The mech is clearly the best part of the show; leading to a man with big gun vs robot setup not unlike Armor Hunter Mellowlink. Of course, Mellowlink is a must watch anime while Tokyo Vice isn't. Honestly, this whole OVA just lacks that visceral energy of contemporary 80s OVAs.
Pacing and direction issues plagued the vast majority of old school OVAs but they worked because they imbued schlocky direct to video awesomeness with superior quality (for the time) animation intensity that you generally wouldn't see in tv shows of the time (and certainly not in many modern seasonals). Tokyo Vice just lacks all of that: throwaway goons don't explode into showers of red goo, 70% of the budget isn't spent on 10 seconds of hyper realistic mechanical designs, the main character isn't a dude or chick wisecracking about asses and bubblegum and the main villain isn't a digitized consciousness Stalin trying to abolish everyone's Amazon subscriptions to become the ultimate proletarian cyber pirate. (admittedly that last one hasn't happened in anime yet).
It's just too grounded and unambitious with its premise! At least the music really rocks.
