High school sophomore Aya Iseshima was on her way to school one day, alongside her peppy best friend Natsume, when they happened upon a strange sight; A shrine maiden named Miko was engaged in a dramatic battle with a flight attendant, right in the middle of the street, in broad daylight, throwing each other into car windows and punching each other’s clothing to shreds. Deciding to step in, Aya both sides with and befriends the shrine maiden, inadvertently taking her place in an underground martial arts tournament called the Platonic Heart. The winner of this tournament would be granted one wish upon completion, and when her new friend suddenly disappears without a trace, Aya embarks on a string of deadly battles to work her way through the tournament to find poor Miko. Unfortunately for her, literally nothing about this situation is as it seems.

Zettai Shougeki: Platonic Heart... Or, Master of Martial Hearts, as it’s known in the west, because a terrible pun legitimately sounded better than the original title... was produced by Studio Kikan, now known as St. Signpost, and I’m kind of at a loss here because I’ve never actually seen any other title from their catalogue. I had previously heard rumors that it was produced by Studio Arms, which would have made sense given the litany of hentai attached to them, but nope. Kikan. But hey, that should tell you all about the production values of this series. It looks like swill from a company that has dipped it’s fingers into way too many cream pies. As far as I can tell, that isn’t actually the case with Kikan, but I have nothing else to work with here.

Most anime with budget problems will save the best looking animation for their openings, because that’s often the first impression most people will have of any series, so the fact that even the opening features running animation that would barely qualify as the worst an average anime has to offer should be your first red flag. This anime is asshole ugly. The animation is cheap and stilted, using budget saving tricks at every opportunity without bothering(possibly due to simple inability) to hide them. The only remotely expensive looking visual in the entire series is the platonic heart itself, the glorious mcguffin everyone’s fighting for that often gets shown to us in an endlessly recycled rotation. It’s fully 3D rendered, it’s see-through, and its design is garish and tacky, just a crystal pretzel covered in smaller colored gems.

The characters proportions are inconsistent, they’re frequently off-model with their eyes rarely set right on their faces, and for a fanservice show, it’s stunningly unappealing. I think the kind of sexiness they were going for was the kind where you take a body part people want to see... T and A, obviously... And just find every attempt to shove those assets as far into the camera as they can, leaving the people attached to them in unnervingly awkward poses. Bare breasts look passable maybe a quarter of the time, but far more often than that they look like the kinds of really shoddy nude-filter fan edits you can find on Rule34 sites. The only half-way decent looking nude scene is a shower sequence in episode 2 that looks like it was stolen directly from Vampire Hunter D.

The fight scenes themselves are honestly kind of hilarious, not only in the logic behind them, but in the different ways they manage to rend the clothing of any given targeted area. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of anime where women punch and kick their opponents’ clothing to shreds, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one where a bra is literally punched off, still in one piece, like the force of the impact somehow unhooked it. The backgrounds are lazy, the movement of extras is minimal at best, and the main character just makes the derpiest expressions whenever she feels the cardinal emotions of anger or despair.

It’s been a while since I talked about the opening theme of an anime, but lord this one stands out for all the wrong reasons. Every single episode starts off with the soothing melody of an electric guitar doing an impression of a fire alarm. I’m a pretty big fan of Kaidoku Funou by Jinn... It’s my favorite Code Geass opening, what with it’s Garbage-meets-The-Donnas aesthetic, but I know I’m in the minority. I’ve heard lots of people call it off-key, shrill and annoying, which means Tatsumaki Wave by Little Non is MY Kaidoku Funou. It sounds like Avril Lavigne trying to cover Britney Spears’ Toxic. The rest of the music isn’t much better, but I barely noticed it.

The English dub, I am sad to say, is annoyingly, disturbingly, distressingly, unforgivably... Good. Like it’s actually really good. Just about every Funimation regular is in this show, and they do a stellar job, especially Cherami Leigh, who is just an absolute champ at making the shrill Natsume as likeable as possible, and Monica Rial, who played against her usual type to make a pretentious sounding lore dump in the final episode(not even the worst of the episode) sound almost palatable. A sad exception is the main actor, who plays her role... I don’t want to say half-assedly, because it does sound like she’s trying her best, but more like half-heartedly, where there are moments where she genuinely sounds like she doesn’t want to be there. She works under an alias, as Anita Neukar, and while it’s usually not my policy to do so, I am going to respect her wishes on that.

