#this one is supposed to be a comic but i can't really do action sequences well | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mechanicalinertia · 3 years

Text

STMPD indulges in further fan wankery and ranks every episode of Bubblegum Crisis 2032 and relevant spinoffs in best-to-worst order

Indulging in this remarkably click-baity format has been on my mind for awhile, but only now am I indulging it, and in so doing attempting to put the question of what Bubblegum Crisis 2032 episodes are the best, and which are, eh-hem, the rest. I'm going to Have Opinions here, folks, opinions about how BGC works best and how it works worst.

And I'm taking a fairly broad sense of what counts as 'Crisis'. So Crash - the much maligned Artmic-only production that was supposed to be a barely-canon sequel to the original 8 episodes, Artmic's claim to the license as much as it was a wrap-up of the series - counts. AD Police Files, despite barely being contiguous with the tone and sensibilities of Crisis, counts. I'm counting Adam Warren's 4-issue Grand Mal comic as a single episode despite the fact that I don't really like it, solely for completion's sake. And to top it all off, I'm throwing in two other AIC / Artmic-produced OVA oneshots from prominent BGC staffmembers - MADOX-01 and Riding Bean, simply because I think they channel a lot of what makes Crisis good in their own weird way. Not all of it, but a lot of it.

Anyway. Let's get to it, shall we?

1. 2032 Episode 7 - Double Vision

youtube

1990's Double Vision is interesting for a few reasons. First, for being the episode where the showrunners had to use the contract Youmex had brought up with Maiko Hashimoto - who was supposed to replace Priss and her VA Kinuko Oomori as the singing character, but didn't after, supposedly, fan outcry over killing off Priss. Second, for having the guest director be Satoshi Urushihara, a bishoujo drawin' fuckboi known as 'the king of breasts' who, legend has it, used sex dolls as drawing models to get that oppai jiggle juuuust right.

In spite of that, it's excellent. Animation's as crisp as you can get, a hallmark of the later four OVA's, but more importantly the general setup of the plot is well-balanced. We start with a big ol' music video, and within seven minutes guest star Reika Chang's spidermech (as piloted by her bishonen bodyguard Kou) is impaling security officers with its legs, strangling a 55C Boomer, decapitating an oil baron, and things just keep going from there. Red Eyes sometimes feels too action-heavy, and the other two in this sequence, Moonlight Rambler and Scoop Chase, lean off the throttle in terms of fight scenes, but Double Vision is excellently paced from start to finish.

More importantly, it uses Vision / Reika Chang very well for a guest-star of sorts, using her grudge against Gulf & Bradley and her heritage as part of a Triad-megacorp hybrid to expand the sense that shit is going down in 2032 outside of Megatokyo, that even GENOM can't squish every competitor it has. It also makes Irene Chang, a one-off character who existed solely to be 'fridged', a link which makes Reika's plans personal. Best of all, we then get more action focused on Linna, long regarded by fans of all stripes as the 'boring' or 'bitchy' Saber, which is a shame because Michie Tomizawa has a lovely voice and probably went on to have more of a career in the 90's than any of the other girls. Shit, Linna gets to be the big plot-worker in here without her blotting out the other gals, the way Priss does in episodes involving her.

I guess what I'm saying is that Double Vision has all the elements that can elevate a BGC OVA from good to great. The mecha and cute girls and other stuff are there, yes, as they always are, but on top of that we have just enough action mixed with character and plot-building moments that reference previous episodes' stuff without being overbearing about it. It all feels effortless in Double Vision, hence its #1 ranking.

2. 2032 Episode 5 - Moonlight Rambler

youtube

Yeah, right at number two and we've already got a somewhat controversial choice. I mean, scroll down a bit and you can see that I've basically put the latter half of 2032 and its first episode in the top 6 choices. This is also the debut of Masami Obari, the director known in the 90's for directing a bunch of SNK anime adaptations among some other stuff. Very sporadic filmography, this guy.

Moonlight Rambler opens incredibly strong. We've got a compact highway hovercar chase, 'Doberman' Boomers that make Mason's SuperBoomer look like Astro Boy in comparison, five lovely young ladies which get gunned down by said Dobermen like cattle, leaving only two to escape - a SPACE STATION! And then we have a pretty cool opening credits montage, as the Sabers all watch Sylvie and Anri's shuttle fall to Earth as a shooting star.

If Moonlight Rambler commits any egregious sin, it's that it has that one big opening action scene, one scene that barely counts as action - the usual couple-makes-love-on-a-dark-roadway-only-to-be-thrashed-by-an-unseen-monster (made all the more funny because said monster is a four-meter-tall mecha with an Eva horn), and then the final showdown, which, well, it ends badly. Sylvie’s the vampire in the mech, sucking blood to sustain her fellow Sexaroid sister Anri (who can’t heal her own wounds because of it) - her last ride, tragically enough, is to steal blueprints for something that would allow them to be self-sufficient, or ‘free’. It doesn’t happen, of course, and so Priss has to fridge someone close to her again (to borrow the term used to criticize how many female characters got fucked over in Western comic books to aggrieve male relations).

But fridging aside (used far more egregiously in OVA’s 2&3), Sylvie the lonely sexbot and seeming friend of Priss manages to be a fairly interesting character - or at least the discourse I saw on a forum or two suggested that. Nene and Linna both thought Sylvie was hot, too, which lead many to think (not helped by the RTAL OVA) that she might have passive hypnotics or pheromones or something going on there. Of course, that puts into question the only solid yuri-ish relationship we have in the whole series - Priss might be pretty masculinely coded, but does that actually make her ‘butch’? (Toshimichi Suzuki wrote a short story between Crisis and Crash, Soldier Blue, where in passing a LeonxPriss moment went down, but I can’t take Leon seriously as a love interest for Miss Asagiri. He’s just too… simp-y, y’know?) And even if she felt affection for Sylvie in ‘that way’, was that affection genuine?

28 years before Blade Runner 2049, and Moonlight Rambler does the same thing Niander Wallace does to Deckard when he implies that Deckmeister’s love for Rachel was, itself, synthetic, implanted at the interest of larger powers. And it does it not even a quarter as directly.

On top of that a whole second layer of mysteries crop up when you think about Largo, resurrected cackling Boomer-Bro, as the lynchpin to Sylvie and Anri’s ambitions of liberation. He was playing both sides, as we see in OVA 6, orchestrating Sylvie’s bust-out with the DD to create internal strife in the SPDC - essentially causing a crisis he could resolve for the subfaction of GENOM he was being held by - and bada-bing bada-boom he has the orbital satellite keys from SPDC and can hold the world hostage at Quincy’s face. So did Sylvie know? Was she sent to ‘get’ Priss, an unsuspecting femme fatale? Was Sylvie really in control of what she did, or was she, as one person suggests, going through her own rampancy - with a desire for freedom evidence of mechanical malfunction? That one could have these sorts of arguments, and that the answers aren't as clear-cut as I think they would be in lesser cyberpunk media - that's what puts Moonlight Rambler a cut above even the genesis of Bubblegum Crisis. Speaking of which:

3. 2032 Episode 1 - Tinsel City

youtube

I don't think I've committed a sin, here, by putting Tinsel City Rhapsody, the first and most iconic BGC OVA, not in first place. It's like how Empire is better than the A New Hope which preceded it; the best media series are those which improve on their first offerings. And I have precedent besides that, so let's rip the stiches off, saw the cast open, and talk about the bad stuff in BGC OVA #1.

