You're a fit and young Japanese man who has managed to work through the ranks of a prestigious airline company known as Yamato Airlines, earning large amounts of respect from your peers and your boss. Not only that, you have a beautiful and caring girlfriend whom you will be marrying soon but who also happens to be the daughter of the company chairman ensuring your heritage into the company. Life is swell and dandy but while you're out for a night on the piss with your dickhead of a friend, the twat gets you so intoxicated with the Devli's nectar that he tricks you into signing a document that ships you off to place called Area 88 located in the heart of a huge war in which the only ways to escape from this place is to do one of the three following things:
A: Survive three years of pilot combat
B: Pay a penalty of 1.5 million dollars which is earned by shooting down the enemy planes
C: Desert
And that is the story of Area 88 in a nutshell. While the narrative is rather simple in design and not all too complex what makes this short three part OVA shine is the characters and the psychological aspects of them. The show spends a considerable amount of time dealing with the main character's state of mind and through Shin we see the dehumanising effects that war has on its soldiers. Shin is a person who is forced to spend each day constantly killing people he doesn't even know just to survive and to garner enough money to make his way back home and free himself from Area 88. The constant death and killing Shin has to endure and the way this effects his mental state is easily the most interesting part of this show and despite the short run time overall, it manages to present and develop Shin's hang-ups very well as we see him evolve and become used to the idea of killing to the point in which he can't return to normal civilisation again since he has gained a hunger for war after experiencing it first hand.
One of the most interesting scenes comes from the third episode in which Shin is speaking to a fellow Japanese man who will be killed soon because he attempted desert from Area 88 on the grounds that he did not want to kill anyone. The man who is soon to be dead challenges Shin's ideology and new way of life which only add to Shin's already broken mental state that war has inflicted onto him. Shin's arc and character are both easy to understand from a narrative standpoint and have a lot of development and time to breath through the show.
While most of the spotlight is exclusively on Shin, the other characters in Area 88 who Shin works alongside with also have their own mental hiccups too with each one dealing with their mental fatigue in a certain way. Each character has a reason for being at Area 88, whether that be because they were tricked into doing so like the main character Shin or simply because they love the sensation of killing. On top that, the tension is rather high since many of the characters in the show are killed off raising the narrative stakes and making each aerial plane battle seem all the more intense and exciting.
Speaking of the plane battles, even after thirty years they still are amazing to watch. This OVA was released in 1985 and still stands up incredibly well today. The beautiful hand-drawn plane designs and fights are some of the best choreographed and directed dog fights in the entire medium with huge amounts of detail in every frame. The fights and general war are both presented as gritty and real making the deaths of the characters all the more impactful.
While Shin is busy battling in Area 88, we have another plot involving Shin's girlfriend attempting to cope with the loss of her love and trying to make sense of what happened while trying to track down Shin once and for all. The insane lengths she goes to for Shin made their relationship feel more organic and stronger which acted as one of the driving forces for Shin's struggles as well as the motivation from an audience to see them reunite once again. Irony is used pretty often in the show such as in the case where one of Shin's missions focuses on him having to shoot off bombs from a moving air plane - a plane his girlfriend was currently on.
Shin's ass-hole of a friend also has a fair amount of screen time with him overtaking Yamato Airlines but seeing his entire world collapsing around him. It's bittersweet to watch after all the shit we see he has put Shin and his girlfriend through but a good amount of development and exploration was implemented into explaining why his friend acted the way he did and his motivations as a character making him less of a one dimensional dickhead.
If I do have one complaint about the narrative, that would be the ending. Without spoiling too much, it can feel kind of anti-climatic considering what all the characters went through and for some, Shin's final decision can feel off putting and confusing but I was generally all right with it. I just wanted a bit more in terms of the final meeting between Shin and his girlfriend at the end, which he hardly got.
The music is also fantastic too and each one fills me with so much manly energy and testosterone that my shirt would easily blow off my chest in the same way the clothing in Ikkitousen gets blown off a woman's body if the wind so much as blows a little too hard. My favorite track being the wonderfully composed Kanashimi no Destiny which never fails to fill me with happiness on each listen.
In conclusion, Area 88 is a great OVA with fantastic characters, brilliant plane battles and a wonderful OST. Even after all these years the show still holds up very well and I would highly recommend it. There was a TV anime sometime in the early 2000s which I haven't seen yet but I've been hearing rather mixed views on that version so I'll be checking that out in due time.
Also, holy shit, I praised something for once rather than being a cynical ass hole and hating everything I watch. Feel strange man...
