Brain Powered 2/10

This show is like watching a car accident involving two Ferraris. Big money going kablooie. The dismal quality of this show should be an embarrassment to the creators.

The 26 (26! Why not stop at 24?!) episodes of Brain Powered shuffled, not unlike the toxic waste guy from Robocop, onto Japanese TV in 1998. Directed, scripted, and created by Yoshiyuki Tomino, the legendary creator of Gundam and Dunbine, I bet this show had a lot of people's hopes up. Those poor bastards.

I liked two things about this show. Firstly the music was great overall. There were some repetitive tracks but I didn't find anything bad (If it's Yoko Kanno it CAN'T be terrible). I even liked the OP and ED, those songs were pretty good. The other thing I liked was the opening sequence. It's basically all the main female characters flying around naked. Since there's almost no nudity in the show itself I'm not sure why they did this but me likey. It makes what follows somewhat less painful.

So what's wrong with this show? First off it doesn't look very good. At times it looks rushed and the characters don't look consistent throughout the series. The backgrounds are also only passable. I can forgive some bad animation in older series but the backgrounds should look great in a sci-fi mech series with the budget these types of shows usually have. I'm also disgusted with the mechs here. First off they all look about the same, this becomes a problem in identifying who is who. You can't even tell the good guys from the bad guys sometimes. Secondly they hardly move. When they fly the animators just move the cell across the screen. They don't even chage the cell between standing and flying, they just draw some glowiness under them. They also have the wimpiest weapons ever, some light glowy dealies and hardly anyone takes any damage since they couldn't re-use the cell they use for everything else.

I ALSO hated the editing in this series. The direction is way too abrupt. The show does things like jump from one closeup in one location to another closeup in a completely different, unrelated place with no break in the dialogue. The director doesn't bother to give the viewer a shot in between to establish the new location. This makes things VERY confusing, especially when all the look-alike mechs are flying in the same blue sky and the characters are just yelling inside their mechs and not at anyone else with them or through a communicator.

The dialogue is ALSO a source of pain and confusion, characters talk so much that sometimes you can't tell if they're adressing someone within earshot, someone outside earshot, their mech, or themselves. This isn't helped by the crappy editing. Oh and I also hated most of the VA's. The main character girl was HORRIBLE! I could read the lines off a card better. IN JAPANESE! WITH A MAN'S VOICE!

So what's this mess about? Scientists have discovered a big thingy under the ocean called Orphan. It spawns these glowy discs that get found all over the place. Sometimes when someone stumbles upon one of these things a big mech is born and the lucky person has a shiny new mech to fly around in. There are 2 types of mechs, the Grand Chars that are piloted by the people that now live in and study Orphan and the Brain Powereds that are piloted by the people who don't like Orphan since it's planning to suck the life from the Earth.

The main male lead once lived in Orphan but escaped and fights on the good guy side on a ship called the Novis Noah where after the captain dies THE SHIP'S DOCTOR IS MADE THE CAPTAIN. The main female lead is a girl that happened to find a Brain Powered and acts annoying. There are oodles of characters in this show, a bunch of good guys and a bunch of bad guys and the whole thing is pretty confusing. People switch sides, motivations change, mechs go figure skating, people go insane, I go insane.

The deal is that Orphan is a spaceship that sucks life for energy. When it takes off it's likely to wipe out all life on Earth. This whole deal gets pushed more and more to the back burner with all the going insane and figure skating. I'm still not quite sure what happened at the end and I frankly stopped caring.

Don't watch this show. It's terrible. I feel dumber for having seen it.

Melody of Oblivion, The 8/10

I had to watch this series twice in order to settle on the score. It was as low as 4 at one point and as high as 9. Let's get to it then.

The Melody of Oblivion is by Gainax, famous for somewhat odd anime and these 24 episodes are certainly odd. Airing back in 2004, I have no real problems with anything technical in this show. The art is terrific and the backgrounds have a cool surreal look to them with odd red shadows and strange lighting. I also really like the character designs (rather busty I must say) and the whole thing is animated really nicely. The OP and ED are both great and I didn't skip them once either time through the series and the score is really good if a little trippy with all the odd violin parts. The VA's were all great as well but that's never a problem in anime.

During the 20th Century, there was a large scale war.
It was a full-force battle between humans and monsters.
After bloodshed so violent no words could ever explain...
it was the monsters who won.
Time went by, and and a new century began.
And then, people started to forget that melody.

This is the current world in which the hero, Bokka, lives. He's a normal high school student and is dissatisfied with his life for some reason, he feels something is wrong with his world. It turns out that every once in awhile one of his fellow students is being sacrificed to the local monster and no one speaks of it though all the adults seem aware it's going on. Bokka meets a Warrior of Melos who is one of the soldiers who battle the secret rule of the monsters against the wishes of the human governments that prefer to live with the monster threat. He decides to become one of them, gets some help starting out, and leaves home.

This is the start of a journey that takes Bokka and his new companion, Sayoko, to several different towns where they battle the resident humans that collaborate with the monsters, the Monster Union. Bokka has the power to fire powerful arrows and has an Aibar machine to help him fight though Sayoko is just along for the ride. They are searching for the Warrior Bokka met earlier since Sayoko is in love with him.

This world is messed up. The members of the Monster Union have crazy set-ups in each town to provide sacrifices to the monsters and they all pilot animal themed mechs to battle the Warriors of Melos. The Melody of Oblivion is a ghostly girl that only the Warriors can see and she seems to be the key to freeing the humans from the oppression of the monsters. Bokka eventually ends up in space with some other Warriors of Melos to thwart a plan to disable all the Aibar machines on Earth and ends up battling the Monster King in the final episode.

