Ariel Visual

My biggest issue with Ariel Visual is that there’s no reason to care about the plot and most of the characters. The OVA starts out with an opening narration that summarizes that sets up the bare bones of the plot and character relations, but it never develops them beyond what’s presented in this narration. It never really goes into why the aliens even want to take over the Earth and by the end of the second episode all of the characters can still be summed up with the same two sentences that they were summed up with in the opening narration.

My other big issue is ... with Dr. Kishida, the grandfather of the three girls who pilot the titular giant robot, Ariel. It’s pretty clear that we are supposed to find his goofy mad scientist antics amusing, but I actually found them to be rather frustrating. Throughout the 2 episode Dr. Kishida repeatedly attempts to convince his reluctant granddaughters to pilot Ariel and fight off the alien invasion. Some of his attempts are actually a bit humorous, like when a video of him suddenly appears on the inside of one of his granddaughter’s (technically she’s his niece) motorcycle helmet while she’s driving through traffic. Mostly of the time though, his attempts just make him seem like a terrible grandfather.

Aside from these two issues there are some smaller ones. The animation is lackluster, they use a wide variety of tricks to avoid having to animate scenes that would otherwise have a lot of movement. The mech and monster designs have a very campy tokusatsu feel to them. The action scenes have poor choreography so the big climatic battle at the end ends up being rather boring.

In the shows favour, I will say that the art was generally pretty good and I actually quite liked the character designs, particularly those of the granddaughters. On the whole though, this is a mediocre series with bare bones plot and static, one dimensional characters.

The story arc is pretty simple. Aliens have invaded for the sake of claiming Earth for the corporation they work for. Their efforts are being thwarted by a large mecha shaped like a woman, ARIEL, so an old friend of the invasion force's leader shows up to provide assistance. Things aren't going smoothly on Earth, however. ARIEL's pilots decided that they don't want the job and it's up to their Grandfather/Uncle, two of the girls are his granddaughters the other is his niece, to persuade them otherwise. The story itself is pretty standard and kind of weak, but the execution is great. It's very light-hearted ... and it's clear that the story is more of a subtle parody of these types of stories than a serious attempt at writing one. The biggest problem is that it suffers from massive exposition dumps. There's one at the beginning of each episode. I know that this is based on a light novel series but show, don't tell. There are better ways to get this information across. Even with the time constraints.

The characters are kind of under-developed. We get a few personality traits for the major characters, but they're pretty two-dimensional traits. Aya is an especially interesting character.

The art is pretty good for 1989. It's better than some later anime from the 90s or in some rare cases, anime from the 2000s. It's almost as good as the art of Gundam Wing which came out six years later.

The voice work is stellar. Mizutani Yuko, Koyama Mami and Hayashibara Megumi all give strong performances. The music flows well with the action and helps establish atmosphere.

There is no yuri in this. Which is good since the female characters who interact are closely related. The yuri factor is a 1/10.

My final rating for Ariel Visual is a 6.5/10. The story and characters have some issues, but the whimsical tone makes it a lot of fun to watch and the music and voice acting are both spectacular. If you enjoyed Gunbuster or All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku, you'll probably enjoy this. If you can find a copy, go ahead and check it out.

The 80s saw a large number of OVA releases, many of which fell into two general categories. Some were passion projects by directors and animators eager to create something, and others were made to serve more as promotional material for another product. Ariel is an OVA that falls into the latter category.

I'll be honest, the only reason I came across this OVA was because of the recently released Moderoid kit of the titular robot. It's also worth mentioning that this is based on a 20-volume long series of light novels, of which a grand total of 0 volumes have been translated to English. The ... OVA tosses you into a story that's already in progress with some narration to tell you what happened beforehand. The OVA is pretty much just flat out telling you "wanna actually get the full story of what happened before, and see where these characters go from here? Find out in the novel!"

It's due to this format that the story kinda stutters and doesn't really show off much. The attempts at comedy aren't all that great, I had a chuckle or two but most of the time it fell flat. There's a lot of setups and possible scenarios they could've done with the premise of an alien corporation coming to attack Earth, but because of the length, nothing really gets fleshed out enough, although you get the feeling that some of those untouched threads are more teasing for things that the source covers more.

There are some positive elements though. The art style is nice and a pleasure to look at even when the animation isn't always the most solid. Ariel herself looks great in the few combat sequences she gets during the OVA, with some awesome close-up shots. Overall, looking at the OVA for what it is (an ad for the novels), it does a pretty good job at that because now I’m interested in knowing more of the hijinks these characters get up to. But as a standalone work, it sadly falls flat, leaving you wanting more when there isn't much you can get if you don't know Japanese. I’ll definitely check out the second OVA at some point, but I honestly would prefer if the novels were more accessible, as it seems that’s where the meat of this franchise truly lies.

There were loads of OVAs that came out in the eighties that have largely been forgotten; relegated to the dustbin of history. This is one of those. And, to be fair, it should stay there.

Starting watching this cold, and it started out with two solid minutes of dense exposition, explaining the whole plot and a brief history of about ten characters each. It reached a point where I put it on pause, backed out to check online to see if I was missing some prequel or earlier season I should be watching first. Nope! This ... was the starting point!

And, then I found out this 2-part OVA was billed as "Episode IV", sort of a throwback to Star Wars, as a way to jump into the middle of the story, I guess.

