I was glad to find out that I was wrong.
YKA is a 12 episode series by Silver Link and the basic story is about a young girl named Kureha who lives in a world where a giant "Barrier of Severance" divides humanity from the world of human-devouring bears who started to attack humans after a great meteor shower covered the lands. Two transfer students, who are actually bears disguised as humans, named Ginko and Lulu then transfer into her class at school and start an uproar of mysterious tragedies, including the death of Kureha's lover Sumika. Kureha is then faced with trials questioning her true love and through it opens the truth of the world around her and that not everything is as she sees it.
The story was very well done and the 12 episode format was great for developing the main characters as well as giving support characters great coverage to help move the story along, and like Gundam many people die. Art as well was very good and had a nice mix of traditional yuri manga styles as well as a blend of Ikuhara's own character style from the fashionable costumes to the mannerisms of the director's breed of sexiness.
Sound design was definitely the highlight of YKA, as Yukari Hashimoto pulls of a fantastic score that even surpasses her last collaboration work with Ikuhara, Mawaru Penguindrum, and the editing was done superbly and really shaped the effect of the shots in each scene.
The characters in general were enjoyable and interesting, however some characters aren't as fleshed out as others and they seem to come off as a 1 dimensional plot device rather then an independent character, however the number of those types are minimal and the lead players truly deserve praise. Nozomi Yamane especially as Kureha and Aoi Yuuki as Mitsuko deserve high praise as they pull of fantastic emotional performances that really put them as some of my favorite female characters in anime and of course Penguindrum alumni Miho Arakawa was great as Ginko as was Lulu's VA Yoshiko Ikuta.
In the end if I had to compare YKA to Ikuhara's other works I would say this was not as good as Utena, but definitely better then Penguindrum which I found to be dragging at later episodes. Regardless if your looking for a sexy and fun character driven show that will push your emotions to the brink and send you on a yuri space odyssey then I definitely recommend Yuri Kuma Arashi.
