Divergence Eve

Now here's an oddity. I've yet to see another series that mixes two conflicting extremes in quite such an inexplicable manner. Allow me to elaborate.

A serious, gritty science fiction horror. A touch of space exploration, but mainly based in one frontier space station. A mildly convoluted, dense plot that's initially baffling but gradually clears while continuing to raise mysteries along the way. A touch of chronological confusion, with the first episode being set after most of the rest of the series. Some intrigue, some bleakness and paranoia, some strangeness and just a touch of the disturbing.

With an almost all-female cast who all have ... breasts the size of their torsos.

An oddity indeed.

The thing that continues to confound me about Divergence Eve is how this happened. The simplest explanation would be that someone wrote a serious science fiction horror, then someone else came along and drew breasts on it. Quite often, a series tries to be two things at once, and fails at both; Divergence Eve doesn't TRY to be two things, it just seems to be two incompatible things haphazardly glued together - and succeeds at both, to an extent. Yes, where series that try hard to meld two elements fail, Divergence Eve succeeds by not making any effort to integrate them at all. Or rather, it succeeds at each one separately, but fails at both together.

You see, if you want to watch impossibly proportioned anime girls bouncing around in impractical faux-military uniforms, getting out of showers and training in their underwear - Divergence Eve will meet your needs. If, on the other hand, you want to watch the aforementioned gritty and engrossing science fiction horror, complete with intrigue, mystery and suspense - Divergence Eve will meet your needs too. But in each case, you need to do your best to overlook the other element. If you want bouncing chests and so on, you may find the involved plot makes you think when you probably don't really want to, and distracts you from the eye candy. And if you want the plot - or get dragged into it against your will - the constant bouncing, jiggling and unprovoked bouts of nudity will grate. If you're willing to concentrate, you can take Divergence Eve on either of its component parts, but not both together.

The series as a whole is reasonably nicely drawn and adequately animated. I don't think I need to say anything about the character designs (or point out where most of the animation happens) but it's worth mentioning the 'outside' bits. Outside Watcher's Nest, the space station, everything goes CG. Sometimes this is really glaring, such as when a character and a CG object meet (which doesn't happen all that often, in fairness) but a lot of the time it works well enough. The Ghouls (which I won't explain, to avoid spoilers) are done in CG and seem a bit woodenly animated, but the CG spacecraft are pretty decent. It's not Advent Children, but it's good enough, and having the Rampart Armours (the characters' individual transports in space) in CG actually lends them an oily, military solidity that fits with the tone of the plot.

Some of the incidental music in this series is quite nice, though not outstanding. The opening theme is probably the musical highlight; a vaguely mechanical-sounding guitar-based chug at odds with the mildly fanservicey images it accompanies. The ending theme, though, is horrendous: a shrill, vacuous noise that can't be labelled 'pop' without offending a great many people. It's awful even if taken alone and out of context, but when it comes immediately after a tense or ominous scene at the end of an episode, it's hideously jarring. At the end of each episode I leapt for the remote, and you will too - to hit either 'stop' or 'mute', depending on whether you want to watch the full-on fanservice montage that is the end credits.

Before we leave the realm of the audio, I'll mention the voice acting. I watched the dub (I usually do, unless it's bad enough to grate - Escaflowne, I'm looking at you) so I can't comment on the Japanese voices, but the English ones are less annoying than you might imagine - and yet more annoying, too. Misaki, the main character, sounds like, for want of a better word, a bimbo. And she is, mostly. In that sense, I suppose the voice is appropriate, but bear in mind that she's meant to be a marine of sorts. Some of the other girls are a bit squeaky or whiny, but not unbearably so - and there's one solitary gem. My favourite voice actor in this is also my favourite character: the girls' immediate superior, another generously proportioned woman by the name of Lyar von Ertiana, who defies the gravity of her chest and acquires some gravity of character. She's voiced by Shelley Calene-Black, who I later discovered again in Those Who Hunt Elves (and it turns out she's been in a few others too, such as Orphen) and while her performance isn't exceptional for anime in general, in this case she's the only one of the female characters to have any kind of strength or distinctive character in her voice.