Animation? Inconsistent. Stuff like the multi-layer Megatokyo highways look more sketched-in, less able to fool the eye into seeing continuous motion, a problem which later episodes didn't have. Middle Act? Sagging. After we've established our bad guys and given Sylia and company the job via fax-newspaper, we spend like seven cringey minutes with Sylia and Nene in hardsuit going to a military base and getting their debriefing, then outwitting a spy satellite by means of convenient Silky Doll van and an underpass. From there, the Sabers appear to be combing a city of tens of millions of people by waving Polaroid photographs in the faces of people at nightclubs, if Priss's work is any indication. Shit, if those Boomers hadn't half-assedly tried to kidnap Miss Asagiri the plot would never have revealed itself. Also, finale? Solid enough action against some fairly basic combat Boomers, but the whole idea of one Boomer having nanotech-y matter-transmutation powers that let him fuse with an entire artificial island always felt like it was pushing it a bit. Or, hell, a lot.

All of this, of course, is more than redeemed by the first seven minutes. BAM: cyberpunk cityscape, half-ruined, half-thriving, all ruled by a new mechanical Mount Fuji. BAM: Holy shit, Priss is hot, and Konya Wa Hurricane is a rock song unlike any other, especially because it's cut between her performance and the AD Police introducing us to the Boomer problem in a stylish, music-video way of doing things while showing off just how nasty even a single Combat Boomer is. BAM: shadows, light reflecting off of bright color in a tunnel - and then the Knight Sabers show up to, as an actual goddamn team, wreck that 55C's shit with minimal effort. BAM: Sylia swims, thinks, scares the bejeezus out of us with a flashback sequence that makes a point of obscuring more than it reveals. BAM: Quincy is a big chungus who can get the Prime Minister's support on anything, and has an underling voiced by Char Fucking Aznable. All these compelling worldbuilding elements, laid out on the table, just waiting to be put together. A universe of potential, what one fellow once called 'catnip for fanfic writers'.

God. So good. Not comprehensively unquestionably the best part of the series. But still, so goddamn good.

4. 2032 Episode 6 - Red Eyes

youtube

The second of the Obari episodes, and thus largely a direct continuation of Moonlight Rambler. And, uh, hoo boy. If you could perhaps say that the previous episode was more of a 'thriller', Red Eyes (titlecarded as Eye's) is straight action after like the first twelve minutes of the episode, one long violent night as resurrected SuperBoomer Largo puts his plans to take out the Knight Sabers, kill the ADP in passing and hold all of GENOM hostage in exchange for the right to rule over all Boomerkind. It's the most superheroically melodramatic episode of all the OVA's by a mile, it’s all action, and most of its strengths and weaknesses stem from that fact.

Yeah, most of the plot ain’t - the best. Angsty Priss isn’t a great speed for the character, feels forced in a very sort of 80’s-90’s comic-book fashion, Sylvie got put in the fridge and now we see the fallout. The impostor Sabers are a pretty open call to ‘come get us’, you might say, but then the boss-battle Boomers under those fake suits manage to expand from two meters of hardsuit to four meters of big meaty robot, which is kinda dumb, and then we never get to see the Sabers have a fighting chance against these Chungus Amonguses without Priss. Why is she the lynchpin, Sylia? Protagonist Powers?

I should have mentioned this before, but I think Masami Obari did the design for those mecha, as well as the DD and Dobermen in OVA 5. There’s a particular swollen goofiness to the chest of all those mecha that stretches reasonable design in a way that the 55C or the 12B Boomer designs don’t, and it also evokes human character designs he would do later in his career. None of it’s very good design for a series like this, but then again Obari never did anything as grounded as BGC after this (BGC isn't grounded, that's not what I mean, but the stuff he did was even sillier.)

That aside, well, aside, Red Eyes relies pretty heavily on cinematic coincidence to get things going. Priss sees Anri, Priss manages to snatch her hardsuit and Motoslave (HOW???) to bail her out, manages to fly into the heart of GENOM Tower (I would have assumed whatever it was preventing the Sabers from doing so to blow the Chairman's brains out prior - air defenses or whatever - would still be active even if Largo was in there fuckin' shit up), Priss gets nearly beaten to death by Largo and his minions after a grossly melodramatic reconciliation with Anri (HOW COULD A KNIFE PENETRATE HARDSUIT ARMOR), a spare motoslave and hardsuit shows up Just In Time for Priss not to die - you get the idea. Meanwhile in the rest of the plot the Sabers escape with their lives (barely) after Mackie brings out Sylia's Skycarrier - a particular machine which seems incredibly easy for GENOM to track, which begs the question 'why have it in the first place' - Leon tries to deal with Largo and that goes badly, etc etc etc.

Someone pointed out that this was pretty clearly supposed to be the episode where Priss bites it - either at the hands of Largo's Boomers, or at the hands of his orbital satellite, or at the hands of his last-minute attempt at a mouth-laser blast, and so on and so forth. Perhaps that's why, plotwise, it's all over the place.

But it's well animated, it's relentless action, it's ridiculously fun throughout, and for all Largo's tendency to muahahaha his way through problems, his ultimate plan - hold the world hostage in exchange for what is implied to be the remote control uplink over all the Boomers on earth - is pretty cool. And then the climax - where he gets roasted by his own particle beam as the Sabers use one of their own to knock it askew - is also pretty cool. Even if Leon is the one who gets the kill, and even if Largo just falls into a pit with the ol' 'no one could survive a fall from that height' line.

I suppose what you could say is that Red Eyes has a lot of lows but also a lot of highs and nothing in between. Which makes it still very good, just not the top episode on the list.

Also. That last plot bit, the ol' 'you and I are much alike Sylia', and then her allusion to Largo being a resurrected Mason - boy was that fanfic fodder for decades to come. Boy was that one line the OG series never expanded on, and boy was that a plot hook to be remembered.

5. Riding Bean

youtube

Before Kenichi Sonoda, character designer for Artmic's Gall Force and then BGC, made his break into manga with Gunsmith Cats, he used the same characters, the same crime-saturated Blues-Brothers-but-nastier Chicago, except he focused on Rally's on-again-off-again fuckboy and archenemy Bean Bandit. Hell, back when he made the first manga Rally was blonde and white and worked with him as a co-partner (though she still focused more on guns than he did). Well, the manga magazine he was working on that folded, but not before he and AIC made this little 1989 gem.

As much as a lot of hallmarks of Gunsmith Cats show up here - hyperspecific guns, perverted lolis and the evil oneesans who control them (Semmerling is a proto-Goldie Musou and you can't tell me otherwise), Bean Bandit's bulletproof jacket and headband literally flattening bullets on impact - that's not really a problem, because this is a boom-boom smash-smash OVA from start to finish. There's no mecha, per se, but Bean's custom Roadbuster and its all-wheel drive come close. There's no necessarily heroic mission beyond rescuing a tycoon and his daughter, but the whole process of Bean being framed and then having to escape the absentee millionaire's estate while being chased by dudes with anti-tank rifles and being pursued by an unhinged police inspector with what later becomes Rally's Shelby Cobra - all this is good clean wholesome fun with a very 80's action flair highlighted especially by the parking garage climax scene where Bean gets hit by a car and shot in the head (in his bulletproof bandana, but still) and yet refuses to die. Move over, John Wick, here's the manliest guy in anime working in style. It's Sonoda at his finest. It's glorious.

(If you need more comedic indicators of 'holy shit shouldn't Bean be dead at this point', Rally goes to wake him up for breakfast by normal means. He doesn't wake, so she resorts to a two-prong taser. He growls and rolls over, and so the only thing that gets him up is having a red-hot frying pan, eggs and all, smashed into his face. And he's unfazed by that shortly after.)

