The Year is 2005, it was not the worst of year but most certainly not the best either. Anime releases such as Eureka Seven kept the hype for anime high, with alternate releases like Noein and Blood+ In the mix for those with a more (mocking voice) “Refined Pallet”. Added along of course with the big three inshounen going strong, Bleach had just started the year before, One Piece goes into its 6thyear and the original Naruto is only 2 years out from having been rebooted with the release of Shuppuden. This was a fairly low-key year, nothing bigor gaming changing, but nothing too drastically horrible…until of course the release of the anime we are going to be talking about today.
A single OAV production that not only is consideredby some to be the worst anime they have ever witnessed, but was so bad it ended the careers of many of the staff who worked on it. It has a story so convoluted it was like tryingto deliver the plot to an average 24 episode mech anime in a mere 20 minutes It is a production that is really only noteworthyfor one thing, that it got animated in the first place. Thankfully it’s almost impossible to find,let alone watch. Ladies, Gentlemen, and others my name is Arkadaand today on Glass Reflection we have dived deep into the bowels of anime history to bringyou an anime so loathed, and so horrible, I almost couldn’t find the footageto show you just how bad it really is.
Today is Mars of Destruction, God Help usall. Let’s Jam. So before we dive headfirst into this sh**fest allow me to explain upfront how this OAV is one that you will thankfully never have towatch. Mostly because of it’s availability. It’s never been licensed in North Americaso no DVD’s and even no VHS copies are available, because it is just barely old enough to qualify for that. It’s not available on any legal streamingservice, and in my research only one Fansub group was ever brave enough to sub and releaseit online. Even that release though is hard to find anywhereand comes in “beautiful 640x480 AVI format”. Which I say in jest because it’s not even640x480. It’s more like 640x413 because there’sthis suspicious black bar at the bottom. There’s no other releases out that I couldeven find to compare, so I can’t confirm if this black bar is in the original production or if itwas just added by the subbers as a convenient place to put subtitles. Considering though how the shots are framed,I’m inclined to believe it’s actually the anime that’s doing this, in which caseWHAT IS WRONG WITH YOUR ASPECT RATIO. I should also point out that this video willbe spoiler-tastic, though honestly? Do you really care in this case? Like really? Freakin Re- Allow me to attempt to explain what exactly is going on in this show, because as I mentioned the pacing is completely wackedin the head. In the long far off year of 2010 some guysreturning back from Mars and burn up upon retry to earth's atmosphere due to some “mysterious malfunction” that is never explained. Shortly afterwards many a bizarre event beginsto happen on the streets of Tokyo, apparently because of this Martian debris. At least that’s what’s being assumed bythe expletory text here. Make sense so far? Good! that won’t last. Next we see some alien creature’s referredto as “ancients” attacking the city. And it’s up to an elite taskforce of Moeblobgirls with assault rifles to defend the city! Why Young girls? Why no Helmets? WHO KNOWS! I’d say that they forgoed the helmets toshowcase the character designs but I’ve seen fan work on Deviantart better than this.
Not that any of this matters because one ofthe girls gets her head blown off anyways, as your reminder that this is a “serious”and “grounded" action series. Eventually though the girls get outmatched,and are saved by our protagonist in a skin-tight mech suit wielding a plasma sword. Though I say ”saved” but our protagonistgets smacked down so hard I question why the story didn’t just end there with all of their DEATHS. We cut to him in the hospital being dotedupon by the surviving female soldiers but nowhere do we get an explanation on how theymanaged to escape. The ancients just let them go I guess? Ok. Sure. Because that makes sense. There is a lot in this story that’s blatanthand waving for the sake of progressing… what I assume to be the plot. I don’t know if someone thought that thiswas good character development or what but having our protagonist get the living shitkicked out of him is not a good start. In fact it’s not a good end either. Within 5 minutes we are in another fight scenewhere he once again gets shat on. But eventually he’s able to save the daybecause, who I assume to be the main female lead is in danger once again, but alsobecause our big bad conveniently and very politely stands still for the pre-requisiteamount of time for our hero to line up a sniper shot and slam it into his torso “SAVINGTHE WORLD”. This is of course after “twist” wherethe bad guy reveals that they were REALLY earthlings all along, awakened by the Martiandebris, and Humanity itself is the villain! Because that makes sense. *sigh* ooook. We have a lot to unpack here, so let’s startsimple. There is no reason to care about any of thecharacters in this story because there is no character development. Yes there’s only 20 minutes long and that’snot a lot of time to work with, sure, but deal with that by cutting away all of the extra characters and just focus on one maybe two of them. Let’s not spend several minutes of our limitedtime talking about these 4 female soldiers and how specialized and badass they are, onlyfor them to be of no use whatsoever. The development of our main character Takeruconsists of two fight scenes where he get’s beat up showing how inept he is at what he’ssupposed to be good at.
