Alice in Cyberland

This ova being subbed is such a dangerous double edged sword for it. The first episode is gorgeous but the second episode is basically entirely irrelevant to both the previous episode and, importantly, the entire video game following it, which remains untranslated. Taken on its own this ova is not very good but I can't say it's actually... bad? The animation in the second episode is terrible and the core plotline of it is flatly not very good, but it still has pretty entertaining dialog and some decent jokes.

Having played the game, it shares some of the same problems as this ova but for having ... more casual downtime with the characters, and an actual ending, they're both much more satisfying placed in that fuller context. There's a lot of weird grey space between the ova and the game where it feels like there might have been plans for other media in between that never happened, but all of the basic ideas established in episode 1 are brought back up and resolved by the end of the game, including, surprisingly, smaller character stuff like Alice's reaction to Julie teasing her in the locker room, which isn't brought up directly but. The game has an entire optional chapter about Alice going on a date with a girl and effectively realizing that she's into women. So it's hard to say these two events are wholly unrelated.

If you're able to play the game, and plan on doing so, this ova is worth watching. If you can't, you might be able to appreciate certain aspects of it but it is definitely going to feel extremely incomplete.

Definitely a product of its time with a moderately strong start and a pretty weak finish. Fans of the early internet's promise may find this entertaining, back when the world wide web was imagined as an alternative world for users to explore. Here, "cyberland" comes in layers to be delved by the avatars of heroes and misfits alike.

The first episode is definitely the superior one. The animation is better, the story is stronger, the jokes hit better, the stakes are higher. The end-boss monster is tentaclicious per the era's norms. Its tendrils are probably the best animated things in the OVA.

The second episode is a ... let down by comparison. The budget must have been blown on episode 1, because the animation is shoddy and stilted. The characters even appear to have been drawn from different stylesheet. Gone are the civilization-ending hackers. Instead our trio of protagonists get mixed up with a couple computer programs playing cat and mouse. Who cares? Frankly, it feels like a filler episode, even though it's 50% of the saga.

Feeling nostalgic for a time when the internet was best understood by the movie "The Lawnmower Man"? Want to groove on a vaporwave soundtrack while three anime girls swing swords and dive past numerals? Then this might be for you. If none of that interests you, skip this and head for greener pastures.

Alice in Cyberland is a totally listless, directionless show. The idea of a Tron-style adventure immersed in 90s futurism, where the function of tech improves rather than its form, is an interesting concept on paper, but this show totally fails to bring those ideas to life in a way which is at all compelling. There are "cyber anarchists" afoot, and some ill-defined goddess of cyberspace grants a girl and her friends special powers to manifest in the virtual world. It makes sense that this is based on a video game, because it feels as though the audience is missing some vital context from the very ... start, as though we are being dropped right in the middle of a story. Then, the fight scenes that ensue feel disjointed, and actions are disconnected from each other between one shot and the next for seemingly no reason. Episode 2 is even worse, where they have this ridiculous subplot where one of the girls falls in love with a little boy in cyberspace, and uses that as a springboard to moralize about how AI is sentient life too or something, with another subplot about getting a sword from some programmer who spends all his time as a magical sea turtle on a beach somewhere. The whole anime follows this pattern of starting off bad in episode 1, only to get way worse in episode 2.

The art is a good example. Where episode 1 has serviceable art direction and animation, episode 2 looks unacceptably bad, to the point where the main characters don't even look like the same people between the two episodes.

The sound also falls victim to this, with the voice work and sounds of life meeting the basic standards of quality in episode 1, only to fall off a cliff in episode 2.

The characters, however, weren't ever good to begin with, so they're spared from this phenomenon. Overall, Alice in Cyberland started off with an interesting premise, but instantly bungled everything to the point of no return. If anybody were strange and insane enough to salvage any scraps of creative value from this garbage heap, they'd leave with precious few crumbs for their effort. Do not waste your time with this boring, mediocre slop.