Funimation has a weird history of giving some of their best possible effort to fanservice titty shows that do NOT deserve the attention, and this OVA is no exception. The actors put their all into reading their absurd and often repulsive dialogue, recreated faithfully but altered just enough so that the glut of awful Japanese puns will be accessible to English speakers, and I know I’m going to sound ungrateful for saying this, I’m kind of disappointed by that. If this show had come out a few years prior, and had found it’s way to the desk of ADV Films... Or a few years later, with Sentai Flmworks... I have no doubt in my mind that someone like notorious ADR director Stephen Foster could have given it the Ghost Stories treatment, albeit maybe on a smaller scale, just basing an entire dub around calling out it’s own material for how stupid and non-sensical it is.

But yeah, really good dub. Go figure.

So here’s what this show is, and this is probably the best description I can possibly give it. Let’s say you’re playing a table top RPG, similar to DND but in a modern setting. The DM says you each create your own female combatant character... Humans only, of course, but weird gimmicks are encouraged... Who will battle each other to the death in a series of one on one fights. Simple, intriguing idea, could be fun. Immediately after the game starts, however, he railroads the game and makes you the main character, placing you in literally every single fight except for the introductory one between another player character and his own DMPC. You fight all the other player characters, personally, and when you’re losing, DM gives you some BS power-up so you win anyway for the sake of his story. At the end, DM mercilessly dumps layers upon layers of cruel, soul crushing plot twists on you about the game and your character, and you just have to sit there, jaw dropping further and further to the floor, as he revels in his own delusional sense of depth.

The whole game just follows a bunch of edgelord murder hoboes calling out ridiculous attacks against each other while the ‘mastermind’ behind it all sets up fetish scenarios for each fight, saving every defeated player character to serve his own twisted, perverted endgame that none of their creators would have allowed given the choice. This anime reeks of poor planning and world building, revolving around a concept that could have worked if they spent any time trying to make sense out of it instead of focusing all their time in writing reveals, none of which were properly foreshadowed. It’s a secret tournament, but it takes place in broad daylight in the middle of the street. Combatants are putting their lives on the line for one perfect wish, but they shoot themselves in the feet by basing their entire combat styles on overly complicated gimmicks. Remember in my review of Key the Metal Idol, how I said it’s only glaring flaw was that it spent the majority of it’s feature-length penultimate episode lore dumping to explain the mystery to the viewer? I take it back. This show does the same thing, only far worse, and in far less time.

The only reason I could imagine anyone subjecting themselves to this cringe-fest... Aside from inviting some friends over and drinking until it’s funny, which I’ve done... Is for the uncensored nudity, which this show has in spades, outside of one indoor pool scene that stands as a lone, and very weird exception. My friends, it has often been said that I like boobs. My friends, I like boobs. Friends, I love boobs. I love when they’re bare, I love when they’re not covered by hair, steam or streams of light, and I absolutely hate it when uncensored manga are adapted into TV safe anime, sacrificing my beloved boobies in the process. I won’t deny that watching Master of Martial Hearts after watching an anime that constantly teased you with TV-safe nudity does create a favorable comparison for it... This show can be a serious palette cleanser after watching something like A Sister’s All You Need, Fire Force, or let’s just be honest here, pretty much anything by Hiro Mashima.

But you know what else could serve that particular esoteric purpose? A lot, actually. Even in a modern market where the inclusion of uncensored nudity in non-hentai anime is becoming less and less common for the sake of appealing more and more to the puritanical American market, there will always be options out there, and they will always be better than this crap. You could watch Highschool DXD, supplementing your fanservice with intense, suspenseful demonic action. You could watch Strike Witches, supplementing your fanservice with high-octane aerial combat and a cast of extremely likeable characters. You could watch A Centaur’s Life, and supplement your fanservice with smart social commentary and some of the ballsiest world-building I’ve ever seen. I know there’s a lot of horny 14 year olds who probably don’t have any self respect, and I’m saying this as someone who was once one of you... You deserve better.

Master of Martial Hearts is available from Funimation. I should warn you, they were so desperate to sell this puppy that they put fanart of three characters topless right in the inside cover of the DVD, do with that information what you will. It’s supposedly based on a video game of the same name, but I can’t find any proof that it actually existed, like, ever. That says a lot.

If Ikki Tousen were to have a baby with Fate Stay/Night, Master of Martial Hearts would be the afterbirth. It starts out bad, and it never gets better, oh no, quite the opposite. This series goes downhill faster and faster, leading up to an infamously rancid trainwreck of a conclusion that has to be seen to be believed. I don’t think this show is quite as bad as the worst anime I’ve ever seen... Which I’ve vowed to only ever refer to as “Name redacted” until the end of time... But that’s also probably because it’s only five episodes long, I can’t make any guarantees for how much more bafflingly heinous it would be if it were stretched out to a more standard 14 episode length. As it is, it’s more of a challenge than entertainment, something you survive rather than just watch. For literally anything that you think you can get out of it, just watch Highschool DXD. Trust me.

I give Master of Martial Hearts a 0.5 out of 10.