Unfortunately, that little trick didn't work out too well. You're left dropped in the middle of a story, without all of the careful setup, or the long act of character development that is necessary for the viewer to buy in to the story. So, it ends up being a jumble of scenes without purpose, me not caring about what the characters are doing.

It doesn't help that the overarching plot is fairly hackneyed, as invading aliens with giant monsters attack Earth, but there is a giant robot created by a scientist that is Earth's only defense against them. The "catch" of this OVA is that apparently this annoying scientist decides his three young female relatives are the best fit to pilot this craft, and ONLY they can do it, and acting in the most annoying manner possible will make these unwilling girls bend to his demands.

And the show makes you aware of that almost every minute, as Granddaughter #1 is so against it that she makes sure to make the viewer aware of this fact every time she opens her mouth. Ugh.

First episode is nothing but exposition and setup, cutting from one bland scene to another, from one set of characters to another, every minute. And me not caring the entire time. The second episode (starting with an annoying Star Wars IV screen-scroll, no less) is where the action happens, but remember at its heart this is a Giant Robot vs. Giant Monster show. And if you're not into that, then this was just a monumental boring fight scene.

Artwork is serviceable if not a little wonky in places. The animation is uneven, and when it's bad it's really bad. Maybe they were hoping to leverage this into a series (after all, it seems half the OVAs were testing the waters for that idea), but nothing really came of this. Thankfully. I file this one back into the dustbin of history, where it belongs.

If you're looking for anything fun or exciting, this isn't it. I could tell things were off to a rocky start when this anime began with a 3 minute long narration, explaining things to the viewer like they're three years old. The show just reduces its characters down to their extremely barebones tropes, while ignoring anything interesting it could expand on (though, granted, that might be caused by length). The first episode was pretty boring, but the second episode was slightly better. The creature designs were super cool and the lighting during the fight scene at the end was sexy as hell. The music during ... the fight scene was also great. The design for the robot though is super dumb. It's the most humanoid mech I've ever seen. It makes the mech from Darling in the Franxx look good.

Honestly, I don't recommend this. If you're looking for a short, fun mecha anime that you can finish in one sitting, watch Dangaioh.

You could do way worse than Ariel Visual. The second episode does have some cool aspects to it (as mentioned earlier). You could do worse but you could also do much, much better.

“Ariel Visual” is a lighthearted comedy mecha OVA with some parody elements. Being based off of a long-running series of light novels, this OVA has an interesting premise. However, the story is not executed well, and most of the technical aspects are substandard.

It seems that the makers of this OVA tried to cram as much information as possible into the two episodes, each of which is less than 30 minutes long. Both episodes start out with a long narration explaining who the characters are and what’s going on, with the narration in the second episode being set to a “Star Wars”-esque CGI text scroll in ... romanized Japanese.

The gist of the plot is that there are aliens that are trying to invade Earth, but it’s not going well, and they're pretty much just relegated to orbiting the Earth in their spaceships and complaining about how hard it is to invade Earth because of the ARIEL robot. ARIEL stands for “All Round Intercept & Escort Lady.” It’s supposed to be piloted by the creator’s 2 granddaughters and niece, but two of the girls don't want to pilot it at all, and one is just mildly okay with it. The first episode mostly consists of repeated “comedic” attempts by the creator, the scientist Dr. Kishida, to convince the girls to pilot the robot, and them telling him “no” in various ways. And the aliens are having troubles of their own, with the head of their accounting department complaining to the captain that they don't have enough budget to continue with their invasion plans. Their commander, a longtime friend of the two (there’s a long flashback of them during their “academy days”), boards the ship and says he’s going to take over the operation. There are also a few references to some alien guy who lives on Earth who is apparently an enemy of these other aliens, but his background is not explained.

In the second episode, the aliens finally decide to invade Earth by sending giant monsters down to rampage around Tokyo (how did they have room for these on their spaceships?), and the girls have to get in the robot to fight them off. The robot looks like giant woman, and even has a full head of hair. Why does the robot have hair? It seems that the scientist modeled it after his late wife, so perhaps that’s why. The whole thing ends in a cliched fashion.

The two episodes have a multitude of redundancies and deficiencies in plot elements, dialogue, direction and animation. There are a few scenes that don’t make sense. Animation frames are repeated, and characters at times will have facial expressions that don’t match the voice acting. Supporting characters who are supposed to be important aren’t introduced well. Character designs are generic. The jokes fall flat most of the time.

The voice acting is pretty good; Mami Koyama does a particularly nice job as the leader, Mia. The two ending themes which are sung by the voice actresses of the other two girls are okay, but forgettable. The opening song is a full-chorus homage to/parody of the “Ultra Seven” theme.

As for objectionable content, while there are no human deaths, the giant monsters gush out lots of blood when they are killed. There’s a brief scene from behind of one of the girls getting dressed, but she has her underwear on. The name of the institute run by Dr. Kishida is a double entendre — its abbreviation, SCEBAI, is pronounced “sukebe” in Japanese, which means “pervert.” So every time a character says the name of the institute, it sounds like they’re saying “pervert.” Some examples include “The pervert is being attacked!” and “We have to go the pervert.” This is a running joke throughout both episodes, and while some may not find this objectionable, you may want to be careful watching this with Japanese speakers in the room.

Overall, while this OVA isn’t something that needs to be avoided at all costs, it’s not particularly worth watching due to its subpar execution on all levels. There was a sequel OVA that came out a couple of years later; perhaps it will be better.