Reviews

I'm not a big fan of Koichi Ohata. I thought that MD Geist was laughably bad, that MD Geist 2 was horrible, that Cybernetic Guardian was forgettable, that Ikkitousen was laughable but a bit of a guilty pleasure, and that Burst Angel was mediocre but had its moments. He has yet to do anything that I truly enjoyed, nevertheless, I have derived some enjoyment from his works, on one level or another. Nothing, however, prepared me for Genocyber.

The story in Genocyber is...poorly told, at best. Scenes skip around with reckless abandon, never staying too long on any single point long enough for the viewer to get a feel for what's going on why its worth caring about. It also skips ahead, in the last two episodes, about two hundred years.

Considering that this is an OVA from the mid-90's, I'd expect it to at least have decent animation. There are a few scenes with decent animation, but most look like they were pulled directly from a cheap OVA that came out ten years prior. Now, I'm not a stickler for animation, but I do ask that it's at least accompanied by something interesting in the art. Genocyber doesn't have that either and it leaves the whole affair looking rather generic and boring. Some of the action scenes look okay, but those are few and far between. And very short.

Now, the characters. There are characters in Genocyber, I know this much. Unfortunately, there is not one character that is developed beyond a single line of description. You've got an evil genius, wait, scratch that, TWO evil geniuses that want to rule the world or something, a super-powerful girl that can't talk, her super-powerful sister who's sole purpose is to complain to her father about her sister, hard-nosed detective looking for the truth who disappears after midway through the first episode, and a host of others who serve no reasonable purpose. All five episodes have enough character development to fill a thimble halfway. The only characters that are even remotely likable are the two mains from the episodes 4 and 5, but, as with every other character in the series, they have little development.

Enjoyment? I didn't enjoy it. At all. The two and half hours that this OVA ran were beyond painful, easily amongst the most depressing and bloated I've ever put myself through. The shows takes everything it does with the utmost seriousness. There's no humor here, even unintentionally. At best, you can chuckle a bit at how bad the dub is, which I attempted to, but that really didn't last long since it the horribleness of the dub slowly bled into the horribleness of the rest of the show and succeeded in only making me feel more depressed about the whole affair.

I don't know why I gave this a 3 instead of a 1. I really don't.