Zettai Shougeki: Platonic Heart

Every April 1st, I spotlight a heartwarming anime with a special place in my heart. Last year, I covered the wonderful family film Shoujo Ramune. A film where we learned the lesson to choose ice cream over frozen yogurt, because some yogurt isn't even yummy at all! This year I'm covering "Master of Martial Hearts", which is the greatest magical girl anime you've never heard of! Move over Doremi, there's a new sheriff in town!

Why you should watch Master of Martial Hearts:

1. The characters. Simply put, Aya is one of the loveable and well developed characters in the medium. However, great characters can't exist in ... isolation. Even Don Quixote needed Sancho Panza. In Master of Martial Hearts, we get to see the astoundingly realistic family life of Aya and her mother Suzuko. The relationship between these two just blows past the mother/daughter relationship in Beast Player Erin. This is family drama on the level of Yi Yi and Tokyo Story.

2. Funimation is well known for their high moral standards. That's why they chose to dub, mass distribute, and continue to stream this series. Anime has a reputation for being lewd and sexist, but Master of Martial Hearts finally gets the portrayal of women right! This belongs in the pantheon of high brow, feminist anime along with Nana, Rose of Versailles, and Utena.

3. The art. My GOD the art is just beautiful. I wouldn't expect anything less from the esteemed Studio Arms. A studio most well known for their excellent biographies of prominent 19th century intellectuals including Wordsworth and Gauss. With titles like that, you KNOW it means quality! What other studio would have the artistic merit to make biographies of William Wordsworth and Carl Friedrich Gauss?!

4. Finally, it would be remiss not to mention the ending. I don't want to spoil anything, but this is hands down one of the most satisfying endings I've ever seen in a visual medium. The ending is so clever it makes your jaw hit the floor, but then you feel mad at yourself for not guessing it. The clues were all cleverly laid down all along! When the big reveal happened, I stood and applauded ecstatically for 3 minutes! This is the best ending I've seen since the 1973 film The Sting!

If you have friends that turn their noses up at anime and say it's trash culture, you MUST show them Master of Martial Hearts! Not Lain. Not Texhnolyze, not even Galactic Heroes. FUCK that shit! You show them Master of Martial Hearts and they will immediately apologize for ever questioning your tastes!

Zettai Shougeki: Platonic Heart, what a series this is, it's truly something that has to be seen to believe.. And I don't mean that in a necessarily good way either.

I'll first start off by stating I watched this expecting a whole lot of ass-kicking babes, with a lot of fan service, which is exactly what I got. But here's the kicker..

General premise of the series is about a girl named Aya Iseshima and her best friend Natsume Honma, and their (well Aya's anyway) inclusion in a fighting tournament called the Platonic Heart, a tournament where female fighters compete for the grand prize of the Platonic ... Heart, a jewel that can grant any wish to the winner of the tournament.

Story 5/10
I admit I was kind of enjoying this particular little anime, for a little while.
While the story lacks any true construct, it makes up for it's brilliant fight scenes.. But then again, a story can only go so far, when after all, it is about buxom babes fighting each other with plenty of ecchi to boot.

Art 7/10
Now I have to say that the art style is actually pretty good. Watching our heroine beating the living daylights out of her opponents is a crisp, and rewarding thing to watch, and I love the fact the fact their clothes literally explode when a blow has been landed hehe.. Alas though, that's just about the only good thing I can say about this..

Sound 5/10
The soundtrack or BGM, is rather forgettable, nothing really struck me as brilliant, I can say is that I don't particularly like the opening theme. As for the ending theme, well.. It's forgettable! (Haha, oh well, I tried)

Character 6/10
I really found myself liking our heroine Aya Iseshima, she has a knack for kicking some ass so.. Elegantly, which is pretty fun to watch! Aside from Aya, and her best friend, the rest of the characters hardly have any real development, they are just there for their respective episode, and we'd be lucky if we'd hear or see from them again.. Like I remember seeing one character with only 1 minute of screen time during the entirety of the show! She didn't have it good at all, ahh well, a lot of characters are indeed left with something to be desired, go figure. Afterall this is a show about expendable characters.

Enjoyment 5/10
Like I said, there are parts where I liked, but for everything I liked, there about a dozen things I didn't.. There are characters we only see for a brief period of time, sometimes see them once, and never again. Soundtrack is relatively forgettable, and that awful opening theme I just don't care for in the slightest. Story is nothing spectacular, just your standard fighting tournament with Femme Fatale's fighting and tearing apart their clothes.

Overall 5/10
This is something that was truly something to behold...
Well I guess if you're looking for a show with little plot, but plenty of fan-service action girls, then this is a show you may like, just don't go into it thinking you'll get anything other than that. Being said, the only thing I like is the main lead character Aya Iseshima (The only character with development), and her fight scenes. In conclusion, Zettai Shougeki: Platonic Heart is just your fan-service fix for the weekend.

Okay, so having completed this anime I can say I almost enjoyed it... until it got to the end. It has the rather standard ecchi anime vibe and typical OVA problems. Every fight you are guaranteed to see a boob shot with the occasional unnecessary fan service shots... it definitely feels like a wannabe Ikkitousen in that regard.

The story had a rather plain and unoriginal plot revolving around a gem that would grant the user any wish she chooses, however, it comes at the price of requiring them to fight for the gem and if they lose the fight, they would go into the ... "dark realm." The dark realm is never really explained and once you get to the end of the series you understand why. Now, as I was saying, I started off semi-enjoying this anime until it got halfway through the last episode. Out of nowhere it had more twists than an M. Night Shyamalan movie and like the new M. Night Shyamalan movies, the twists sucked and made no sense.

As another reviewer said, the main character's sole drive of continuing on this battle for the Platonic Heart is to save a "friend" that she only met a day prior. I don't know about you but I wouldn't put my life on the line for someone I just met and have no attachment to. Now, the other characters that you meet are plain and you have no interest or feeling towards them what-so-ever. Everything about this anime screams mediocre, from the art style to the characters and most importantly the story. It seemed like whoever penned the story liked the idea behind Sekirei and wanted their own version of it, yet they failed horribly.

I cannot express my frustration with how this anime ended anymore without giving it away. So I recommend anyone that is interested in this anime and feels the need to watch it, to possibly stop halfway through the last episode. You'll certainly be saving yourself a headache in the end. Overall: 3/10