MEGAZONE 23 SPECIAL SONG COLLECTION (aka Megazone songs I both downloaded and liked)
Despite the fact that Megazone 23 PART I and PART II look and feel completely different, they were only made a year apart from each other, and tell one complete and (somewhat) coherent story. PART III, on the other hand is its own thing– it was made in 1989 (three years after the release of PART II), takes place several hundred years after the events of the original story, and has an almost completely original cast. As is usually the case with a sequel like this, it’s not very good– a lot like The Godfather III or all the Pink Panther movies made after Peter Sellers’ death. Yeah, it’s pretty bad.
Strangely enough, the plot is the best thing about this part. Unlike PART I, which was clunky and lacked an end, and PART II which just made no sense– PART III actually tells a pretty decent story that mostly makes sense. I still think it suffers from the same problems the other Megazones suffered from in their storytelling, but less so.
Unfortunately, the praise ends there. This entire production is a disaster. For starters, the animation is horrible. There are some cuts which do look really nice, but for the most part the animation ranges from G-Gundam quality to… Gundress quality. I’m not even kidding, there’s entire sequences in the first episode that are just unfinished cuts of animation with no shading or inbetweening. Don’t believe me? See for yourself, then!
The characters in this are also really lame. Especially Eve, who for reason has a horrible seiyuu this time around, and I think Megazone 23 PART III was the only show she ever did. The main character is like a less good Shogo, and he even admits it in the dialogue. The villain’s also pretty lame.
Megazone 23 PART III is a pretty bad sequel to an otherwise good series of OVAs. You can watch it for the sake of completion of you really want to, but if you’re short on time, I say skip it.
ps: anyone up for a game of HARD ON??
Megazone 23 PART II is quite an uneven piece of work. The animation is mostly incredible, but at times isn’t entirely convincing. The story has good elements, but is told in a convoluted manner. The characters are all great, but are still fairly one-dimensional. All this doesn’t keep it from being one hell of a ride, though.
The first thing that strikes you about PART II is how it looks– it has a completely different design sense than the first one. The cute, big-eyed designs from the first part are traded in for more intense and realistic looking characters penned by Yasuomi “Kite” Umetsu. And it’s not just the designs that had a re-work– the entire piece has a darker colour palette, more complex shadow effects, and five more tones than Part I. In fact, if you didn’t know any better, it’d take you a bit to figure out that this was a Megazone sequel. I mean, these reworked characters barely look at all like their Part I counterparts!
Part II also one-ups Part I when it comes to characterization. Part I had some pretty decent characters, but in the end I found them to be somewhat bland. While mostly one-dimensional, all of the lovable punks in Part II burst with personality through their designs and snappy one-liners. You’re not going to get super attached to these bozos or anything, but they’re depicted as a likable bunch, and all get their moments to shine.
Where Part II falls short is in the story department, however. As I mentioned earlier, the plot for Part I was pretty weak, so the fact that Part II’s plot is worse is… not very good. Well, it’s not so much the plot that’s bad, as much as it’s the execution. This OVA was, for some reason, directed by Ichiro Itano– a man known for his complex missile firing patterns and… lack of any sort of directorial ability. The piece starts off well enough, but once all the plot seeds begin to blossom at around the half-way mark, you can slowly see Itano losing his handle over the project. The whole thing ends with a bunch of explosions matched to cryptic dialogue, and not in the good End of Evangelion way. But really, in the end you don’t care about the plot, since the show has a lot of chases and action scenes thrown in to distract you.
The production values are also a good distraction from the convoluted excuse for a plot. For the most part, this thing looks beautiful. The characters are all super detailed, the animation is at times frighteningly fluid, and the piece on the whole is dark and beautiful. There are odd cuts here and there where the characters seem too weightless, and there are also a number of cuts which lack shading, but they aren’t terribly jarring. One place where the production really shines is in the action sequences, which are always well choreographed, exciting and sometimes extremely gory.
Megazone 23 Part II is, in the end, 90 minutes of wasted potential. For all that it could be, it falls prey to poor directing and tired anime cliches. Perhaps it could be better in the hands of a more skillful director, but what we get is only really good for the action.
Last night I jumped into my DeLorean, set the destination for 1985, and took a colourful, sexual, violent, gory, and action-packed trip into the first installment of MEGAZONE 23 (that’s two-three, not twenty-three.) For those not in the know, Megazone 23 is the title that brought the OVA format into prominence, and is also the show that many people claim The Matrix rips off on. However, to me it’s a very interesting look back into the history of anime.
Megazone 23 is one of those shows you’ll see old guys talk favourably of all the time when they go on about the Good Ol’ Days. Me, being a relatively new anime fan (started watching things in ’99) lack such nostalgia, and can look at these things without the rose-tinted glasses. Simply put, Megazone isn’t as flawless and perfect as some of these guys may lead you to think. The storytelling is clunky, the animation is uneven, and the production is generally somewhat amateurish. Like the first Space Battleship Yamato, this show is filled with the staff just trying new things out, and not having much of a budget to mess with. It’s good as an educational experience, but as far as entertainment goes, it shows its age.
That isn’t to say it isn’t totally entertaining. This thing is just so 80s– one of the first scenes involves tons of copyright infringement (Cokes, mentions of McDonald’s and the Hard Rock Cafe), ridiculous outfits, poofy hair, and a perfectly straight guy who wears eye shadow for some reason. Yeah, I don’t know either. The synth-heavy soundtrack by Shiro Sagisu also does everything its power to date this thing, reminding you constantly that, YEAH THIS WAS MADE IN THE 80s. And it’s fucking awesome.
If you already know the big twist in the story (which you probably do, especially considering I gave it way in the first paragraph) then this doesn’t have much going for it storywise, since the twist basically is the story. The show doesn’t actually end either, so as far as plot goes, it’s kind of weak. I guess I have to watch part 2 before I can pass judgment though, so I’ll be doing that right now!
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