UFO Princess Valkyrie

This anime has a great soundtrack. I have bought every album I could find. I would have bought this anime purely to enjoy the flow of the musical track. The music is not only great by itself, but it is utilized to full effect, imparting whichever atmosphere is called for. Though the story does falter from time to time, the music is solid throughout the show. I truly feel this is a pretty good anime, but without the quality of its music, it would not be worth watching. For instance as princess Valkyrie decides to fly off into space in her UFO the music cut ... in is moving. Of coarse some of the battle scenes make use of "The Flight of the Valkyries", and other variations on that music by Wagner. I highly recommend this anime, and I recommend the soundtrack even more highly.

Recommendation: Inconsistent romantic comedy that is at its weakest when dealing with the romance elements, but can be quite funny when it's going pure comedy. Not terrible, but skippable. Review covers all 3 seasons plus OVAs.

Positives:

+ Full of the kind of insanity that you can only get from anime. Where else can you see a tank armed with a laser that turns things into catgirls? Or a magical bath that turns adult women into lolis? The series is full of the most ridiculous things you can imagine and a lot of the comedy is built around this unrestrained wackiness.

+ Most of the characters are fun. ... Laine was my personal favorite, but most get their time to shine at one point or another. I was also fond of the trio of little mascot characters (Shirou, Marduke and I forget the other one's name) and their side adventures as hard-boiled war veterans.

+ Makes the most of its ecchi tag. There are so many uncensored tiddies in this show that you stop even noticing that characters are topless at points. If you're in it for the cute alien girls, you won't be disappointed.

Negatives:

- Main romance is poorly developed and can feel uncomfortable. Valkyrie is not just physically transformed into a little girl, but has regressed in mental age as well. She can become adult Valkyrie, but only by kissing Kazuto, which leads to the very offputting sight of a 5 year old girl, in both body and mind, kissing an adult man on the lips. Leaving aside the pedophile vibes, Valkyrie just spends so much time as a child, and with Kazuto treating her more like a daughter than a girlfriend, that there is no romantic spark or chemistry between them even when she's an adult. You never really get a good sense of why they love each other.

- The main couple is just generally boring and lacking in personality. It's hard to root for such bland characters to get together. Kazuto is a generic nice guy, and Valkyrie has no personality beyond "likes Kazuto". She's often described in dialogue as cool and fiercely independent, but you never really get a sense of any of that from the show itself.

- Stumbles badly whenever it tries to get serious or tragic. Season 2 in particular is marred by this with the December Nocturne arc, which is so tonally imbalanced that it's hard to take any of it seriously.

- The art has not aged very well and it extensively re-uses previously animated scenes to cut corners. This is especially noticeable with the magical girl transformations, which are often repeated in full multiple times per episode.

- Too much stalling with the romance. It has a sitcom-like tendency to always reset to the status quo, with Kazuto and Valkyrie's marriage being called off multiple times in increasingly improbable ways, and still remaining unresolved after 3 seasons. For a couple that already lacks heat, this makes it even harder to care about them

UFO Princess Valkyrie is an anime that exists. Unsurprisingly, it's an adaption of a manga (never heard that one before...). It feels weird saying this "means something to me" since I heavily dislike this show. I would only say that because this (and its sequels) was the first anime I ever watched, beyond random episodes of DBZ, Naruto, and so on that were on Toonami and similar. I got a friend to watch it with me earlier this year, and he wanted to quit almost at the end. I don't blame him. This show is awkward. That, which for me was a rewatch, was interesting ... because I realize how little I actually remembered of this show, and how much I probably blocked out of memory. Let's start with the positives.

The music isn't too bad. The opening is fine, though not a favorite. The ending is fine too, but I almost always skipped it and the opening, as I usually do, so that's not really saying too much of its quality. The music that plays during the episode is fine too, though I never really felt it was super good. So, I guess to sum it up, it's average. Not bad, but not great.

The dub is fine. The actors try with the strange script and cardboard cutout characters, but their performances sometimes fall flat. My big annoyance with the dub is that things written in Japanese aren't subtitled in any way, so when the camera lingers on a note, or heck, even the title of the dang show, if you can't read Japanese, then you have no way of knowing what it says. It's not the worst thing ever, since papers affixed to doors can usually be figured out what they say based on what happens immediately before or after the note is shown, and if you don't know what show you're watching... one might be in for a big... "surprise."

The art is passable. I didn't think it was all that bad, but some of the character designs are questionable. At least, I don't find unrealistically skin-tight fabric on the boob area terribly appealing. Not to mention, bras don't seem to exist in Valhalla so (adult) Valkyrie and Hydra have their nipples poking through their clothes as well. Because of course. Anyway... the environment art was good and the character animation itself wasn't all that bad. There are a few standout scenes here and there, but it's sandwiched between several episodes worth of blegh. And that brings me to the story and characters.

Let's start with the story. As is common with other anime, there's an alien that crash lands and kills our unwitting protagonist. He gets revived through alien magic, this time around, it's half a soul. As everyone knows, when you give half of your soul to someone else, that ages you down into an 8-year-old nuisance. Our protagonist, whose name is Kazuto, is then forced into a marriage with her by our alien (name's Valkyrie by the way) and her psychotic catgirl maid Ms. Sanada. Despite how often it's talked about, this marriage never actually happens, and Kazuto seems to actually fall in love with the child Valkyrie. By the way, to transform Valkyrie into an adult, she and Kazuto have to kiss. What follows is a very creepy transformation sequence of naked child Valkyrie changing into her adult self, complete with zooming in on her breasts and butt as they grow. Yikes. Hydra gets a similar transformation sequence (oh yeah, she crash lands too, but into the shrine of the childhood friend Akina) and it's no less creepy.
So after all that setup, what happens? Nothing. What happens is a boring slice of life that likes to forget all this set up even happened in the first place. There's a whole episode dedicated to Rika's school life which also serves as a completely pointless recap episode since it's like the fifth episode. Then later on, there's a beach episode. It wouldn't be an anime without a stupid, meaningless, completely filler beach episode. Even if this is in the manga, it's still stupid. Why are beach episodes such a common trope... Now let's talk about the characters.

Kazuto, the protagonist, is very bland and boring. He has a massive fixation on his grandfather's bathhouse, which is understandable for things that mean a lot to people. But when most of the things he says is related to the bathhouse or Valkyrie, it gets boring. Rika is his sister, but she's even more forgettable. All she ever talks about is money, money, money. And studying. That's it. Ms. Sanada is completely insane. The very first thing that she does in this show is (really, it's that she shows how worthless the space airport security is) brainwash an entire legion of completely innocent, teenage girls into actual catgirls that are her slaves. All because Kazuto had the most meaningless of interactions with them. Child Valkyrie is very annoying and abusive of her... pet dog? I'm not really sure what he is, because it's never really talked about. She rides him and constantly pulls his ears and throws him. Adult Valkyrie is "cool" but still eh. Hydra and Akina are there too, and Hydra is constantly trying to prank or do mean things to Valkyrie. Akina goes along with it for no reason.

I actually liked this when I first watched it. I'm not really sure how, but I guess this is just a shining example of how people's tastes change. I might rewatch the later seasons and review those too, but that means sitting through more of this crap. Stay away from this garbage, unless you like this sort of stuff. I was planning on reviewing something good, but watching this with my friend filled me with so many feelings. None too positive ones at that.