There’s an overly long suit up sequencewhere he gets seemingly crushed by the suit as he attempts to put it on. Oh yeah and their's this scene of him talking to a disembodied voice telling him to get into the damn mech suit because if we can’t give him his own character development we can just pretend he’s shinji ikari andhe’ll get development via osmosis or something. #BECAUSETHATMAKESSENSE The animation is not much better than the story. It is not only poorly drawn, it is not juststiff, it is something I’d use on someone if I wanted to attempt to cause blindnessthat’s how bad I found it. To be fair this was 2005, the industry isjust starting to get a leg to stand on in this new era of digital animation. For a lot of productions your mileage didvary, but for a time where we had such samey bland digital character designs, thesefeel like they came out of the bottom of the bargain bin. They consist of every bad stereotype fromthe time, the action scenes could be recreated by a student and 30 minutes in an editingprogram moving characters from one side of the frame to the other. Saying nothing about the musical score forthe show which somehow I found somehow to be an even more of an outrageous offence. There is little original music in this production,what exists I feel like was created on a $5 synthesizer someone found in a back alleyin Akihabara. The worst though is the out of context bastardizationof classical music. Seemingly thrown into the mix because itsfree to use and someone thought “well there has to be music right”? Is a bunch of well-known pieces by classical composers. There for no reason. No thought however was put into how this music is supposed to complement the rest of the production, because it doesn’t complement AT ALL. It’s there to have music playing.
That’s it. It enrages me because I now cannot listento these pieces without remembering this sh**fest I now attach them too. And don’t get me started on that “Twist”shamalan-esk ending by saying “Oh the ancients are the real earthlings and it’s the humanswho are the invaders.” That is such a copout ending with no buildupwhatsoever. It would have been fine to end with that ifthere was anything before it to lead us to believe it was even remotely a possibility,or you know if we had any reason to care about the plot in the first place. Really though by the time the twist came aboutI’d already tapped out and was trying to figure out if I would die via alcohol poisoning if I tried to turn watching this into a drinking game. The answer to that is yes by the way. Every single aspect of this production, fromthe story, the characters, the animation, the sound are all devoid of any creativityor possible enjoyment. Everything is so bad that if even one of theseaspects was in any other production they would have dragged down a 10/10 show down into1 or 2 out of 10 territory at best. No one in their right mind should watch this.
A single OAV production that not only is consideredby some to be the worst anime they have ever witnessed, but was so bad it ended the careers of many of the staff who worked on it. It has a story so convoluted it was like tryingto deliver the plot to an average 24 episode mech anime in a mere 20 minutes It is a production that is really only noteworthyfor one thing, that it got animated in the first place. Thankfully it’s almost impossible to find,let alone watch. Ladies, Gentlemen, and others my name is Arkadaand today on Glass Reflection we have dived deep into the bowels of anime history to bringyou an anime so loathed, and so horrible, I almost couldn’t find the footageto show you just how bad it really is.
Today is Mars of Destruction, God Help usall. Let’s Jam. So before we dive headfirst into this sh**fest allow me to explain upfront how this OAV is one that you will thankfully never have towatch. Mostly because of it’s availability. It’s never been licensed in North Americaso no DVD’s and even no VHS copies are available, because it is just barely old enough to qualify for that. It’s not available on any legal streamingservice, and in my research only one Fansub group was ever brave enough to sub and releaseit online. Even that release though is hard to find anywhereand comes in “beautiful 640x480 AVI format”. Which I say in jest because it’s not even640x480. It’s more like 640x413 because there’sthis suspicious black bar at the bottom. There’s no other releases out that I couldeven find to compare, so I can’t confirm if this black bar is in the original production or if itwas just added by the subbers as a convenient place to put subtitles. Considering though how the shots are framed,I’m inclined to believe it’s actually the anime that’s doing this, in which caseWHAT IS WRONG WITH YOUR ASPECT RATIO. I should also point out that this video willbe spoiler-tastic, though honestly? Do you really care in this case? Like really? Freakin Re- Allow me to attempt to explain what exactly is going on in this show, because as I mentioned the pacing is completely wackedin the head. In the long far off year of 2010 some guysreturning back from Mars and burn up upon retry to earth's atmosphere due to some “mysterious malfunction” that is never explained. Shortly afterwards many a bizarre event beginsto happen on the streets of Tokyo, apparently because of this Martian debris. At least that’s what’s being assumed bythe expletory text here. Make sense so far? Good! that won’t last. Next we see some alien creature’s referredto as “ancients” attacking the city. And it’s up to an elite taskforce of Moeblobgirls with assault rifles to defend the city! Why Young girls? Why no Helmets? WHO KNOWS! I’d say that they forgoed the helmets toshowcase the character designs but I’ve seen fan work on Deviantart better than this.
