Aquarion Evol OVA — Screw the Space-Time Continuum

July 2nd, 2015

   

Instead of donuts, frog puns. …Japanese!

Impressions:

I'm going to display both my ignorance of the original Aquarion series, and apathy of finding out more, and just go ahead and assume that every single character that I didn't recognize from this was from that one. Anyway, if you remember way back towards the middle of Evol, the frog girl that turned invisible picked up a BF from testicle world who then took a bullet for her, so this picks up with their reincarnations or whatever (I stopped being able to follow that after it was revealed that the protagonist was one half of a pegasus-dog), and by accidentally ripping open a book, tear a hole in the fabric of space time, pulling the characters of both series into a quick round of "what's going on" before having a mass orgy and everyone going back to their right space-times and living happily ever after thanks to the power of love and giant robot frogs. There was a Dyson fan involved in there too. And yet, I find this making more sense in context than, say, your average Punch Line reveal or Cross Ange return-from-death-thanks-to-frying-pan.

Mostly, I just enjoyed seeing Bag-Head Girl again and remembering that time Japan knew how to do a background joke without being obnoxious about it. I know so little about you, Bag-Head Girl, yet you intrigue me. That kind of captures how I felt about this entire episode, especially in relation to Logos; not so much that it was particularly needed or made any sense, but that stuff happened, and in twenty five minutes, it managed to have real (CGI) action, weirdness, and a narrative structure featuring not only a plot involving characters having an easily understood relationship and conflict within it, but a minor subplot (with Amata and Rabbit-head having a tiff) that all started and ended in a single episode without clubbing me over the head with unneeded exposition or mugging melodramatically for the camera. It even managed to balance a bunch of people fighting each other without any of them jobbing. Yes, it absolutely could have made (more) sense, and yes, it did get to skip a lot of those things by most of the characters in it having long since been introduced, but I was able to keep up and follow along with even the ones I wasn't really aware of… including the ones I had forgotten in the haze of the three years since Evol ended.

So it was enjoyable as a fanservicey tagline to Evol, but if it was meant to make me excited for Logos, it did the opposite because it was a very stark reminder of the things that Evol did right that Logos's first episode sucked great big donkey balls at.

Posted in Aquarion | 2 Comments »

2 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • jingoi says:

    one of the few things I liked about EVOL was that Jin died….so I’m transmitting rage to whoever thought it was a good idea to revive him!

    • Aroduc says:

      He’s still pretty dead, unless I really REALLY misread his ghost saying goodbye again to frog girl at the end before disappearing into thin air.