Oct 12, 2015
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.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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