It’s the distant future, year 5997. A series of massive, catastrophic events have reshaped humanity forever. Not only is the Earth itself unrecognizable in its current form, but humanity has managed to accomplish the once-thought impossible task of spreading out throughout the solar system, colonizing most of the celestial bodies making up their corner of the universe. They’ve bent moons and entire planets to their will, and the galaxy’s unifying government... As was once predicted by The Lonely Island, of all people... Is built around a sort of space olympics called The Divine Games, where representatives of each celestial body meet every year in competition to crown the Cosmo Beauty... A title once held akin to a mere championship, up until 100 years ago, when Akira Kanzaki won the crown and successfully defended Earth against an alien invasion. However, with that threat out of the way, the competition continued, only now the Cosmo Beauty is kind of like the Queen of the Galaxy, or something. I don’t know, it’s not entirely clear. Either way, the descendants of the 4997’th game have pretty randomly reunited to crown the next Cosmo Beauty!
Battle Athletes Victory Restart was produced by Studio Seven, and I swear to God, you have no idea how tempting it is to just sit here and spend 5 pages of text roasting them. They’re a fairly new production company in the anime market, they were founded in 2007, and they made their first non-hentai release in 2011, I am not making that up. Granted, it’s not impossible for great anime to come from such a source... For example, Gen Urobuchi is one of the most celebrated anime writers and directors of all time, and rightly so given his ability to wring engaging stories out of terrible ideas, which is why Psycho-Pass and Aldnoah Zero went from greatness to shit as soon as he stepped away from them, and he’s just generally seen as an artist who can bring complex emotion and unfathomable depth to the darkest of subject matter. He got his start in hentai. Sure it was really dark, problematic edgelord hentai, but it was still hentai. Then again you also have Studio Arms, who had a similar start, but their entire mainstream output has been terrible torture porn that just barely qualifies as NON hentai, and the only thing they made that anyone likes is Elfen Lied.
Studio Seven made a ton of hentai from 2007 to 2011, and while I’m no hentai watcher myself, I’ve seen one... There’s this nudist beach hentai based on an old doujin... The doujin is better, frankly, and it’s still not one of my favorites. As for their actual mainstream anime output, I’ve only seen a few of their titles, and the only one I kind of liked was “I Can’t Understand What My Husband is Saying,” which was a pretty cute short-length ONA about relatable newlywed drama. They also did My Wife is the Student Council President, which I didn’t really get into, and King’s Game, which I hated entirely. Oh, and it’s called “King’s Game the Animation” so we don’t confuse it with the party game, I’m pretty sure. They also apparently made a reboot of Irresponsible Captain Tylor back in 2017 that I literally heard about for the first time about tn minutes ago when I opened up their wikipedia page for this review, and I’m sorry, but that feels like it should have been bigger news, right? But anyway, if they made a reboot to one cult classic late nineties sci-fi epic that was instantly forgotten, it really shouldn’t be a surprise that they tried again with the Battle Athletes franchise.
As far as the visuals go, you don’t have to go too far into the first episode to see how ugly this show looks, which is a bold feat for a show that has such a bright and vibrant color palette. That’s probably the only improvement Studio Seven made over the previous installment, but every other aspect is the opposite in the worst way possible. Where Victory had a low budget that it struggled against, Restart clearly poured a ton of money into CG backgrounds and shiny rippling water and then just lazily let the character animations suffer to make up the difference. Where Victory spared no expense in making the athletic animations look as impressive as possible given their limitations, paying total attention to anatomic movement and making each step a runner takes feel impactful and dynamic, Restart takes the easy way out at every possible opportunity, moving frozen images across the screen to simulate flips and dives, and reusing the same three running animation cycles over and over again with every single character. The character designs are fine... Everybody looks like less interesting versions of the ancestor they’re supposed to be representing... But the new unitards look like they took inspiration from the space suits from Heroic Age in the way they ride up the girls’ buttcracks, which is a design choice I THINK was supposed to look sexy, but it just looks like everyone has the most uncomfortable wedgies in history, even when they’re wearing fucking jeans shorts.
The music is fine, if a bit too repetitive, but speaking of recycled animation, am I the only one who noticed a few seconds of animation in the opening that were clearly stolen from the first opening of Cardcaptor Sakura? There are other moments in the opening that look vaguely familiar, although I’m struggling to place them. I don’t mind so much the parts that pay homage to Victory’s original opening, but this is such a different feeling anime that they feel anachronistic to say the least. An homage I definitely didn’t appreciate was a remixed version of the original opening that plays in the credits of the final episodes. The first few notes are right, then everything goes to shit when they switch up the beat. There’s no English dub, and I’d personally recommend Funimation to not waste their money producing one, so let’s move on.
