Bubblegum Crash

Bubblegum Crash seems to get overlooked pretty often. The Crisis OVA and 2040 already seem obscure enough especially around here at MAL and then Crash is just, completely lost in it's own void. Kind of a shame because Crash is certainly worth seeing if you're a fan of the OVA and new series. My review for 2040 was probably too big, so I'll keep this one a little on the shorter side. It could be a good read along with this review though.

Crash is basically a direct continuation of the original OVA and it's completely obvious. The animation and everything in that aspect is the ... same, with many improvements because it's newer - this made me second guess myself after saying I liked the redesigned characters in 2040, because Priss, Nena, Linna, and Sylia all looked really cool in this one. The cyberpunk setting is still very grim, dark, heavily detailed, like it rightfully should be! The music also retains its awesomeness from the original OVA, great 80's hair metal that you can't help but love if you grew up in the age. The BGM fits the mood and is great too. Oh and the opening is just downright awesome, timeless stuff!

I've head some complaints about this one mainly geared towards the plot being a little contradicting against some events in the OVA. The only issue that might bother me here is that Priss could be a little out of character, with her constant attitude and decision with being a Knight Saber and fighting Boomers changing - but I have to ask, do you really go in watching Bubblegum Crisis for an in depth story and thought provoking characters? Not exactly, if you ask me... that aside the characters reminded me a lot of how they act in 2040 pretty often. Priss can be pretty hotheaded, Nena is cheerful and weary that the Knight Sabers are breaking up, Linna is just all over the place, and Sylia is her mysterious self but shows a little more character towards the end. They're all fun and enjoyable characters.

The three episodes do connect in the end. They're a little episodic, but 40 minutes pure episode isn't bad. The horrible events in episodes 1-2 eventually lead up to the finale, where a previous villian is brought back (one of the best ones from the OVA, with that being said some can maybe make a guess as to who that is). Though the show does get a little silly towards the end kind of like 2040 did, it tries a little too hard to be overly weird and thought provoking. But it's just part of the episode, rather than an entire story arc ... so it's not a huge complaint.

Overall Bubblegum Crash is simply put, more Bubblegum Crisis, more Knight Sabers kicking ass, great cyberpunk settings, awesome old school music. It's always been something you shouldn't take TOO seriously, but if you go in just looking for some quick enjoyment with action/comedy this should deliver. If you're a fan of the OVA, 2040, and still haven't seen this - definitely give it a shot sometime.

Bubblegum Crash isn't a BAD series per se, but it is certainly inferior to its predecessor Bubblegum Crisis. Where as Crisis had a unique opening scene for every episode of the series as well as a unique outro, Crash uses a stock opening and a plain credits. The animation is overall less impressive than Crisis' fantastic artwork, the violence is toned down and there are continuity errors particularly in the second episode.

THAT ALL SAID - I enjoyed Crash a fair deal. No where near as much as Crisis, but it certainly is not awful. Continuity errors aside, each episode's story is fairly interesting and the ... four Knight Sabers are as fun to see as always. It also provides an actual conclusion to the story, which gives Bubblegum an actual sense of closure after Crisis had its mother of all non-endings. There's still a few good cheesy songs as well (though nowhere as many as in Crisis) so the spirit is still there. All in all, Crash isn't a bad way to end the series on, and for all its flaws its still an enjoyable watching. At 3 episodes long, its not even that time consuming either, making a quick fast watch.

To speak frankly, one of the reasons that made me watch crisis, other than having the series in my want list since ages ago, was the fact that I had bought the DVD some time ago and it was getting old in the shelve.

With Crash we pick up again the series some months after the last episode and events of Crisis. It is now 2033 and Megatokyo has become more dangerous and AD Police is getting it’s hands tied because of political powers from above. The Saber Knights are nowhere to be found and the city is collapsing. Then… Naturally of course they’ll turn around ... again to save the day.

