Bakusou Circuit Roman Twin

I had a difficult time deciding on a rating for this. On one hand, it has decent animation, and excellent direction, and somehow managed to keep my attention for its entire 1.5 hour runtime. On the other hand, the characters are paper-thin, mentally unstable, and there are two attempted rape scenes and one successful rape scene (committed by the protagonist, no less, and it's shown in a positive light afterwards).

This OVA centers on a boy named Hyou, who is constantly trying to kill himself for the first half of the show, and Hibiki, a rich, lonely girl who initially wants to commit suicide just because ... she saw a guy she likes kiss another girl. She ends up running into Hyou, falls in love at first sight, and makes it her mission to basically stalk him and prevent him from killing himself.

Despite the fact that Hyou constantly acts like a jerk to Hibiki, wrecks her motorcycle, causes her to get injured, and almost lets her get raped by a group of guys right in front of him, her obsession with him is unwavering. She has to be one of the clingiest girls I've ever seen in anime. She even tells him, "If you live, I live. If you die, I die." And this is repeated a lot in Hyou's flashbacks and treated as a sentimental, meaningful statement, when in fact it's borderline disturbing considering how mentally unbalanced these characters are.

We finally get to the motorcycle-centric part of the story about a third of the way in. Influenced by Hibiki, Hyou decides to get into motorcycle racing. This isn't because he found a reason to live, per se; it's because he thinks that through racing, God will give him an answer as to whether he deserves to live or not. After a lot of trials and tribulations, The Big Race begins. Can he beat his "rival," who is conveniently Hibiki's ex? Can he make it through without killing himself? Watch to find out the answers to these questions.

The other characters aren't all that memorable. There are the guys at the bar, who at first seem like bad guys, as they try to rape Hibiki, but they're inexplicably depicted later as delinquents with hearts of gold, and they help Hyou out as mechanics on his racing team. The bartender, by the way, wears a ski mask, and is naturally named Jason. There's a prostitute who decides to help Hibiki get closer to Hyou. There's a guy who was hired by Hibiki's parents to watch over her (her parents are never at home), and he is depicted as the true "villain" of the series, though his most villainous act is defused abruptly and in an inappropriately comical manner. Hyou's mother is bedridden in a psychiatric hospital and keeps pushing needles into stuffed animals. His aunt, together with his cousin or nephew (?) basically helped raise him.

What disturbs me about "Roman Twin" is how unhinged the characters are. Hibiki is clingy and way too dependent on some random guy she just met. Hyou is a jerk and even rapes Hibiki, but does not get in trouble for it. The guys at the bar are sick and twisted, but the OVA tries to make them likeable and funny. The tone in this OVA is all over the place.

So how did I manage to watch the whole thing? Well, the direction is surprisingly good. All of the shots are interesting to look at, especially the angles when they went around the hairpin curves on their bikes. The animation itself is not bad, except Hyou looks like another clone of Gun, the main character of the famous motorcycle anime "Bari Bari Densetsu" (and they even have the same voice actor!). Voices are decent, although Hibiki's voice gets annoying at times. The music is all instrumental and feels cheap, but it gets the job done.

If you don't mind watching mentally unstable characters doing mentally unstable things, and aren't bothered by seeing repeated attempts at suicide and rape, then maybe you can stomach this one. Otherwise, I would recommend staying away.