(Also he looks uncannily like Ryoga Hibiki from Ranma 1/2. Headband, the little fuckin' fang, and a general ability to absorb damage that should obliterate even cartoon characters and be fine. He's not voiced by the same guy, but do you know who Ryoga's VA, Koichi Yamadera, has voiced? Fargo from BGC and Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop.)

6. 2032 Episode 8 - Scoop Chase

youtube

1991. Four-ish months before the Youmex-Artmic-AIC agreement falls to pieces. Four months before crash puts out 3 OVA's in six months, which 2032 only got close to doing back in 1987 (and at the cost of seriously short episodes in Crisis and a major quality drop for Crash). The last episode of Bubblegum Crisis 2032 - and it doesn't really feel like it, does it? Shit, it probably wasn't even intended to be.

By which I mean that it is not just an episode with light-hearted city-pop for the soundtrack, a generally lighter color palette for most if not all of Megatokyo, and a villain who is not a tenth as villainous as Quincy or Largo or even Mason (pencil-pushing mad scientist-type in GENOM's labor-Boomer division decides to go after the Sabers to make his name in the company). It is an episode with a specific slice-of-life-comedy tone propelled by a laser-focus on Nene.

Yeah. You remember Nene, right? The young cutesy one whose primary role was infodrip in the AD Police and occasionally got to do some electronics work but was generally useless in combat? Adorable. Perhaps obnoxious to the nastier of 90's-era BGC fans. And I guess if you disliked her before, this episode ain't changing your mind. The poor girl gets charged with looking after the ADP chief's niece, one Lisa Vanette (did I ever mention that the ADP chief is so clearly a pastiche of 80's cop show chiefs, ie black and grumpy and having problems with loose cannons like Leon, that you spend the entire series waiting for him to insist he's two days from retirement and is getting too old for this shit?), who just so happens to want to expose the Sabers after Priss got her in an armlock and busted her nice little camera (after she was using it to try to expose Priss's identity in the first place while in the field, so who's really aggrieved here?). She's voiced by the lady who voiced Sailor Mercury and AMG's Skuld, too. Sounds more like the latter than the former in this role.

Anyway, we have a few scenes with Nene doing next-to-no fighting while the Sabers deal with Dr. Miriam (bad guy)'s Boomers, purpose-built to analyze their performance to build perfect counter-Boomers (wait but Largo did that exact same thing in OVA 6! What makes you think it's going to work this time?). She gets her faceplate smashed and Lisa gets a shot, Lisa tries to blackmail Nene in a very cutesy way, Miriam busts into the ADP building with his Saber-Killer Boomers, only for Nene and the rest to trounce his goons with second-gen hardsuits (which only show up in this episode! And Crash swaps them out for a third gen! See how this was never meant to be the last episode???). Lisa has to run around the locked-down ADP building while Nene tries to outfox the Boomer that's taken over the security systems, Nene and Mackie outhack the Boomer and kill it, Lisa returns the photos to Nene and runs off into the morning sunrise! Freeze-frame on her jumping in adorable joy! Cut to credits, with the background music being Kinuko Oomori back in the driver's seat! (As lead singer of her own band, now, separate from the Youmex contract - named 'Silk' as a pun on her name apparently - but take what you can get.)

The rest of the episode, the non-plot-essential scenes you might call them, are still straight-up feel-good-fun, and the fact that I just used that phrase means I'm going to be a Boomer at 21, doesn't it. Anyway, Nene tries her darnedest to be valued in the Sabers, and Priss in particular is having none of it. Ridiculously silly shenanigans ensue. Like, after Nene has to give Priss a speeding ticket - she can't let Priss off while Lisa's watching - Priss gets back at her during fitting for the next-gen suits by shaming her about her waistline. And then Nene tries her gosh-darndest not to eat a little bit of cheesecake she's got stashed in the fridge as consolation food, and then she does. I'm not sure if this is sexist or not, but it feels like it's on the borderline, it really does.

So this is, to my mind, not a truly great episode. It's a bit of that Moonlight Rambler syndrome (and a problem for OVA's 2 and 3 later down this list), where genuine plot progression seems utterly untied to the Sabers' work - where they don't really solve a case so much as they get sucked into someone else's plots (which is not the case in Double Vision, see, the Sabers are doing undercover work there pretty actively, firing on all cylinders), where the middle sags but the beginning and end are tight and slick. Here, though, it feels very intentional that this is the take-it-easy episode. If Toshimichi Suzuki, originally a showrunner from the Macross days, an action-series man through and through, kept the early episodes more explosion-oriented - and to a lesser degree, the Artmic-only BGCrash seems to be a return to that - this feels like the dawning of moe, soaked up from deep reservoirs through porous roots. Is it good fun? Yeah, but is it really what one wants from Crisis? Not especially.

The director, Hiroaki Gouda, would go on to direct the Ah My Goddess! OVA's and later TV series, supposedly because Kosuke Fujishima himself saw Scoop Chase and told AIC 'that's what I want, if you adapt my manga have this guy do it'. And if you've spent any time around that franchise - as I did by binging the entire manga in a few weeks back at the beginning of this year and then starting up Divine Patronage - you can see why.

Who knows! Maybe this was just a pause episode, a softening-up before the final showdown with Largo that would be adapted into Crash. (Although assuming that Suzuki's claims that he had the whole series roughly planned out, that he knew how many episodes there would be and where the whole thing would end, seem suspicious at best and hypocritical exaggeration of his own prowess as a showrunner at worse). But this is how Bubblegum Crisis 2032 ends. Not with a raging fireball, but with a silent freeze frame of a girl who isn't even a Knight Saber, leaping into the morning sunrise as a reborn Kinuko Oomori sings to us about hope for the future.

7. 2032 Episode 4 - Revenge Road

youtube

The only BGC OVA to be released in 1988 after the Artmic-lead triumvirate put out the initial trilogy over the course of 1987, Revenge Road is self-contained in a way no other BGC episode will be for the next three years until Scoop Chase. It's also a little shorter than any of the back-half OVA's, has a dead-simple plot which is primarily a vehicle for gorgeously rendered vehicles chasing each other in Megatokyo. It also feels like the last time the grimy streets-of-fire sense of Megatokyo is still prominently expressed, has a plot focusing around some crazy guy building a murdercar to kill off a biker gang (whereas later plots in the OVAS feel wayyyy higher high-stakes). So by no means is it exceptional, but it holds together pretty well, does well at the thing it sets out to do well at at (car chases, especially the final showdown with Priss’s Highway Star hunting the rampant Gryphon at insanely high speeds while the other Sabers play backup with their motoslaves, cutting through subway lines just to keep up.)

Also this is the only BGC episode directed by Hiroki Hayashi, the AIC mainstay known later for dreaming up Tenchi Muyo and El-Hazard. Tenchi, in particular, was said to be the brainchild of him and later Tenchi scion Masaki Kajishima - the two wanted a light-hearted break from Crisis’s ostensible grimness (compared to other cyberpunk media these two hadn’t seen SHIT) and maybe a hot springs episode or something. (Such media would later come into existence, like an audio drama with Crash where the Sabers infiltrate daytime TV - not to mention Go! Go! Sabers, a later manga. So maybe Hayashi was onto something.) Obviously that didn’t fly, so once Artmic and AIC broke for good they got Tenchi Muyo made, mixing up the magical-girlfriend trope Ah My Goddess perfected just a few years prior and instead saturated Mister Masaki with multiple magical girlfriends with unique personalities.