In these OVAs we had some improvements regarding the first OVA, like Nene, she’s pretty more dependable now than she ever was.
And also some bad points, while Nene became a dependable character, Priss on the other side, became a more shallow character, unfortunately.
There’s also the Seyuu of Priss, which was the best of the first OVA and here she had left the task to pursue her singing career leaving a new seyuu for the character, but she still managed to sing for the opening and ending songs of the anime, it was still pretty cool.

All in all it was a nice way to end the series. I’ve read before the two OVAs were intended to be a series, but I don’t know how they ended up being two OVAs instead. Perhaps they had lost some story in that transmission and some episodes didn’t went as well as others, but they’re still good episodes.

Rate; 7.0

Spectacular piece of anime but totally messes up as a sequel to the original ova series! Bubblegum Crash continues the awesome formula of the original series: Blade Runner style setting, bombardment of 80s culture, brilliant colours, corporations running amok with technology and cute girls laying waste to berserk boomers and cool hardsuits. However, the continuity is messed up so bad you'd wonder if the whole group of writers just suddenly suffered from amnesia!

As standalone stories, the plot is standard, entertaining fare for retro cyberpunk anime. Cool fights happen, there's an overarching plot involving people trying to use boomers in a grand scheme to wreak havoc ... and perhaps not as much character development as one would like; all just like the original ova. However, so many things just don't match up with the original. The huge overarching plot about this ova is the coming of second generation boomers; more human like, far more intelligent and able to mingle with humans. Except, standard boomers could already do all of that in the first ova! Also, supposed 'combat boomers' are much more humanoid in this ova and have far less combat capabilities than an average boomer mook in the original (being robots with guns as opposed to hulking gorilla mechs with laser cannons in their mouths) Its great that boomers have more of a purpose in Bubblegum Crash, being separated as worker and combat class models as opposed to killing machines in human skin but its just confusing when a boomer made for prostitution from AD Police (which happens even before Bubblegum Crisis) is deadlier than a combat boomer here! Other confusing things is the complete lack of the Genom corporation who were the big bad guys of Crisis; some sequel this is! Lastly, Priss also hates boomers which provides an opportunity for character development, except she had boomer friends in the original ova!

Speaking of characters, one thing the continuity didn't mess up is that overall, our main heroines have their personalities carried over intact. The whole crew also had suit upgrades so they have more fire power (or less? they seem to have less attacks now; the exploding punches are GONE!). Nene is now useful in combat, yay! But at the cost of Leon being sorta useless now. The main villain of the first half of Bubblegum Crisis also makes it over as the main villain for Crash. Character development isn't a lot (but at least Linna finally gets some) but that that is to be expected for a 3 OVA series. The 9 rating is for the gorgeous character designs and lively personalities to be honest, what else do you need for a fun anime like this?

The art is far up there as far as 90s ova's are concerned; its Bubblegum after all. Mechanical designs are sweet as to be expected. And animation is consistently smooth.

Music? Bubblegum Crash isn't so music oriented as Crisis unfortunately. I think only the opening and ending themes have Prisses' voice talent. The the two themes are above average AOR rockers. There is a bunch of synth jazz in there too. 80s music I suppose.

Overall, watch this with a casual mindset and do not compare it to the original but rather as a spin off of sorts and you'll have fun! Lots of fun!

I've reviewed two instalments in  this franchise. The first being Bubblegum Crisis and the second being the AD Police spin-off, which was garbage. Now it's time to look at the sequel that came out from mid to late '91, Bubblegum Crash. Let's hope it's more like Crisis and doesn't resemble AD. 

Story:

We open with an armoured vehicle full of mech suits committing a robbery. The AD Police are called to the scene, but since the culprit isn't an over-sexed, creepy woman, they're useless. The mech suits escape. We soon join the Knight Sabers, Nene, Linna & Priss. Nene wants the three of them to get their ... suits and do something about the robberies since the AD Police are useless but Linna is making a fortune with stocks and Priss is about to get a record deal and the pair talk about the Sabers like a thing of the past. Sylia soon returns and the fire gets lit under both Priss and Linna. But there's more to these robberies than meets the eye and the Sabers quickly find themselves embroiled in a major plot.

