seems like it's going to be important, or heck, even the actual story Akai Hayate intends to tell. It's as jarring as you might expect, then, when the second episode drops Hayate and Shiori more or less entirely, to focus on another of the Shinogara escapees and what we'll soon discover is a much wider conflict for control of the nation, which by episode three will have drawn in yet another secret organisation and moved on to a third protagonist. All the while, Hayate and Shiori drift around, barely in the background, lost amid a too-large cast and a plot that imagines that watching characters we've barely been introduced to, let alone grown attached to, backstab and manipulate each other is somehow intrinsically interesting.
Perhaps it even might be if you went in expecting that rather than a tale of body-sharing ninja siblings; "secret organisations vie for power in the shadows" is less of a fresh setup, but it's hardly been done to death. But while I suspect a rewatch will be more satisfying, the execution is still lacking, even putting aside how muddled the storytelling frequently gets. Tsuruyama, who has a fascinating CV but apparently no other directorial experience, brings little to the material, with his most distinguishing characteristic being a tendency to overuse close-ups and mid shots, making everything feel cramped, even the frequent action scenes. And even when the action isn't let down by poor choices or the never much more than decent animation, it still has a tendency to devolve into what I've dubbed special move tennis. For reasons that are never explained and probably don't stretch much past "What does our target audience expect to see?", all of the main cast have a super-powered shadow form they can adopt, seemingly whenever they like, and of course those shadow forms come with flashy powers that they can blast at each other and so end fights without any of that messy business of actually fighting.
In that sense and others, Akai Hayate reminded me of another largely forgotten OVA, Hades Project Zeorymer*, in that it feels caught between two stools, on the one hand looking back to a goofier and more carefree era of anime when characters in cool suits or giant robots firing off special moves at each other was enough and on the other pre-empting the relatively greater complexity, the darker tone, and the increasing brutality and cynicism that came to dominate a lot of genre anime throughout the late eighties and nineties. Like Hades Project Zeorymer, it routinely gets the wrong end of both sticks, while working just well enough to feel like an intriguing failure; at any rate, it definitely lands amid that handful of titles whose absence from DVD feels really puzzling, and the parts that succeeded were strong enough that its lack is mildly annoying.
-oOo-
That one threw up a couple of the nicest surprises I've had here in a while, in that there was basically no reason to be hopeful for either Samurai Spirits 2 or God Mars: Untold Legend of Seventeen, let alone to imagine they'd be such a pair of mostly-forgotten gems. Whereas The Girl From Phantasia I did have some vague expectations of - I can't remember why! - and falls into that most frustrating category of things that aren't even interestingly bad. And that only leaves Akai Hayate, which happens to be the title that doesn't appear to be anywhere on YouTube with English subtitles, and which was certainly novel and decent enough to deserve at least that slender cultural legacy.
[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]
* Reviewed on this site as Zeoraima, because nobody seems to agree what the thing is called.
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