I’m using a line break here because I want you to understand, dear reader, that this means that Mackie Stingray was the progenitor of harem protagonists as we know em’. Not Ataru Moroboshi - he’s pretty strongly coded as an awful and overexciteable person. But Mackie, the Boy-Wonder of the Sabers who can’t stop peeping at his older sister. Yeah, let that sink in for a couple of seconds. Even a shmuck like me who’s largely made his peace with harem-ish shows so long as they can do other stuff for awhile (Monogatari! FSN! Toaru!) finds that particular origin story to be a story of original sin, a flare gun shot into the night screaming ‘it’s all downhill from here, nerds’.

Also a really nice scene is the one smack-dab in the middle where the Sabers go to play paintball in a VR-ish high-rise arena, with the losing team buying the others expensive lunch (Sylia lets Nene be bait for Priss and Linna only to bait them into a little booby trap, and boy howdy you can tell both she and her voice actress are enjoying themselves greatly), and then we get the girls just kind of, you know, talking. The jobs have stopped coming, which might mean peace for a time but also means Linna can't get the extra cash stream she needs to trade in her van (broke down in last episode), Sylia prods her about her boyfriend, Linna replies she broke up with him over him being unambitious and too artsy-fartsy, Nene gushes about simple, pure romantic love, everyone else laughs at her - it's so goddamn wholesome, and it helps give personality to these characters beyond their most basic archetype-y bits. It's weird how well having the 'gang' just talk without bringing up the immediate stakes of the plot is nice here, as it is in later episodes, even if they do talk a bit much about Linna's boyfriends and other 'girl topics'. Stuff like this feels out of place for a series that is ostensibly dark n' gritty cyberpunk, but Crisis never took being Frank Miller-levels of edgy very earnestly. As long as a balance can be kept - without veering straight away into total slice-of-life territory - it works. It really does.

8. MADOX-O1 Metal Skin Panic

youtube

MADOX is the directorial debut of the now-iconic Shinji Aramaki, the guy who cut his teeth with Artmic designing the transforming motorcycles of Genesis Climber Mospeada (and then the transforming Garland motorcycle-mech of Megazone 23 (and then the Motoroids of 2032 (Are you sensing a pattern here?)))and would go on to direct the CGI-anime adaptations of Appleseed. He was also supposed to direct the back half of Ghost in the shell SAC_2045 after Kenji Kamiyama's episodes, but it seems as though the unanimous fan loathing for SAC_2045 - and this coming from the director who already made the original Stand Alone Complex one of the best anime ever, a man of far greater talent than Aramaki if I had to guess... whatever. I'll say it's for the best.

I actually have more precedent for MADOX counting as BGC-ish than aesthetic sensibilities and sharing prominent staff (Hideaki Anno also did key animation work for the OVA but who's counting), because according to the RTAL BGC RPG the AD Police's K-11 Powersuits are based off of the titular MADOX powersuit that is the super-tech MacGuffin of this OVA. It makes sense, too. They look too goddamn similar not for there to be an intentional design thing going. (The episode where the K-suits were introduced in BGC came out 11 days before MADOX. Aramaki was working on these designs concurrently, I assume.)

Madox is not, by any means, a deep anime. If anything, it seems to revel in the stupidity of its own plot. The mech enters the normal world of Tokyo by virtue of literally falling off a truck into the lap of a horny mecha-otaku who gets himself trapped in the suit because he stands in it and accidentally triggers its activation sequence without reading enough of the (paper!) manual. Then for ten minutes he just fucks around in Tokyo attempting to deal with the MADOX's impracticalities - he buys (shoplifts) groceries, struggles to use chopsticks with the mech's claw hand, refuels using commercial diesel fuel, uses the chainsaw edge of one of his hover-guide wings to saw off the roof of some hotshot with a stupid looking car (his even stupider friend cries with glee, 'now it's a Beamer!'), and eventually our boy gets it into his head that with this, he can go visit his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend and win her back, even after the autotargeting system on the MADOX shoots down a chopper and brings down the (righteous?) wrath of the US Military down on him.

After all, that's the best 'I-want-you-back' gift of all: accidentally stolen cutting-edge military hardware. Chicks dig that shit.

This sounds like I'm badmouthing MADOX, but in all honesty I can't bring myself to do that. Once Protagonist-Man faces off against the original designer of the suit in her own prototype mecha, a close-range duel in a Tokyo subway station where the lights get cut a minute into the fight, things don't get more serious but they do get more action-oriented. Our jealous badguy tank jockey (Lieutenant Kilgore, as voiced by the guy who did Largo) pulls up with an airdroppable minitank that also requires him to stand with most of his upper body exposed (not sure if working with a design flaw like that indicates balls of steel, or high-yield stupid, or what), and so mech and tank duel up the floors of a skyscraper till both are smashed, and protagonistman survives but Kilgore most certainly does not.

It's simple, straightforward, a mech otaku fantasy that is more a model-kit ad for the MADOX than anything else, but you can see the outlines of the less cyber-punk-y parts of 2032 in MADOX. One might say that as the promise of promoting Kinuko Oomori as a rock n' roll empress faded fast, as the cultural zeitgeist slipped away from Streets of Fire-ish gritty-urban stuff in the closing days of the bubble economy, that in the end later Crisis looked more like MADOX than it did its own first episode. But even if that Meatloaf-y sense of Crisis never lasted very long, I would say that Crisis still keeps a sense of identity all its own independent of that. If anything, it's MADOX which lacks its own identity as anything but 'BGC but marginally more silly'.

9. Crash Episode 2 - Geo Climbers

Oh boy oh boy oh boy. Here we go. Now we get into the stuff that isn't universally loved among BGC fans. Fuckin' Bubblegum Crash: No GENOM, new ethos around Boomers, poorer art quality, and to top it all off the new Priss's VA can sing but sure as hell can't speak.

Yeah. Crash has its very cheesy-cringey moments, for sure. But I'm ranking Geo Climbers and Illegal Army above 2032's second and third episodes not as a joke, but with genuinely sincere intention.

Episode Two, Geo Climbers, has a lot of plot elements that are transparently lifted from Tinsel City - a smol child Boomer has been abducted from its rightful home by Bad Dude Boomers for sinister purposes and the Sabers have to get em' back, but Priss stumbles across said smolbot and much of the revolves around the dynamic between these two as they're pursued by Boomers through a postindustrial hell-corner of Megatokyo, with a good old-fashioned boss fight after. Good-guy Dr. Haynes and Bad-guy Dr. Yuri, and their contest over just making cool Boomers instead of handling a walking orbital-laser football, isn't quite as compelling of a conflict. Adama doesn't even try to be human physically, though Minami Takayama (Nabiki in Ranma 1/2, and Kiki in the Ghibli movie!) does her best to make him as cute of a shota-bot as one could ask for.

Still, though, I keep rewatching Geo Climbers when I have no desire to watch the original OVA's 2 or 3. This might make me an anomaly in many senses, but reader, you knew you were signing up for hot takes and Bad Internet Opinions when you opened this megapost. So let me say that Climbers is the best of the Crash episodes because, like in Double Vision, it’s well-paced.

