Wanna-Be's

Wanna-Be's gets a really bad rap, and frequently earns a spot near the bottom of many people's "worst" list. But to be honest, it's not *that* bad. Sure, it's pretty blah, but not the eye-searingly bad level of bad that you would think from the way people talk about it. Perhaps they see the character designs by Kenichi Sonoda, and think, hey, if he's working on it, then it has to be good. And then end up disappointed when they actually see it. But he *only* did the basic character designs, and that's it.

To put it simply, this ... is a show showing off lots of girls doing professional wrestling. It's a predictable underdog story as a team of cute but underpowered girls go against the odds (and two of the odder ladies at that). Lots of training. And lots of wrestling.

And to put an even finer point on it, chances are you will only find this interesting if you are one of those people who have that strange fetish where you like female wrestling. And that's about it. Because if you not a female-wrestling-fetish person, there really isn't enough of anything else here to keep you interested.

Yes, I have a female wrestling fetish. That's why I watched this.

It would be good if it focused more on the wrestling and less on the techno-thriller aspects. There's a whole subplot of a mad scientist wrestling promoter with military contracts trying to create super-soldiers. It goes deep into sci-fi territory and mixes a lot of ideas together that distract from what I came for: a wrestling fetish OVA. This is 1/3 wrestling at most.

A shame there isn't a lot of anime like this. Perhaps this early work was a warning for anime producers to try more proven genres like mecha. I can dream of ... a wrestling Evangelion, but for what Wanna-Be's is, it's fine. It's watchable.