The biggest story issue with this is that the OVA wastes far too much time with the AD Police. And their contribution is pretty much sitting on their asses and otherwise being ineffectual. Very few of their scenes actually do anything for the narrative. They're mostly just boring. It feels like the OVA only included them to advertise that shit spin off. Another issue I have is that the climactic reveal of the antagonist could have been foreshadowed and generally handled better. It ends up being a bit weak. 

With that out of the way, the narrative does a good job of building things up. The situations the Sabers face are developed well and they have a good amount of tension behind them. The OVA also does a good job of tying all the scenarios together in a way that gives every episode a satisfying conclusion while also seguing into the next. It's also good at balancing triumph, tragedy & bitter-sweet moments. It's just, overall, highly entertaining and compelling. 

Characters:

The best character moments we get involve the Sabers themselves. Their interactions are very strong and we get a good sense of their personalities. I also appreciate that the antagonist does have a pretty well defined motivation. There are some great side characters as well, notably Adama. The AD Police are the weakest part but even then Leon & Daley are pretty well fleshed out characters. They're far better in this than they were in that OVA where Leon was the main character. And yes, I do have to keep taking jabs at AD Police. 

Art:

The series looks quite good. It's well animated, the backgrounds are nicely done, the general aesthetic is strong and the action scenes are damn good. The designs remain a very strong element. Seeing the Sabers go into action against various threats is a treat. I will also give this OVA some credit over even Crisis, it has a lot less fan-service. 

Sound:

Hiramatsu Akiko, Sakakibara Yoshiko & Tomizawa Michie all reprise their roles and do fantastically. Oomori Kinuko quit voice acting work to be a full time singer, unless my information on that is wrong & Priss does get a new actress with Tachikawa Ryoko. Tachikawa does a good job, maybe not quite as good but it's a strong performance. Crash also brings back the amazing soundtrack with some great songs being used during the action sequences. 

Ho-yay: 

There isn't really any. The OVA doesn't really have romance period. Which is fine because not everything needs to have it. 

Areas of Improvement:

Take out the bulk of the AD Police scenes. While there are a few that actually serve a purpose, most of them just come across as pointless. 
Use some of that extra time to give some more hints about the identity of the big bad. Like I said, the OVA would have benefited from foreshadowing that better. 
Use the rest of that time for some more interactions amongst the Sabers. Because the scenes where Nene, Priss, Linna & sometimes Sylia are just spending time together are really good. 

Final Thoughts:

Crash is exactly what you would want from a follow up to Crisis. It features strong action, great interactions and an interesting narrative that keeps your attention. If you're even somewhat a fan of Bubblegum Crisis I would highly recommend checking it out. If you haven't seen Crisis but the idea of super heroines in robotic suits appeals to you, I would watch that first since this OVA definitely builds off of it. I'll give Crash an 8/10. Same as Crisis. 

To keep this pretty quick, if you liked Bubblegum Crisis there is really no reason not to watch Bubblegum Crash. I have seen a lot of negative reviews and I think they are completely unfounded. This basically takes the formula from Crisis and repeats it for 3 more episodes while giving the series a more solid ending than what Crisis gave it. Also, you get a little more insight into the characters and how the end of their story would play out. The intro is pretty awesome (far better than Crisis); it has a more rockin tune and better production value. All in all, a ... solid little ending to the series that anyone who is a fan of Crisis should watch, if nothing more for completeness sake.

Whether you're a fan of the Bubblegum Crisis franchise,a cyberpunk fan or even just a casual anime viewer this anime has something to offer.After the events of the original ova the knight sabers have all moved on and taken new directions with their life's while leaving their superhero past.

Priss after being signed by a record label is overjoyed over the prospect of being a professional singer.

Linna works for the financial district and have found a new passion besides fighting,making money.