Like, we’re barely ten-ish minutes in before Priss picks up the resident smolbot, instead of reaching the episode’s third act like in Tinsel City. So we get a sequence of competent action setpieces as Priss in plainclothes, armed with nothing but a handgun even chunkier than the Member II she used in Tinsel City - oh, and it actually works this time, because only one of the Boomers involved is a full-scale combat model. And there’s no beating around the bush in terms of plot, either. Sylia knows exactly who nabbed Adama from the start, and then it’s just a matter of reuniting with Priss on top of Geo City, where she gets back in her hardsuit to slug it out with a shitty lizard-scorpion-Metal-Gear in a fight that has more kickass moments than it has any right to possess (Priss grabs the poor thing's laser turret with her powerup-part mega-arms, wrenches it around, uses it to lase its other weapons off, etc). Story's weak, animation's weaker still, but Geo Climbers manages to make up for all the weaknesses of OVA 1 as a retread - albeit turning all of Tinsel City's strengths into new weaknesses. Pity.

10. 2032 Episode 3 - Blow Up

youtube

2032’s Born to Kill and Blow Up, the second and third OVA’s respectively, are probably the weakest link in all of mainline Crisis. They’re too short, literally the length of a standard TV episode, and as such have to rely on introducing characters close to the civilian identities of the Sabers to be tragically killed off by Brian J. Mason, the antagonist for these first episodes all made in 1987. One can’t shake the feeling that these episodes were rushed into production, really - as if the Artmic-Youmex-AIC production trifecta was surprised that the anime concept Toshimichi Suzuki had been cooking in the oven since 1981 was well-received enough that more could be made reasonably. Shit, considering it took them a pretty long-ass time after that to get Revenge Road out the door, maybe they thought that the series was done after Episode 3. Whatever.

So 2 and 3 get pretty low-ranking spots on the ladder in my humble opinion, not that they’re bad per se - all the good elements of a BGC video are here, music and mecha and fun fights and sinister plots - but they’re not especially good. You can sort of see the series struggling to find its own footing. Certainly by the time we get to the back-half episodes much of the cyberpunk sense of the series is lost, as Kinuko Oomori stops singing and the general aesthetic becomes less grimy and grim and whatnot, but hey, I’m willing to pay that price.

So what puts Blow Up, the one where the Sabers finally take on Mason directly, above other less-awesome episodes in the series? Animation quality’s good, which is more than you can say for Crash and ADP Files, but what puts it above Born to Kill, then? Simple: Mecha. The opening sequence of this episode, while lacking a musical opening, instead shows us a pretty awesome slugfest between the 12B Battle Boomers - armored monstrosities built to hunt tanks, and turned loose on the ADP and downtown Megatokyo to wreak havoc - versus the ADP’s K-Suits, which are, again, based off of the MADOX suit from Metal Skin Panic. Of course, these suits aren’t that effective against far more modern hardware - the tech curve just keeps accelerating in this show.

And then the middle of the episode is just kinda blah. Priss is taking care of a Dickensian scamp in a housing project on behalf of some friend of hers, who's been saving up money to move out to the country 'where the air is clean'. Of course Mason's department in GENOM has just bought the land for industrial redevelopment; of course they can mass evict people with three hours notice and start tearing down the complex seconds after that; of course Priss gets her ass whupped by Mason's Boomer bodyguard; of course Mom runs back for her money and gets crushed under rubble. Melodrama. Cheap melodrama at that. (The only really redeeming line here is Leon pulling up at the scene and moaning 'It's too early in the morning to be having a riot!')

What's interesting about Blow Up, its solid fight scenes aside, is the framing around this saggy middle plot. After the 12B's wreck the Silky Doll's storefront, Priss remarks that this is Mason gunning for them, and they should respond in kind. Sylia responds appropriately vaguely - she does this a lot, even in Red Eyes, as if to minimize genuine risks to the Sabers. But the implication is that Mason might be trying to provoke Sylia, to draw her out in hardsuit so he can out her to the world - a later scene suggests he's scanning some data to deduce her identity pretty blatantly - and she's not falling for it. Not until Mason gets mixed up with manslaughter of an innocent mother - now they have a public reason to get him. Easy revenge.

From there, we get all of Blow Up's vocal songs in quick succession - Victory for driving up GENOM Tower and dealing with (only a handful of) 12B's (one fanfiction retelling this episode suggested Quincy didn't bring in more reinforcements because he wanted to hang Mason out to dry), Asu e Touchdown for the Sylia vs. Mason fight (and Nene vs a single baseline Combat Boomer, the poor girl) where Mason unmasks her, unhinges his powersuit helmet, and in so doing lets her stab him in the throat cold-blooded, and then Wasurenaide (Don't Forget) for the ending, which is the last time we hear Oomori sing solo till Chase the Dream.

So the episode is split between 'gee whiz this is exciting' and 'gee whiz this mom is marked for death in a way that makes Eren Jaeger's mom look all but invincible', and it spends too much time on that latter, eh-hem, b-plot. Had Blow Up focused more on what makes Crisis good - and had it more run time to do so - it might have been ranked much higher on this list. But it doesn't, and it doesn't, so it isn't.

11. Crash Episode 1 - Illegal Army

History may not always repeat itself strictly, but it sure does rhyme, endless ten-syllable ABC rhythms of tragedy-farce-atrocity. But there's supposed to be downtime between cycles, you know? Otherwise the Shakespearian world-stage gives the game away too quick. Even in fiction, it's not wise to repeat events and act like they are different - not with enough of a time delay to make the reader feel smart that they've discovered the parallels.

So why is it that, not so much as a year after Scoop Chase, we return to the dark cyberpunk future of the 2030's, and focus on Nene?

I make it sound like a bad decision, but it isn't, actually, because Nene plays a far different role, here, as the Knight Sabers' moral center while Sylia's off elsewhere. The city's being a-ravaged by bank robberies (how cliche) by powersuited supersoldiers, the ADP are under new management, and stuck with a guy who resembles Bush the Elder too much not for it to be funny, because he really does want a kinder, gentler AD Police, no K-suits or nothing. So you have Leon and Daley scrambling around desperately, all the while Nene tries to convince Priss and Linna that they should do something about the criminals. Only neither of them are interested.

Okay, for stupid reasons. Linna wants to make money as a stockbroker investing in high-tech, using whatever info Nene gleans as a hacker for her own insider trading purposes. And Priss wants to get her 'pro debut' without the Replicants (the poor bastards) even while she's fussed over by a fairly pervy twinky talent agent who you just know wants to screw her over in more ways than one. Linna makes sense. Priss doesn't. And the fact that both of them want to move on from the Sabers and are 'nostalgic' about it, just 'cause Sylia skipped town to visit Mackie in Germany for awhile, feels kinda out-of-character, no? Where does these gal's loyalty lie?

It gets resolved, of course. Sylia deus-ex-machinas back into the girls' lives, literally showing up to Nene on an arcade game widescreen then telling the girls she's got a new job, i.e. catch the bank robbers. Priss and Linna are both reluctant to do so, but circumstances kick their dreams to the curb, so they suit up, return to battle, et cetera.

Megatokyo looks a lot weirder, here, its office buildings all rendered in an almost plasticky-looking white, its interiors feeling more vaporwave-y than proper cyberpunk. The music's different, too, throwing cheesy-ass stings at us when we don't need them, and being more synthesizer driven, with one commentator saying it sounded almost like a synth-y version of the Danny Elfman Batman music (and it does, but not in a good way). And, well, you know. The plot's not great, either.

