Hi I'm Dranzerstorm
You may remember me as a regular contestant on the caption battle contest.
Welcome to Retro Retrospective, my world dedicated to the old guard of the Otaku world; expect some reviews of the old & obscure, and in-depth geeky knowledge with the occasional top ten and I now have a logo.
Little info about me
Well I'm British and I'm in to all things animated and nostalgia.
I've grown up with every cartoon going and have watched hundreds of anime.
Oh and to answer a question I was asked once, no I don't wear glasses in real life, I would wear Loke's sunglasses though.
The last review tonight is Nora, an infamous title listed as one of the worst anime of all time.
This ova actually had another episode but finding that is near impossible so were just looking at episode 2 and trust me it says everything about this anime.
Nora is a bounty hunter working as an extra for the galaxy police and her latest job takes her to a mining colony where she's after a bounty on an Esper.
Nora has her own Esper powers to complete her missions and even uses them to help a young man find confidence again.
The production of this show is dire, there is barely any animation going on in scenes, so it looks like a giant flipbook, heck a flipbook is more fluid than what we got. Animation is expensive I get it but 1. You don't blow the budget on a soundtrack that pretty much is the only good thing about this crap. 2. Even if you had to work on a tight budget you made your lives so much harder with a huge dance number right in the middle of the episode with dance moves that would be hard to animate.
Sad thing is, Nora is one of the more likable anime heroines of yesteryear and this is not the way she should be treated in her only anime attempt.
Strange fact, interest only came back to this series recently when it appeared on search results for Twinkle Star Precure, so it's become a mini meme if only for a short time.
Final Verdict: it's production is dire but compared to others dubbed worst ever anime it's no where near the levels those shows are at, mostly because Nora is laughably harmless.
So here's the next one. My Dear Marie.
An engineering student named Hiroshi, deciding he's had enough of loneliness decides to make an android girl named Marie, except she's based on an actual girl named Marie the top tennis player in the college of whom Hiroshi has a crush on. Not wanting to arouse suspicion and because Android Marie has a mind of her own, Android Marie plays sister to Hiroshi. Naturally this causes hilarity which drags in a former childhood friend turned delinquent.
Ignoring episode 2 which is poorly written and keeps pulling crap from everywhere it's actually not that bad.
It avoids becoming one of "those" android girl series by actually staying grounded in reality by being closer to an Archie comics story, weird comparison but it's true, episode 3 is a nice touch with the dream sequences.
Dub is passable for an early ADV release.
Final Verdict: Episode 2 is a waste of time so just watch episode 1 and 3, overall it's a passable anime.
Get ready for an anime run like no other as I power through tons of short series starting with Carol.
Bad times are happening in London as sound is being stolen by an other worldly being. Fearing that this monster may destroy their fantasy world, a band of adventurers summon Carol to their world, although reluctant she later finds the courage to quote the incantations needed to destroy the monster.
I wasn't expecting much from this as it's obviously a hack job of trying to splice a multi episode story into an hour and Carol does that.
It features a decent soundtrack, and characters with some potential but let down by it's supposed villain making such confusing decisions over his alignment and the lead herself Carol being a spolit bitch trying too hard to act adult.
No dub but I imagine it would be crap.
Final Verdict: it had something to work with but many of it's more important elements are let down by shoddy character writing.
I really need to stop doing this to myself.
Half the reason I started digging up ovas to review in the first place is to find a diamond in the rough or a cheese fest I could watch with actual cheese and a red cabernet sauvignon blanc, but the titles I seem to come across are awful for a reason and Psychic Force is no exception.
Based on a fighting game that no one bought, Psychic Force tells the story of Keith Evans, a psychic who becomes a target for the military only to rise up against humanity and lay waste to the world as a form of revenge for the way he and others like him were treated, while his best friend Burn tries to snap him out of his new found taste for genocide.
The first episode is Burn and Keith's past among other psychics as well as setting things up while the other episode just sees crappy fight scenes.
This anime is awful; it barely passes for video game cutscenes, the editing is so dreadful that it removes any emotional weight in scenes were meant to care about, the characters barely have any personality, the dub talent was wasted and for a fighting game anime there was no bloody fighting!
As bad as some of the other fighting game anime were, there was at least fighting and as rough around the edges as they were they at least had some shred of confidence in what they were making even if it was bad but this is embarrassing.
Final Verdict: This anime is so awful it actually pisses me off.
Oh boy I can certainly pick them.
The Sacred Book of the land of Eija has been rediscovered and with it the legends of a mysterious and all powerful ship called Ellcia. The Kingdom of Megaronia has set forth on a quest to recover the ship and its ultimate weaponry. All that stands between the Kingdom and total domination of the world is a small group of pirates led by a girl unaware of her destiny as the chosen one.
I have a friend that makes fun of anime by sprouting a story similar to this all with random foreign words that sound like all the terms and places mentioned in this very title all spoken in the most terrible of dub voices. I really don't care for this anime at all, in fact this would be the worst anime to show to a newbie, it's colour palette is horrible, the characters scream all the time and the dub is easily ADVs worst.
A better story is hidden within and a couple of standout characters prevents it from being a write off but ADV wasted money on this.
Final Verdict: It's not even so bad it's good, it's just boring bad, I'll likely forget this after today.