Nene still work for AD Police and is the only one that truly misses the knight sabers. And Sylia whereabouts is unknown.

Trouble brews as rogue criminals ... armed with the latest suit technology are going on a rampage through the city in a diabolical scheme to use the latest AI technology in their plot of terror.

I really enjoyed this anime,each episode followed the same plot and the pacing was excellent.The characters were realistic which each having their own distinguishable personality.There some nice humor especially in the second episode.Being an early nineties anime the animation showed its limitation in terms of detail and is by no means the best animation of that period but was still pretty decent.The opening music was nice but otherwise nothing musically inspiring about this.Overall a fun high energy ova that's worth your time.

Bubblegum Crash is a fairly decent companion piece to its prequel that - despite being episodic - still manages to continue the plot established in the previous series and does wrap up the narrative. Frankly speaking though, the story throughout most of the series is rather lackluster and forgettable when the focus is placed on the B plots of each episode.

With everything else in regards to the visuals, soundtrack, and characters, it's all good to even great in some instances - especially for fans of the original. All the old cast is back and their interactions are always amusing. The aesthetic has a very retro ... 80s vibe and it's paired together with a nice pop/rock ost to fit the mood.

This OVA has some great moments in it, but it's sometimes a slog to get to them and that's ultimately what keeps holding Bubblegum Crash from being something that I'd wholly recommend without first giving warning.

I’m actually glad that most reviews of Crash! are generally more positive than I thought they would be - I’ve seen this iteration of the franchise shit on so many dang times, even by Kenichi Sonoda himself, and it baffles me that this show has a lower rating overall than 2040. 2040 is terrible! Sure, Crash ain’t perfect, but I will say this much: In spite of having many of the strengths of its prequel series Crisis cut away from it - like any sort of lasting canon around character development, high-quality art, consistently good 80’s music, Priss’s VA, etc etc etc. - Crash! does ... its damnedest to play to the strengths of Crisis rather than the weaknesses, and for the most part it succeeds, even managing to pile up some stuff that I wish the original series had managed to play around with.

A bit of context before I get going, though: Bubblegum Crisis was made by 3 companies in a joint venture, but Crash was the result of all those companies parting ways and one of them (ARTMIC) trying to continue the series without key elements and the long-term timetable the series usually had. They put 3 episodes out in six months before one of the other companies (Youmex) sued them into bankruptcy, etc. So that’s why, amidst all the copyright issues, GENOM isn’t mentioned, Priss’s VA is different (but not necessarily worse if you ask me!) and only the vaguest sense of continuity carries over, because they couldn’t explicitly reference episodes whose rights they didn’t technically own. Regardless:

Story: Story has never been the franchise’s strongest suit, in no small part because of the seat-of-pants production methods even the original series went through, with directors changing almost every episode towards the end of the original OVA’s run. And that’s fine, actually. Like most superhero stories, BGC is at its best when it lets its characters play to their archetype and run around and kick ass and blow stuff up in a generally cohesive narrative background. And for the most part Crash! achieves this. The four Sabers are still largely themselves. Sylia may be a little softer in her methods, Priss may be more generically grumpy (she apparently hates Boomers now for some vague reason despite having gotten pretty close to banging one), but now Nene - yes, Nene, the cute hacker one - is the moral glue who keeps the team together in the first episode, which is refreshing! It takes the best parts of her character from Scoop Chase and builds on that moral pride she has as an ADP desk jockey, the kind of pride Priss and Linna just don’t have. (Oh, and Linna gets a bit more development of her money-crazed character. She’s one-note, yes, but it’s a good kind of one note. Like I said, playing to archetypes). The whole first episode is cliche, but in a good way, in that it’s the Sabers getting back together to kick some powersuited merc’s to the curb with minimal bitchiness from the involved parties. It’s not hitting the emotional highs of the back half of the original series, but it’s getting there.
The second episode plays to a strength of Crash! that Crisis actually doesn’t have. Namely, it focuses intensely on Boomers. Boomers were always just kind of there in Crisis, the issues around killer robots and the like coming in and out of focus based on what the director that time around wanted to focus on. Here, though, they’re everywhere, an integral part of life not just as Terminators which pop out of their skin, but as civilian labor. GENOM’s absence notwithstanding, this makes sense, provides a grounding, however weak, to the world that wasn’t really there in Crisis. Episode 2 focuses on a cute little super-intelligent Boomer who as far as continuity goes makes no sense - weren’t Boomers already pretty much Turing-Test-passable? - but the action scenes that he as a MacGuffin cause, with Priss and him running around Megatokyo’s underground trying to dodge a gang of Boomer terrorists and getting into various exotic firefights, are worth the goofiness. Hell, if you take it alone, I’d argue episode two is the best of the bunch.
Episode three, on the other hand, tries desperately to a) be all hardsuit-action, all the time, b) tie up the loose story threads previous episodes of both Crisis and Crash! were generally content to leave hanging, and c) bring back Largo for the second fucking time. It’s a mess on most levels - the action scenes aren’t exciting, the plot outline is barely coherent, Sylia almost gets turned into Instrumentality by Largo, it all kind of feels like the ending of 2040 and not in a good way. The less said about Melt Down the better.