Illegal Army does manage to keep one entertained, though. The new mecha designer for Crash ostensibly started as a toy designer, which is why Priss's third-gen hardsuit uses modular powerup parts, different in each episode of Crash (collect em' all, you garage-kit Grouchos!), but who gives a shit? I like the third-gen designs because they give Priss solid weapons, Sylia her usual loadout, Linna some ranged utility by means of electroshocking wire-daggers, and best of all NENE GETS TO HAVE AN ACTIVE ROLE IN COMBAT. The scene where the Sabers finally whoop the Illegal Army's ass may be JRPG-level fight mechanics, with one side throwing ordnance at the other, the other either taking the hits or dodging, and not a lot happening in between that, but the point is that not only does Nene get these shoulder-mounted EMP blasters to stun Boomers and whatnot out of commission, there's this point where one of the suits launches a bunch of missiles at her, and she licks her lips, looks at the enemy menacingly, and redirects the missiles remotely to blast his ass into oblivion. That's just - we needed more of that in coreline Crisis. Just more of that.

Another thing we need? Civilian Boomers. We see some in Scoop Chase, but you'd be forgiven for thinking all GENOM ever did was make killer robots. Here, though, GENOM may not be name-dropped ever, but Boomers have civilian purposes, they work as bank security guards after hours and get blown away by other Boomers, they're waitresses that make coffee in their chest-mounted makers and accidentally fail to make said coffee, they do construction work in episode 3, et cetera. Just having that makes the world feel just a bit more plausible - and having Boomers everywhere would help remind us of how powerful GENOM is were the megacorp actually present in this version of the story.

So I like Illegal Army even if it isn't objectively as good as most stuff in 2032. It's jankier, but it has charm because of that. Maybe it even has a bit of vision, too. Pity we never got to see more of that, with more money to bear.

12. 2032 Episode 2 - Born To Kill

youtube

If Blow Up has good chunks of pure 2032 Crisis at its beginning and end, but has a saggy middle made even more saggier by a guest character you know is going to die within the next fifteen minutes, the previous episode Born To Kill is even more egregious in its aggravations. Which is a pity, because this Linna-centric episode (despite telling us nothing about her character beyond the fact that she teaches aerobics (I swear to God Illegal Army did more with her than this OG episode does)) is what sets up Double Vision. There's no top-of-the-rank episode without this bottom-ranker.

Like, the opening's great, Mad Machine is one of Crisis's most iconic tracks, and the mystery of these diving-suited women pulling a black-box out of the wreck of the Boomer girl from the last episode just hours after Tinsel City saw its completion? Great hook.

The boss-of-the-week being a larger, bright-red Combat Boomer with Cynthia's laser-satellite control rig plugged into its guts? Dumb. The whole point is that Cynthia's supposed to look harmless so she can watch things, be a lynchpin for info. What good is the satellite in one BIG chungus, especially one which looks like it's supposed to be mass-produced? Shit, why's it still work at all if the box is lost? The military never bothered to change their access codes and brick it remotely? I know real-life militaries don't treat their WMD's super seriously because they're supposed to be easy-to-activate, mutally-assured-destruction at its finest, but if you've lost the goddamn weapon then yeah you lock it out before it can start indiscriminately nuking major cities. Especially after it, you know, ends up doing just that to the offshore complex in Tinsel City.

And Linna's friend Irene Chang being the unfortunate fiancée of a researcher killed during an accidental discharge of the SuperBoomer? Running up to Mason in public and attempting to j'accuse a stone-cold bastard like him when his security detail would gladly push her down the front stairs just for kicks? Eh. Dumb. Priss gets her hand mangled here, too. It's all just - not well put together, in any sense of the word. Then the whole girl-in-dark-alley thing comes up again, and it only barely works because of Mason's hitwoman-Boomer popping out finger claws and impaling her over a footpass - blood drips onto Priss's helmet before Irene is dropped like a stone, which is kinda cool but also it's hard to give a shit about Irene, because all she can be is a plot device. Sylvie at least had independent motives, moral ambiguity, and was a nice callback to Blade Runner proper, even if she, too, succumbed to getting jammed in the Refrigerator of Vengeance.

The only really redeeming parts are, again, the soundtrack - say what you will about the Obari episodes and Revenge Road, Yukio Tsubokura as the gal who does the big songs for those episodes lacks a quarter of the kick Priss-chan does - and the fight scene at the end. Even that's not half as cool as the 12B showdown in Blow Up - the Sabers are just fighting Mason's security detail Boomers, ladies in leotards with claw nails. The Terminator 2 Industrial-Pipework Hellscape background helps make the fight exciting, and it's helped by probably the best instrumental track on the entire 2032 soundtrack - look up Knuckle of Fire and you'll see what I mean - but then it's back to fighting a big chonky SuperBoomer which seems perfectly willing to let the Sabers wail on it, blow its head off, trigger its satellite uplink, etc.

Ugh. Look, if you want a good rendition of Born to Kill, go read Eyrie Production's The Iron Age, where Irene gets to actually be a character for more than ten fucking minutes. This - there just ain't enough here, chief.

13. ADP Files Episode 2 - The Ripper

Now - now - we begin to truly circle the bottom of the barrel, as we pass into the realm of the AD Police Files, three shorter-length OVA's made in 1990 by Artmic monstrosity Tony Takezaki as a prequel to Crisis. It's 2027, Megatokyo is even darker and gnarlier than before. There are no Knight Sabers, just a bunch of unhinged murdercops doing their best with the ordnance they've got. Most of these stories loosely focus on a rookie Leon and his senpai, horny tanned titaness Jeena Malso. Loosely. They just kinda show up once or twice, because ultimately the ADPF stories are all characterized less by being cop shows and more by being exploitation bits.

I'm very serious, here. You start with a whole bunch of nudity and general irrational sluttiness by the female characters in the show, slather on egregious amounts of gore both biological and cybernetic, and a general nonsensical nastiness from all involved characters, especially Jeena. Music's not great, either. Weirdly enough it's in English even in the sub. ADPF veers towards horror at times, but the sheer low-budget (holy shit it's just saturated with brownscale still frames it's not even funny how many punches this series pulls) makes it impossible to be scared by it.

And yet in The Ripper, an episode more about a young ADP detective trying to catch some cyborg ripping out the underparts of various Megatokyo teen prostitutes than Leon or Jeena, there is this weirdly clever hint of brilliance. There's an interesting story about institutionalized and internalized misogyny with cybernetics as a shorthand for it, but it's buried under deep, deep garbage.

Okay, think of it like this: 2027 and everyone loves cybernetics. People love machines in 2028 AD, you know? Of course, they're all gone by the time we reach 2032, at least in polite society. That's because the issue this episode and the one following it deal with are people who go crazy because of excessive cybernetic implantation. You know, like in 2077 and the 2020 RPG. Cyberpsychos, men and women alienated by the metal that has replaced their meat, the disconnect and feeling of absolute superiority that such body-tools give them having consumed them entirely. In a Buddhist sense you might say they're asuras incarnate, succumbed to worldly desire entirely. Pondsmith and company thought of the idea first, back with CP2013 in 1988, but I don't think this anime copied from Pondsmith, even if it's kinda clear that Johnny Silverhand is a genderbent Priss, and that the general rock-n'-roll murder vibe of CP2020 takes a lot of cues from early BGC (look, RTAL made a goddam licensed BGC RPG in the West in 1996 that hybridized 2020 and Mekton, you can't tell me they weren't fans 'cause that ain't true). They could probably have both just formalized whatever the fuck it is that's going on in Tetsuo The Iron Man and left it at that.

So cybernetics are the craze, not on their way out yet. And The Ripper turns out to be this up-and-coming executive who had her uterus and other lady parts ripped out after a rival graphed her productivity against her uterine cycle in a meeting and kicked her down the corporate ladder in doing so. She cuts the stuff out - she starts winning. Even starts fucking the guy who humiliated her in the first place. Of course, he ends up preferring meat-parts for the ol' insert, and so our exec loses her shit, kills him, and then starts having horrible pains down there, and blackouts where she heads off to wreak revenge against all the temptresses of female flesh.