Now to the plot. I'm not going to describe any of it, since I can't do so without spoilers, but I will say it's the strongest point of the series. It's interesting, fairly clever, dark, and engrossing - but I have a couple of significant criticisms. Firstly, it can be a little confusing. It's some time before anything becomes remotely clear, and you may find yourself going back to earlier episodes to see if they can help you make sense of a new development. Having said that, it's less confusing than the likes of RahXephon, so it's a surmountable problem. Secondly, the plot doesn't finish. I'm not giving anything away by revealing that; I think it's best to go into this series knowing that if you want the rest of the plot you need to watch the sequel series, Misaki Chronicles. At least, I assume Misaki Chronicles actually wraps everything up; I haven't got round to watching it yet, out of sheer terror that it might have been completely overcome by fanservice. Either way, you won't find resolution in Divergence Eve.

All in all, I'd have to say I do like Divergence Eve and will probably watch it again sooner or later, but its flaws are too numerous to make it essential viewing. The acceptable but vaguely annoying voices, the occasionally jarring CG, the grotesquely inappropriate ending theme and the lack of plot resolution would knock this down a point or two anyway, but the most striking and downright inescapable of the faults in the series is the utterly baffling fanservice that pervades everything by way of the enormous, bouncy chests of all the female characters. This really scuppers the whole endeavour by contrasting completely with the tone of the story and forcing the viewer to squint or develop selective blindness in order to take any of it seriously. This jarring contrast is probably easier to resolve if you're only in it for the breasts; you can just press 'mute' to avoid exposure to the plot.

It's a shame, really, because if it had stuck to being drama/horror instead of trying to tack on some Playboy elements, Divergence Eve would have been easy to recommend as a dark, interesting and pretty different take on science fiction anime.

Divergence Eve is a show that shows some great potential with its diverse character line up and seemingly interesting plot, but in actuality is quite a bit of fail.

The story, i am actually trying to still figure out myself. Things just don't seem to make much sense no matter which way you look at them. Especially that WTF ending that leads into season two, which i have not finished watching at this time but will get to in time.

The back story is simple enough, and you can understand what is going on at specific moments in the show, but to get ... an overall idea of what is what, and when is when will twist you brain.

The art work is done very well, the animation is decent, the only down side is the use of of CGI with the anime. This is one case where the two are not mixed properly and it makes it look really stupid.

The characters are nothing special, though some of the higher ranked secondary characters do grab your attention with secret plotting and what not. The point of the characters in this is basically fan service. Boobs bouncing and clothes that are very revealing or being ripped off are something to expect. Nothing particularly memorable about them.

This was a mildly entertaining show. Its interesting to see the alien things fighting and some of the sci fi elements they throw in to spice it up. Since the show was confusing as hell, it doesn't get high marks in that area, but its not completely terrible.

Overall, this is something to watch if you have nothing else to watch. Or if you want fan service, this is good for that too. Dont expect anything much from it, and if you make it through the show, there is a season two that will hopefully make some sense of things.

Oh and watch the sub because the dub just isn't that great.

Divergence Eve aired in 2003. It was created by Tsukumo Takumi and produced by Radix before the studio shut down in 2006. I don't know what to expect from it. I've never reviewed a Radix work before. The only Radix production I'm even vaguely familiar with is Amazing Nurse Nanako and, I have to say, that does not inspire confidence. But that also came out three-four years before this one and most studios have their good and bad moments. So, let's see if Divergence Eve is worth looking into.

Story:

We open with a group of buxom women, and one flat-chested android, being briefed before getting sent ... in robot mechs to fight some kind of bizarre CG monster. We see one, Misaki, in some kind of pod attached to a bunch of cables while also being on the battlefield, somehow. Then the version of her on the battlefield turns into its own CG monster form and they both explode. It's at this point that you start wondering if this is a sequel to something since there seems to be a lot going on that you've just been dropped into. The next episode takes us back in time where four cadets, Misaki, Luxandra, Suzanna & Kiri are being sent to some kind of space station to join a military force s potential replacements for its retiring Commander. We then spend all the episodes except for the very last one getting to the point where we started.

