Tenchi Muyou! GXP: Paradise Shidou-hen

This series is for experts of Tenchi lore only. I watched it and despite having seen all the Tenchi anime set before it, it was still very confusing. Even if you have seen all the OVAs and the spin-off GXP, you will be hit with countless relatives and aliens you did not see introduced properly. As the series begins, Seina returns to Earth with a lot of women who did not appear in the GXP anime. Characters from the TV series generally do not appear much in this besides Seina. The reason for this is that this is a sequel to Japan only Tenchi novels ... which introduce yet another group of harem wives. The purpose of this OVA is to set up other preexisting Tenchi books and OVAs, by explaining how Seina came to create an island spaceship inhabited by lots of pirate women. However it is not properly explained who the new human arriving at the end of the anime is, so that leaves anyone who hasn’t read books in the Paradise War series confused. It is also not really explained why Seto decided to settle lots of pirates on this island, or even why the island needs to exist to begin with. No one on the island seems to be aware of the reasons for her plans. They simply go along with the committee decisions from prior OVAs and books. There is very little in the way of action in this OVA. The humor is all based on one of the new wives being a perverted otaku who died and was reincarnated as an alien. She is a very obnoxious character who is always screaming and getting beat up by the other characters. There is no chemistry between Seina and any of the other wives, but especially not her. The reason they are married is not explained here, but it seems to be because she was a package polygamy with some hot elf girl that appears briefly in the last couple of episodes. The main romance in this OVA is between Seina and his best friend/wife’s mom. In the first episode she tries to sleep with him and while we never see it; a later conversation implies she slept with him off screen. This plot is creepy, but par for the course with Tenchi’s insane incest and age gap romances. After the first episode or two, the infatuation between those two is put secondary behind her gaining magical powers. The first thing she does upon getting magical powers is create doubles of herself to go kiss Seina while the guards are sleeping. Seina never seems comfortable or consenting to any of the girls’ romantic advances, but married them all anyway for reasons not explained here. Another source of confusion is that many of the characters change into Cabbits, and it is hard to tell them apart when the Cabbits get into a marathon gossip session about Seina.