Yeah, okay, so maybe fucking the guy who screwed you over in the first place was a bad move, lady. Was it a peace offering disguised as a power play? Who knows. Does the whole idea of having to cut off the stem of female weakness seem like the decision of a mentally unstable person, one who perhaps could have powered through her humiliations and not decided to play by the boys-club game? Maybe.

But still, the idea of humiliating a rival woman by basically saying she's unreliable because of her biology. It's deeply, deeply twisted, yet who can deny that something like that has probably happened at some bigshot consulting firm here in the states? Who can deny that man is meant to be rational, woman irrational, and in attempting to play the boy's game our villainess only destroyed parts of herself in an attempt to become acceptable to a society that never was going to accept her in the first place because she wasn't an easy lay some exec could fuck and forget? Some of the best sci-fi is, in my opinion, the 'holy shit that's grotesque but I can see people doing it' kinda stuff, and this - this gets very close to that.

What a pity this entire story is just told by the Ripper to detective Iris in one of her moments of lucidity. The whole idea of Miss Ripper also no longer having legal rights because of excessive cyberization, being just another rampant Boomer for the big-boy cops to perforate with tungsten slugs, is also grim in just the right way, but what a pity that she attempts to escape by offering up her body wholesale to various urban scum, as if embracing the role of whore, which is a pretty sexist way to look at the whole thing.

What a pity that there's a weirdly interesting story here, one which ADPF refuses to let be realized.

14. ADP Files Episode 3 - The Man Who Bites His Tongue

Not to be confused with famous Jojo stand, Bites Za Dusto. And with that terrible pun out of the way...

Man Who Bites His Tongue is one of two ADP files based off of Tony Takezaki's spinoff manga of the same name, with its first episode coming from the same volume as well (The Ripper being the only one that isn’t). I flipped through this once, since it has built-in English translation in the original scans, translated by Japanese folks into the cringiest Engrish this side of ‘HERE COME THE CYBER FUNKER’ (bonus points if you know what that's from). It works when said tales are out-and-out comedies - gee, Takezaki wonders, what would an Osaka-constructed Boomer be like? For the ostensibly melodramatic stories like this one and Phantom Woman, it’s no good, nothing works.

(I just remembered that these manga exist, and that one of them, one said to foreshadow part of the origin of Largo, actually saw a Western release. But, man, I dunno. A spinoff of a spinoff, a second-degree simulacrum? I don't remember the Western-release one having any real redeeming features, and the Takezaki-native ones are interesting mostly as gag pieces with their hilariously bad 'dubs'. So I'm going to let them pass in the night.)

(I also just remembered that there were two BGC 2032 light novels published in 1989, copies of which I have but lack the skills to scan or translate. Shit, there was an LN made in 2012 where the Sabers are all highschool girls, which I have but haven't got translated either. Obviously, those, too, must go. Shit, some yahoo published a slice-of-life BGC manga with the 2032 cast in 1998. How the fuck did that happen, folks? I don't know.)

That aside, The Man Who Bites His Tongue is basically Robocop but without memory loss, just a full-body cyborg reconstruction with no sense of touch on his armor plates (so he gnaws on his tongue because it's the only major meat part of him left). Poor bastard - barely human, sent out into the wild grunge-hell of Megatokyo to go toe-to-toe with Combat Boomers, then stuck in a charging port in a dark room for the rest of the while another awful AD Police Files female stereotype - the horny mad scientist who created him humps our genital-less gendarme aggressively for no clear reason. With no touch - no risk - too much detachment, our insidious ingenue keeps him hooked on stimulants to keep his performance acceptable - even if acceptable, to her, is him shredding Boomers to the point that the rest of the force thinks he, or what’s left of him, is going a little too far. It gets out that miss mad scientist wants to get rid of Brobocop once he’s no longer useful - his dependence on drugs to function as a combat machine is a flaw best ironed out in V 2.0. So Our Boy Billy jams enough of the stuff into his tongue (concealed by a drug dealer under the guise of sending him cassette books, which is the funniest part of the entire ADP series holy shit) to go totally unhinged (we see shots of his brain pulsate like a beating heart, which is not how brains work) and slaughter his way through the ADP HQ until Jeena Malso - the same Jeena who is the rough animus of the whole series, Leon’s senior, Robo-bonobo’s ex lover, etc. - faces him and, at his request, shoots him right in the tongue.

None of this is served well by animation. Or audio. Or anything, really. Any actual action sequences become brown-pencil stills with a bit of voiceover work, and that alone is enough to sink the project. But then we’ve got Police Files (ADPF’s) horniness coming out again, this time in a way that doesn’t serve the plot super well at all. The one visual upside is our Robo-bonhime’s design, really only because of the detail of his hard-armor lips - no nose and no easily seen teeth, just this little nub of pink occasionally slipping out between two plates - sells the uncanny horror of the Boomeroid’s situation, more than any other part of the story does.

15. Crash Episode 3 - Melt Down

We're really scraping the bottom of the barrel here, aren't we? And it only gets worse, we've still got two more entries in the quasicanon to work through. But Melt Down, the last episode in Bubblegum Crash and thus the last entry in what could be considered mainline 2032-ish Crisis.

Melt Down tries to end the series. To culminate in a final battle. To be more of an ending than the almost deliberate anticlimax of Scoop Chase. But by this point you can tell Artmic's budget is stretched too think to do much of anything (juxtapose the outside shot of the Piss coffee shop from Crash 1 with its counterpart here and you'll see what I mean), and that the legal system is encroaching on Suzuki and company, and that no one really wants to finish Crisis this way, with fragmentary chunks of what one must assume the plans for those last episodes of Crisis recycled here.

So Largo has his Adama-derived AI virus. So he triggers a Boomer apocalypse. Which would have carried the episode all the way through, I think, but that isn't what happens. After the sabers absolutely curbstomp a derivative of the 12B's from Blow Up - you know, the ones that just ooze video game miniboss energy, who should not be curbstomped by indiscriminate firing of weapons to suit low budge animation - all the Boomers fuse into a giant angry-ass face on top of the Megatokyo 'data bank' in the style of Tinsel City. We've come full circle, but our new mega-fuse Boomer is dumb and ugly and can't do much more than gripe about how it needs 'mooooooore dataaaaaaa'. So the Sabers fly at it, break out fucking particle-beam guns - there's a moment of fairly forced tension where Nene has to scan for the core for whatever reason - and kill it. Nene speculates that the bugaboo was attempting to absorb enough data to transcend mere humanity - whatever. Might have been interesting, if rote robopocalypse fare. Except that's just the fucking decoy plan.

Yeah, turns out Largo's real scheme is to hijack a nuclear-powered boring machine (which actually has a cool design in settei form but is colored and rendered in a hilariously ugly fashion (Elon Musk eat your blackened little heart out)) and drive it into an offshore fusion reactor. Sylia flips out since this would destroy Megatokyo and throw the rest of the world into a panic (fusion reactors by definition don’t work that way but whatever), so the final battle is the 3 non-Sylia Sabers fighting big custom-built Boomers a la Red Eyes - again, in the ugliest colors possible - while Sylia goes into the driller, finds Largo in a regeneration tank (why is he in the fucking drill? He’s not a martyr-type, he prefers to let others do that for him), and ends up getting tentacle-grabbed by him and forced into a mindscape, and the Boomers try to do the same thing to the Sabers, but they break out of mindjack together, etc etc etc. Sylia flies off to parts unknown, muses about how Largo’s last line about something something environmentalism (would Dio Brando-meets-Skynet really give a shit about preserving ecological harmony? I think fucking not (Largo voiced DIO in the original Stardust Crusaders OVA! I'm not joking!)), and the credits roll over a fairly good closing song. It's not a great way to wrap up the series, it's not even a good rehash of decent plot elements seen earlier in the series. It's just kind of disappointing.

