天下制覇

Ow.

I’m just going to use the numbering that the OVA uses. Get your panties in a bundle over it at the risk of inciting my wrath.

Impressions:

I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Black Lagoon. I love the antagonists and side characters, but despise the protagonists, particularly when they devolve into a broken record of "Life is hard and it made me like this. Don’t be like me. Waaaaaah." Go write some damn poetry, you damn whiny little brats. Or at least don’t steal away from my crazy navy nazis in order to have "Rebby and Rock’s touching nature vs nurture debate." *ahem* Getting off topic. Which is probably okay because this episode was about 95% setup and recap/backstory for Roberta anyway. There’s not much to say about the first two thirds of the episode.

Anyway, at least for the start of the OVAs, most of it is focused on fleshing out one of the antagonists from the original run, Roberta. Hell, the main characters barely even show up. That’s already a good start in my book. Rebby and Rock mostly just sit around, talk about Roberta and provide some background, the other two read the most curiously verbose Playboy article ever before acting like a glorified taxi service while Mini-Roberta Fabiola knifes someone in the penis and then shoots up the place. I’m probably making it sound a little more exciting than it actually was. The most intereting thing to happen in the first fifteen minutes was Roberta spinning a flintlock rifle around like she was going to be a part of the world’s most dangerous edition of Bring It On, but hey, after that… knife to the penis!

In any case, it’s a promising return so far. It actually almost looks like an OVA too, a rarity in this day and age. So long as they don’t get bogged down in Rebby’s bitter drunken ramblings, I’m game. Also note that this was the TV cut, although I didn’t really notice any major censoring. The released DVDs will probably have a minute or two more extra footage, but I doubt it’ll be anything overly interesting,  be about ten minutes longer, so who knows what’ll be there. I can’t imagine that they’d cut too much of the actually interesting stuff though. If there is something neat, I’ll make a note of it when it’s available. *shrug*