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.
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.
So my look through bad anime continues with Darkstalkers.
The anime starts with a war between the families of Morrigan and Demitri but Huitzil interrupt the battle as Pyron the fiery deity of space starts destroying the Darkstalkers in order to destroy the Earth.
Meanwhile on his own mission, Donovan Bane is on a journey of trying to rid himself of the darkness with Hsien-Ko and her sister following, some of the other Darkstalkers appear and just leads up to Pyron vs Donovan.
It's been many years since I watched this and I was only reminded of it recently and I remembered why I forgot it.
It's dull, depressing and drags it's sorry ass between shoe horning characters that don't do nothing for the plot to Donovan spewing out his emo nonsense, it shouldn't be that difficult to mess up a fighting game title but my god, if not for the fight scenes being good this would be unsalvageable.
Dub is fine, nothing to comment on that.
Final Verdict: this anime made a fighting game boring, one made by Capcom that shouldn't be boring but it did and that's probably why it hasn't come back as a franchise.