Not that any of this matters because one ofthe girls gets her head blown off anyways, as your reminder that this is a “serious”and “grounded" action series. Eventually though the girls get outmatched,and are saved by our protagonist in a skin-tight mech suit wielding a plasma sword. Though I say ”saved” but our protagonistgets smacked down so hard I question why the story didn’t just end there with all of their DEATHS. We cut to him in the hospital being dotedupon by the surviving female soldiers but nowhere do we get an explanation on how theymanaged to escape. The ancients just let them go I guess? Ok. Sure. Because that makes sense. There is a lot in this story that’s blatanthand waving for the sake of progressing… what I assume to be the plot. I don’t know if someone thought that thiswas good character development or what but having our protagonist get the living shitkicked out of him is not a good start. In fact it’s not a good end either. Within 5 minutes we are in another fight scenewhere he once again gets shat on. But eventually he’s able to save the daybecause, who I assume to be the main female lead is in danger once again, but alsobecause our big bad conveniently and very politely stands still for the pre-requisiteamount of time for our hero to line up a sniper shot and slam it into his torso “SAVINGTHE WORLD”. This is of course after “twist” wherethe bad guy reveals that they were REALLY earthlings all along, awakened by the Martiandebris, and Humanity itself is the villain! Because that makes sense. *sigh* ooook. We have a lot to unpack here, so let’s startsimple. There is no reason to care about any of thecharacters in this story because there is no character development. Yes there’s only 20 minutes long and that’snot a lot of time to work with, sure, but deal with that by cutting away all of the extra characters and just focus on one maybe two of them. Let’s not spend several minutes of our limitedtime talking about these 4 female soldiers and how specialized and badass they are, onlyfor them to be of no use whatsoever. The development of our main character Takeruconsists of two fight scenes where he get’s beat up showing how inept he is at what he’ssupposed to be good at.
There’s an overly long suit up sequencewhere he gets seemingly crushed by the suit as he attempts to put it on. Oh yeah and their's this scene of him talking to a disembodied voice telling him to get into the damn mech suit because if we can’t give him his own character development we can just pretend he’s shinji ikari andhe’ll get development via osmosis or something. #BECAUSETHATMAKESSENSE The animation is not much better than the story. It is not only poorly drawn, it is not juststiff, it is something I’d use on someone if I wanted to attempt to cause blindnessthat’s how bad I found it. To be fair this was 2005, the industry isjust starting to get a leg to stand on in this new era of digital animation. For a lot of productions your mileage didvary, but for a time where we had such samey bland digital character designs, thesefeel like they came out of the bottom of the bargain bin. They consist of every bad stereotype fromthe time, the action scenes could be recreated by a student and 30 minutes in an editingprogram moving characters from one side of the frame to the other. Saying nothing about the musical score forthe show which somehow I found somehow to be an even more of an outrageous offence. There is little original music in this production,what exists I feel like was created on a $5 synthesizer someone found in a back alleyin Akihabara. The worst though is the out of context bastardizationof classical music. Seemingly thrown into the mix because itsfree to use and someone thought “well there has to be music right”? Is a bunch of well-known pieces by classical composers. There for no reason. No thought however was put into how this music is supposed to complement the rest of the production, because it doesn’t complement AT ALL. It’s there to have music playing.
That’s it. It enrages me because I now cannot listento these pieces without remembering this sh**fest I now attach them too. And don’t get me started on that “Twist”shamalan-esk ending by saying “Oh the ancients are the real earthlings and it’s the humanswho are the invaders.” That is such a copout ending with no buildupwhatsoever. It would have been fine to end with that ifthere was anything before it to lead us to believe it was even remotely a possibility,or you know if we had any reason to care about the plot in the first place. Really though by the time the twist came aboutI’d already tapped out and was trying to figure out if I would die via alcohol poisoning if I tried to turn watching this into a drinking game. The answer to that is yes by the way. Every single aspect of this production, fromthe story, the characters, the animation, the sound are all devoid of any creativityor possible enjoyment. Everything is so bad that if even one of theseaspects was in any other production they would have dragged down a 10/10 show down into1 or 2 out of 10 territory at best. No one in their right mind should watch this.
- I’m obviously not in my right mind becauseI watched it THREE TIMES to try and figure this s**t out, trying to find some “Deeper Meaning” but there is none. Don’t watch this. Don’t buy it, not that you can. Don’t download it, it’s an insult to yourbandwidth. I’d rather marathon both SAO and SchoolDays back to back without a bathroom break, because at least then I’d have some semblance of asatisfying ending to trick me into believeing that it was worth it in the end, but this? There's nothing. no payoff, no reason towatch at all! Go and watch paint dry, at least that's entertaining on a microscopiclevel. I’m legitimately pissed right now, you knowwhat I’m not even going to dignify this with a proper ending, I have threemore horrible anime to review and need to keep my fortitude up so I’m going to gowatch something good and this video can just finish on its own. Ok? Stay Frosty everyone. Bye. *Door Opening* *PS3 startup beep* *PS3 startup sound* *PS3 resume sound* *Off-key singing of STAND PROUD*
