Greed

‘Greed’ is an obscure OVA directed, storyboarded, created, and designed by the somewhat legendary animation director and designer Tomonori Kogawa, famous for his character designs and animation direction on the classic Yoshiyuki Tomino anime Densetsu Kyojin Ideon, Sentou Mecha Xabungle, and Seisenshi Dunbine. Kogawa has an impressively large catalog of work spanning decades but the 80’s were his era, and Greed, being released in January of 1985, is one of the very first products of the new OVA format.

Greed is a fantasy adventure featuring a cast with Kogawa’s typical eccentric characters with odd hair styles and colors. The protagonist Kyle Lid has an adventurously voluminous ... and windswept greyish purple mass atop his head. Curiously, this anime takes after Tomino by using similar strange naming conventions, while it is in high fantasy tradition to create exotic and original names, ones that appear in Greed like Karlten Mimau and L'arp Lip would seem to have being deliberately silly near the heart of their intention.

Kyle’s possibly futuristic looking headband is an early tell that Greed is a fantasy-tech anime. In a later sequence, Kyle fights again some mechanical giant chicken shaped creature with thin legs and a blocky frame, head, and tail that make it look like it’s made of old Macintosh computers. This fight sequence and others are impressive such as the long chase from a massive pink orc man. Beautiful moments of animetic abstraction are used such as harsh white backlighting, sliding shoujo bubbles, and even sliding particle backgrounds over a characters unpainted face, a trademark of Tomino’s. The music also features classical dramatic anime ballads and epic mecha fight music, and the characters have personalities that are mostly serious with some atsui flare and occasional dopey moments of expression for comic relief.

Greed is a fine fantasy romp and most of its strength is on part of its unique character of animation and design. It can be found in lofi quality with fansubs.

Honestly, when seeing the score and reviews for this ova, I was expecting something terrible. After taking some time however, I have to say, it was great! The characters and story were very intriguing and I had a great time watching it! The only major problems with it, were just about everything. The animation, voice actors, and plot were so far below average, I cant even see them. And I'm 4ft 3. At the end of the day, don't watch this. Please.

Please. I'm begging you. Don't.

Unless you really want to. Then go for it.

But you probably shouldn't.

In my opinion.

... But that's just me.

Overall 10/10 Would recommend.

An original anime. And that is the downfall of this particular OVA, being original and having no framework to rely on when going forward with this story. It is basically supposed to be a hero's journey type piece where the boy is given a quest by his dying father to set things right in the world. What it becomes is an acid-induced nightmarish cluster F of different ideas from the story writer.
It's first like, let's make a fantasy world with a wide variety of creatures.
Then how about we throw in some mecha, yeah mecha robots shooting lasers.
Oh, lets go back and make the environment dangerous ... by throwing in a sea that is dangerous to cross, but we'll add a giant in there as well.
Oh, lets put some faeries in there in an imaginary realm where wishes come true.
Let's go to science fiction next with an ancient advanced city that is in a state of disrepair.
But now, lets escape all that and the whole time we've been in a dimensional plane created by a god like being we now have to destroy....
Yeah, it is just a jumble of ideas mish-mashed together and a poorly written mish-mash at that.