I really liked this show at first. The trippy animation and direction reminded me of Utena and I was hoping for another great ending. However the closer I got to the final episode the lower the score got. It's like the creators forgot about the Melody of Oblivion and the monsters and wanted to spend the whole series fighting the Monster Union. I felt obligated to watch the series again to give it another chance and I like it a lot more now that I have a better idea of what the creators were getting at. It's not so much about the defeat of the monsters but about what makes the monsters different from the humans and how the humans who do nothing are no better than the monsters. That and the fan service. Recommended.

P.S. This show DOES contain one of the most disturbing scenes in any non X-rated anime. Let's just say there's this interesting farm near the end of the series. Yikes!

Mars Daybreak 9/10

Ahhh. Swashbuckling adventure under the high seas of Mars. I always enjoy a good pirate adventure.

Mars Daybreak aired in 2004 and spanned 26 episodes. This show has some really great visuals. The backgrounds, CG effects, and mechs all look very cool and are extremely well done. The character designs are also terrific and everything is well animated and consistent throughout the series. While I wasn't a huge fan of the OP or ED the in-show score was well above average. Finishing off with the VA's, considering the huge cast, Mars Daybreak does an excellent job providing unique voices for all the characters and they were all great.

It's the future and Mars is populated, has an atmosphere, and huge oceans. Having no military of it's own it's "occupied" in a sense by the Earth military and pirates sail in submarines across Mars raiding the various floating cities. Enter the Ship of Aurora, the most wanted priate vessel on Mars and famous for it's Robin Hood-like behaviour. Our main character is Gram River, a laid back hero who's a great mech pilot, great chef, and takes care of 2 little kids while working odd jobs. He gets picked up by the Ship of Aurora during a raid and decides to join the crew so he can earn some cash.

Now meet Vestemona "Vess" Lauren, a new navy recruit who's been assigned to a unit on Mars whose orders are to capture the Ship of Aurora and put an end to the series. Vess is a hot-headed mech pilot from a rich family on Earth who is disgusted by the situation she's in since the Mars branch of the Earth forces aren't the most "professional".

After a few episodes of introductions and various run-ins with the Earth forces the crew of the Ship of Aurora begin to search for an ancient Martian treasure that they find out about from Gram's pendant. The rest of the series has the Ship of Aurora dodging the Earth forces and other pirates while they search for the treasure. What it is isn't quite clear.

While the whole treasure hunt is great the part I liked the best about this show is the relationship between Gram and Vess. It seems that they grew up together on Mars as orphans and one day Vess was adopted by a rich family on Earth and was taken away. When she sees how Gram has become a pirate she freaks and goes crazy trying to catch him. She gets arrested by the military for disobeying orders multiple times and even ends up joining another pirate all in an attempt to catch him. She gets SO mad it's hilarious and Gram is somewhat indifferent to the whole thing EXCEPT for that when he first meets Vess again early in the series, and she has him at gunpoint, he gets away by giving her a huge kiss and shocking her into inaction. It's always a nice change to see the female lead all flustered and hiding her feelings behind a mask of anger rather than the guy. When she gets mad she gets MAD and it's pretty funny, she really gets homicidal.

With the great look of this show and the story I liked I have to strongly recommend it. It misses out on a 10 because the VERY end was missing something though 95% of it was great.

UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie 6/10

Does everyone in this show have nipple prints?

The 12 episodes of UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie aired back in 2002 under the name UFO Princess Valkyrie. I suspect ADV changed the name because they already have so many shows with the word "princess" in the title (Princess Nine, Princess Tutu, Petite Princess Yucie, Sister Princess). I liked a lot about this show, namely the extremely bouncy transformation sequences for the various princesses. This series does have nice overall character designs and while the animation is usually pretty good I was bothered at times by the poor backgrounds. The music is very good and the ED is OK but the OP disturbed me. While I like the song there's this odd panting at the beginning that makes it sound very perverted. I liked the VA's but old Valkyrie's voice was too quiet, of course she never say much so it's OK.

Somewhere in space there's a kingdom named Valhalla where 8 princesses reign. The blondest and jiggliest one, Valkyrie (Val-Q), crash lands on Earth onto a bathhouse and severely injures the proprietor, Kazuto. In order to save his life she gives him half of her soul which has the hilarious side-effect of turning Val-Q into a little girl in mind and body.

There's another princess, Hydra, that shows up and after wreaking some havoc is turned into a little girl by Kazuto's childhood friend, Akina, who has a crush on him. Hyrda still has the mind of an adult however. Val-Q also has a cat girl maid named Sanada who packs a cat-girl maid gun to shoot unsuspecting Earth girls, turning THEM into cat-girl maids as well to serve her precious Val-Q's every need.

The majority of the show revolves around little Val-Q and Kazuto. Kazuto fell in love with his saviour but doesn't quite know what to do with little Val-Q. She's all over him much to Akina's ire and it turns out she can turn back into jiggly Valkyrie when she kisses him. She battles various enemies that show up, nipple prints and all.

I like this show for the comedy but the plot is pretty stagnant until the last 2 episodes when Val-Q and Hydra are returned home for Val-Q's wedding. The series has a pretty good ending and since it continues I'm hoping for a better story in the future shows.

Image foolishness

It's much to my chagrin that I have decided to cease the inclusion of screen captures in my reviews. This is a direct result of the retarded amount of time it was taking me to decide which images to include, capture them, upload them, and add them to the HTML of the reviews. This was increasing the time from 1h per review to about 3. I'm also concerned about the available amount of space provided by blogger.com for those images. (I can't find that info anywhere on their site). Better no images than no reviews.

This change will hopefully allow me to generate more reviews per hour spent in front of my PC. Your comments on this development are, as always, most welcome.

-The Management