Art: Crash’s art isn’t as good as Crisis’s art. Not even close, on several levels. Megatokyo feels more utopian-futuristic and less gritty and grimy the way the initial parts of Crisis did, though admittedly the city did seem to slip towards that more optimistic aesthetic over time; color is darker and less vivid; the whole art style feels barebones, lacking the detail of an OVA put together with more time and money. Some say the mecha designs, having been done by a toy designer instead of Sonoda and company, are lacking, but I actually like the new Hardsuits and the Knight Wing, and to a lesser degree the new Boomers (especially Largo’s final-boss forms). Admittedly, the action scenes in which they are involved are significantly less kinetic, more the usual low-budget firing-all-weapons-at-enemy-while-they-dodge-in-another-shot kinda stuff, but even then getting the Sabers hardware that can actually wreck their foes pretty hard - even for dear, sweet, precious Nene - is a good trend, one that 2040 completely ignores to its detriment. I personally like Geo Climbers’ running firefights between Priss and various breeds of terrorist Boomer, but your mileage may vary there. You won’t get anything as cool as Priss vs. the crab-mech from episode seven, but I think you’ll be surprised.

Sound: Sound effects are still generally okay, but the magic of 80’s music has been swapped out for a generally more early-90’s sort of synthesizer-jazz mixed with overwrought dramatic pieces that try to emulate Danny Elfman’s soundtrack for the Burton Batman movies. The few vocal songs that Ryoko Tachikawa, and eventually the other Sabers, aren’t bad, though, they’re just not really well-integrated into the episode openings as they were in Crisis. More’s the pity, too. Musical openings were always one of the series strengths if you ask me.

Overall: I guess the most I can say about Crash is that it isn’t as bad as everyone thinks it is. Even with less budget and less bottled-lightning magic available to ARTMIC under a time crunch, Crash still manages to hit the highs of what is good about Crisis: Cute girls in power armor whooping Boomer ass in high-octane fight scenes mixed with sci-fi slice-of-life. And really, what more could you ask for in a series, even one marred by episodes as nonsensical as the third one? Well, if you like 2040, you might say ‘deep analysis of the relationship between man and machine’.
And you would be wrong. So. Fucking. Wrong.

Not as good as the original series (and the animation is a step down), but it's still pretty entertaining. I particularly liked the second episode with an advanced Boomer that has a human-level A.I. The big plus this has over the original is I think the characteristics of the four main girls are far more defined; they all have more well-rounded personalities. I also can't figure out why most sources claim the series was cut short due to legal issues, as the 3rd episode felt like a pretty satisfying conclusion to me. Sure, the series is way more lighthearted than the original, but I honestly ... can't see why any fans with an open mind couldn't find some enjoyment in this.