Well, me neither.
But apparently, someone had, as this is the premise for a fighting anime called "Variable Geo", which features said tournament of the same name.
I only picked up "Variable Geo" because I'd played the original SNES game before (a fiendishly hard game by the way - I couldn't even get to the boss on the easiest mode), and since the anime comprises only three episodes, I thought: why not?
I'd braced myself for a bad anime, but the shittiness of "Variable Geo" somehow managed to surpass even my expectations. Its first mistake, like many other fighting game adaptations, is pretending to be something it's not. Instead of fully embracing its shallowness and concentrating on just being a great fighting anime, "Variable Geo" fancies itself as something deeper and more philosophical. As a result, you get meaningless pseudo-philosophical drivel such as "I'd like to see the petals in the tea" strewn all over the place, along with ill-judged attempts to do some soul searching on why the characters fight, like "when I fight, I feel like I'm communicating with them, that's why I fight." Yeah right. I guess no one told this character the existence of a communication method called "dialogue". Is it just me who get really irritated by fighting anime trying to come up with inane reasons to justify the fighting - no one fucking cares, start beating the shit out of each other already!
I also couldn't extract much sense out of the story, and the parts I did understand seems laughably flimsy. When a fighter in a martial arts tournament turns up for a match with glowing metal rods sticking out of her back, you would think that, in the very least, her opponent would smell something fishy going on, but no. Precisely zero eyebrows were raised at this strange occurrence.
If you're wondering whether you should pick up this anime to see some ass-kicking action, don't bother. None of the fights last long enough, and most of them quickly descend into dull affairs where the fighters start blasting energy at each other, and the fight would get resolved by who's got the stronger projectile attack. Have you ever seen one of those Street Fighter matches where it's Ryu/Ken vs another Ryu Ken, and it mostly consists of them throwing fireballs at each other from across the screen? Well it's like that. Going to the toilet and taking a piss feels more satisfying.
You might wonder what is the point of "Variable Geo". As the terribly uninteresting fights play out on screen, the anime finally reveals its raison d'etre ... in the form of girls getting their clothes ripped off by the attacks of their opponents. THAT's the kind of audience it's fishing for. And if that sounds like the kind of thing that floats your boat, then congratulations on discovering a new anime to watch. But for everyone else, "Variable Geo" is a hard sell: the series isn't just bad, it's ludicrously bad, and not even in a so-bad-it's-good kind of way. Its only redeeming factor is its length: at three episodes, the torture didn't last too long, fortunately.
Personal rating: -2.5 (abysmal)