Let's talk about non-linear story telling for a moment, shall we? In a good non-linear story there are plenty of sources of tension that might get hinted at, but won't be spoiled and there's a compelling reason why they story works better when told in a non-linear fashion. A perfect example is the classic novel, Catch-22. There's also A Prayer for Owen Meany. Even Venus Versus Virus managed to use its non-linear elements decently. So, with that in mind let's look at what this series accomplishes by putting the twelfth episode chronologically at the beginning. It successfully destroys all sense of tension in the series. That's basically it. The main attempts at tension throughout the series are the mystery surrounding just what kind of mysterious power Misaki has that these shady scientists are interested in. Which we already know involves turning into a giant CG monster so that plot line quickly becomes very stale and predictable. They also try to have tension involving whether Misaki will survive various scenarios and whether she'll stay with the team when she considers quitting. But we already know that she'll live and stay with them because we saw her in the first episode, which takes place after all of this stuff. It isn't even tense about whether or not her comrades will survive since we see most of the ones who are going into danger in that first episode, alive and well. They also try to have an emotional moment involving the death of a character. Except that they talked about her being dead in the first episode so you were expecting it by the time it happens and it does nothing.

The gross misuse of non-linear narrative isn't all that's wrong with the story telling in this either. The pacing is awful. We get long stretches where nothing of value happens and a bunch of pointless flashbacks that are there solely to give you information that you already know or to spell out information that was already obvious. They just assume their audience is a bit thick and needs the help. The ending is also pretty rubbish. I will say, to Divergence Eve's credit, there are some concepts with potential here. If the execution was competent they could have led to some decent stuff.

Characters:

The characters in this are a group of stock tropes without much in terms of originality,personality or development. They aren't the worst group of characters. None of them are egregiously annoying or anything like that. They're just a boring group.

I do want to talk a bit about the character death that they spoil in the first episode. It is a really bad idea to open a new series telling you that a certain character will die. Not just because it lessens the impact, but because it's really difficult to get the audience invested in a character when they know that they aren't going to last. It certainly requires better writing than is on display here. You want to give your audience time with that character and reasons to care about them. A good example is the excellent western cartoon Beast Wars. They pretty heavily foreshadow a particular character's death and it culminates in the greatest episode of any Transformers series ever, Code of Hero. But by the time the foreshadowing starts you know this character really well, he may even be your favourite character. You have the investment and that gives the scene impact. In this, you know the character is going to die before you've heard her speak and the series does nothing to develop her. As such, you don't bother getting invested in her and her eventual demise means nothing.

Art:

You may remember last October when I talked about the Galerians OVA and its CG artwork that looked like it was from an early Playstation title. Divergence Eve suffers from a similar problem. They use CG artwork for the monsters, action sequences and some tech shots and it's roughly on par with the CG in Galerians. It's awkward, stiff, blocky and just looks laughably ludicrous. Although, this series has plenty of scenes that use more traditional animation too. Incidentally, there is a major problem with those scenes as well. Namely that this series is almost as bad about shamelessly using exploitative fan-service as Highschool of the Dead was. The female characters, save the android, look almost Liefeldian in their proportions. They have massively over-sized bosoms and overly thin waists that don't look like they could house internal organs. They aren't quite as bad as Liefeld's abominations, though. Since they have pupils and don't constantly stand awkwardly on their tip toes.

Sound:

Radix did get some talented actresses for this. Kakazu Yumi (the voice of Yuffie and Aizawa Mint) takes the lead as Misaki. We've also got Kiuchi Reiko, Koyasu Takehito, & Kobayashi Sanae among others. But this is one of those series where they don't have much to work with so the characters sound pretty generic in spite of the talent behind them. The music is also pretty mediocre.

Ho-yay:

There might be a bit. It's hard to judge because the character interactions are so listless. The girls certainly spend more time with each other than they do with any blokes and they seem to like each other more. There's also a line from Suzanna that may indicate that she has romantic feelings for Misaki.

Final Thoughts:

Divergence Eve is tripe. It's a bad action series that had some good ideas that they didn't feel like doing anything interesting with. The artwork is pretty awful, the characters are dull and any story moments that could have had an impact are ruined by the baffling way they elected to make the story non-linear and butchered the execution. That being said, I have seen a lot worse. It's bad, certainly, but it's not horrible. As such, My final rating is a 3/10. It's kind of sad because I had a bit of a combo going with three good anime, Death Parade, Nanoha A's & Love Live, in a row. Next week I'll look at Ice. So, that should be good fun for everybody. Although, I haven't started it yet so it may very well turn out to not be fun for me. We'll see how that works out.