Festival of single disk anime, part 8: Samurai: Hunt for the Sword and Sailor Victory

A couple more Media Blasters releases today. And a lot more of them in the future. The entire single-disk anime market seems to have been dominated by Media Blasters and ADV.

Samurai: Hunt for the Sword

This two-episode OVA is based on a game, and it certainly seems game-like in how the characters are presented: a juvenile lead surrounded by a half-dozen females... and while the women all have a very distinct look, their personalities are pretty much off the rack.

This is one of the most generic anime I've ever seen: son of a dojo master must take over for his father who is gone on a mysterious quest, and must protect the city... (I can't remember if they named the city or not--I'll just assume that it was Kyoto) ...from revolutionaries who have a mysterious weapon, blah blah blah.

There wasn't anything to hook me in this show: characters, nor plot, nor art, nor music, nor fanservice. It's hard to imagine anyone but fans of the game liking it. A big "meh" all around.

Sailor Victory

So as far as I can tell, this is a side-story to the Graduation dating sim. Another version of it, Marriage, has also been released as an anime in R1 and will eventually be viewed by me, though the Graduation anime has not been released in this continent, AFAIK.

This one, however, is more fun than a barrel of rhesus monkeys. The city is being threatened by giant robots, so a team of cute girls fight with giant ninja mecha.

The producers of this show really know how to use a hook: the OP sequence features the entire female cast naked (a canned sequence that appears once in the show proper, the only nudity n the show). They also know to go after fetishes--the girls' uniforms when inside the mecha are sailor suits (and one of the girls eternally wears bloomers).

What I most enjoyed, however, was the hilarious English dub from Coastal Carolina--nobody does comedy better than them.

I had seen Sailor Victory a number of years ago and didn't think much of it--maybe I was trying to figure out who the characters are, and I didn't know the archetypes well enough. No matter, I've watched it again, and I find it good.