Now, Artmic went under after Youmex sued them over this series. And Youmex got reabsorbed back into Toshiba EMI after it became clear that the musical OVA market was a dead horse. And AIC co-produced BGC 2040 with ADV Films, themselves riding high off of bringing Eva to the states, but even then that series just sucks from top to bottom for various reasons (I will hear no quarrel about this, I will hear no argument, my opinion is right, yours is wrong, if you disagree you can suck my ding-dong). So... yeah. At this point we're going on beyond mainline BGC and back into the swamps of mediocre spinoffs, starting with Dark Horse / Studio Proteus's Westernized prequel:

16. Grand Mal

As the internet accelerated the development and publishing of fanfiction, codifying otherwise ethereal tropes in the collective mind-jello of the nerd unconsciousness, one starts to see the true birth of the Mary Sue and other original characters existing mostly to intrude on fanfiction stories. Self Inserts, too, but those could occasionally be actually be good... Eh. Whatever.

The point is that it feels like every goddamn 90's era BGC fanfiction always ended up focusing around some original character who ran into the Sabers by hook or by crook, with the focus then being on them instead of the four characters Crisis could focus around. Sometimes this way of doing things worked (I really should do a BGC fanfic rec list some other day). Most of the time it did not.

This lone plot shift, the focus on Adam Warren's hypermurderous OC Peter something-Russian-and-unpronounceable as he fumbles around Megatokyo for two issues before refocusing on dealing with the Sabers in the latter two issue, is what codifies Grand Mal, in my mind, as being essentially bad Crisis fanfiction. But it's licensed, albeit probably not entirely canon, and it purports to answer the question of why Sylia's eyes glowed red at the end of OVA 5 and why Largo insisted they were the same in OVA 6.

Which would have all been fine, except this feels like a BGC OVA cut down to 20 minutes of runtime and subjugated to the design sensibilities of Dark Age 90's comics. Fuckin' Peter goes into bursts of uncontrollable bloodlust at plot-convenient moments, is a mercenary hired to finish a job in hopes of getting a cure, and by issue four manages to bring the Sabers to their knees without trying very hard, to the point that he has Sylia and Priss basically begging him to stand down (before Nene hacks one of his Boomers to pop him off, but still). Waiter, I'll have one obnoxiously edgy Mary Sue, medium-rare and with a side of water, hold the sauce.

Yeah, sure, all the characters (Priss especially) are flanderized to hell and back, and Sylia doesn't seem half as hypercompetent as she should be if she is what Warren says she is (no spoilers!) but it's the new characters - Peter and the 'Intellectual Assets' - that rub me the wrong way. The nature of the IA's is a matter for another time, but they basically run the company through Quincy despite being obnoxious hypersarcastic siblings with a side-dealing in contempt for 'organics'. They're the kind of supervillain that people thought was cool because they had NO WEAKNESS, on the grounds that 'supervillains should be rational and think their plans through' (buddy, we've got plenty a' real-life supervillains who seem to be a mix of malicious and moronic. Even geniuses can do stupid things, y'know?). Admiral Thrawn-ish, really.

Also, it's not really clear how they relate to Peter Vaseline (a rough approximation of his name). Peter spearheaded an extraction to nab one of them or something like them from GENOM at the behest of some Germans, he got fucked over and lost the info-hoovering robot that helps him out later, and then he gets hired back by Euros who he knows, loosely, are GENOM, to do another extraction in exchange for medical help. Eventually he settles on doing an extraction of an entirely different 'asset', namely Sylia, but who the hell is he working for at that point? The IA twins made it sound like they only had rumors that something like them existed out there, and it's only through Peter's robot that he figures out her identity and pins her down as his target, so did they just make an educated guess, figure he would know that they wanted Peter to target an IA which was not them at their behest? He seems to think it's a suicide mission but brushes it off as being 'his job', so how do these IA kids figure they can keep Peter Vaginazord under control with only the loose promise of a cure to his edgelord brain problems? Especially when these bad guys don't exactly strike me as the type who would keep their word. Jesus, why disguise their job offer in the first place if they're banking on that? Why not just go to him, send him to 'tie up a loose end', and make it very clear that there's no fucking way he could touch them all the way up in the Tower? Why supersede the admittedly pretty menacing character design of Quincy as the Ultimate Big Bad and replace him with these obnoxious little slimeballs?

Yeah. It's 90's edgy American 'cyberpunk' at its worst, all night and nastiness without a chance for hope or kindness on either the heroes' or villains' part. It's fucking awful, but we have further down to go. One more step, folks. Just one more.

17. ADP Files Episode 1 - The Phantom Woman

Welp. Here we are. ADP Files, episode 1. The other story based off of one of Takezaki's manga stories next to episode 3. And just... eh.

I only put The Ripper as high as I did because the story it got very close to telling was B-movie sex-n'-violence shlock that felt eerily possible, just barely edging into the territory of possibly being profound. Man Who Bites His Tongue is a tragedy all its own, too, but there just ain't much to that one, you know how it's gonna end and it's just a matter of slogging through another nympho mad scientist humping her paralyzed Robocop fuckboy, among other things. Both had something worth talking about, even if overall the episodes lack much compelling stuff to get past the shamelessly tasteless bits. A glimmer of brilliance drowned in sewage.

The Phantom Woman has... none of that. It's sexist and sexless at the same time; it's ugly but it's not trying as hard as one might think to be thus. Leon kills a Boomer Prostitute who walks toward him and tries to seduce the man she's about to kill. He shoots her. Her brain gets used in another meat-body, but now she's all yan-yan for Leon, wants to associate being horny with being shot. Why one would recycle a brain like that is beyond me - why her rampancy and 'scrambled hormone chips' are chalked up by Leon's senpai Gina as a woman succumbing to her primal, lustful urges is also beyond me. Why Gina wants to fuck Leon after watching one of her own get mauled by an ugly-ass waitress Boomer is even more beyond me.

Yeah, see, the whole idea of women in particular as being all closet sluts just all an inch away from violence-induced megaorgasms is kind of the idea that Phantom Woman plays straight, but The Ripper is more willing to mess around with, and which Bites His Tongue doesn't give two shits about. I can't say it's compelling, or amusing, or interesting, or anything other than just kind of grotesquely dumb in that 90's comic-book mega-shock-value way.

Ah well. Such is life.

ANYHOO

Okay. So it ends. I've worked on this mega-essay for two weeks, folks. Not responsibly, yes, but I have no regrets.

Except - wait. Shit. Did I forget the Knight Sabers Holiday In Bali Special? Yeah. Yeah, I did. Ostensibly this little tourism infomercial was where, according to a later reunion interview, the actresses began to bond together as pals. Or at least, Akiko Hiramitsu (Nene) and Michie Tomizawa (Linna) did. (It’s a very funny little interview, Animeigo has it on their site, I’ll link to it later.) But it's almost impossible to watch without cringing internally, and only Yoshiko Sakakibara seems to be aware of it when she points out that yes, she's in a longer-haired wig. I can't rate something like this, folks. I just can't.

#bubblegum crisis #bgc #bubblegum crash #ad police files #aic #artmic #youmex #80s anime #anime ova #anime #riding bean #madox-01 #Youtube

0 notes