So I’m in a bit of a predicament with this review. Obviously, I’m not coming into the Battle Athletes franchise blind, and Restart is not my first exposure to it. I love the TV series Victory so much, it’s at the very edge of my top ten favorite anime series, and I honestly consider it superior in every way to the original OVA... You can call me blasphemous for that, I don’t care. In any case, the reason I’m bringing this up is because, while I may be a biased fanboy, I don’t want it to sound like this review is coming from such a perspective. I don’t want to sound like one of those butthurt reviewers who whines about shit not being accurate or the lore being changed. If all I wanted was to see Battle Athletes Victory, well, I could just DO that. Thanks to Discotek Media doing the lord’s work by rescuing and rereleasing it(like I literally asked them to do in my previous review of the series) I own it on Blu-Ray. When I watch a sequel, I want to see something new... I want to see the concept and universe evolved and explored in exciting and, well hell, why not, daring and inventive new ways. Spoiler alert, Restart did not do that.
I feel it’s safe to say that if I was coming into this franchise blind, the biggest compliment I’d give this show is that it had a ton of really cool ideas, but they were poorly thought out and needed to be workshopped a bit more. Since that’s not the case, I know those cool ideas WERE cool at one point, until Studio Seven got hold of them, and because the two shows do share an inseparable connection, I’m just going to rip the band-aid off now and explain why Victory worked, and Restart doesn’t. First off, the oldie-but-a-goody writing rule, show don’t tell. The very concept of the Battle Athletes franchise is ridiculous and non-sensical, but you can get away with a lot of weird bullshit if you let the audience experience it for themselves rather than try to explain it all to them. Victory did this really well, focusing almost entirely on character development, comedy and action while giving out lore and exposition in small doses through natural dialogue, and at the very worst, the occasional TV broadcast. Restart just explains everything to you at any given opportunity. One particularly egregious example is that before every sci-fi sport they came up with for the series, they tell the audience what it is and how it works, where Victory explained by, you know, showing you the characters competing.
Secondly, the characters. This, if you ask me, is the number one strength of Victory. Characters were complex, flawed, and had depth that reached surprising... Well, depths. There’s this concept in character writing called Mask, Counter-Mask and Dark Room. The Mask is the top layer, the persona a character chooses to show the world. Counter-Mask is what’s directly underneath... Their insecurities, their complexes, etcetera. The Dark Room is much farther down, it’s the disturbing secrets they can’t even admit to themselves, let alone show to other people. In Victory, at least half the cast had their dark room explored, and every one of them had their mask removed at some point. You could spend an episode warming up to a character, only to find out some shocking, disturbing fact about them ten episodes later that SOMEHOW makes perfect sense. The drawback to all this is that a lot of the characters were based on really insensitive stereotypes, and yeah, I’m not gonna excuse that, but they were all still likeable. This is why it’s so disappointing to see just how one dimensional everybody in Restart is. The deepest any of them get is just conflict between principals and friendship, and those conflicts are stupid by the way.
I mentioned earlier that the cast of this show is almost entirely made up of descendants of the cast of Victory, and yeah, that’s true. Almost none of it makes any gorram sense, but yep, it’s true. I guess I can buy Ayla’s descendant being an old lady in charge of the games, and having Tanya’s descendant be a detective investigating them is an okay workaround for the insanely racist character she was in the past. Kris Kristopher’s descendant is still a Beginner, that checks out. Now, how the fuck did Jessie Gurtland’s descendants become arms dealers on Mars? Why is comedy antagonist Ling-Pha’s descendant occupying the Ichino role, while Ichino’s descendant is a coach and not a competitor? Why is Anna’s descendant the only one that looks 100 percent nothing like her? And why the hell is Akari... One of the most loveable yet deeply complex heroines in anime history, fight me... Represented by a descendant that is, in every sense of the term, a bland Mary-Sue? She’s already physically gifted going into the competition, she has no real wants or desires outside of friendship, and every one of her ‘flaws’ is played for awkward laughs.
Friendship was a part of Akari’s development, but she also had to overcome her mental, physical and psychological limitations, part of which was a crippling sense of co-dependency, learning to stand on her own two feet and run for herself when the people she relied on couldn’t be there. Meanwhile, Kanata just happens to get a burst of speed or strength when she thinks about her friends, only two of which she has any defined relationship with, the others, just happened to float into the same social group as her. She isn’t even involved in that stupid conflict I alluded to before, which... Okay, spoilers. Yana Kristopher is from the moon, where a civil war is going on. Her partner Lydia Gurtland is from a family that’s supplying weapons to both sides of the war. Yana is urged to kill Lydia by an old friend who occasionally makes insane faces, because killing Lydia will show her family what happens when- Okay, stop, that’s not going to end the conflict. All it’s going to do is justify more violence. Are you fucking high? The Gurtlands have these weapons they’re selling your people, they probably have access to a ton more, and your plan is to create a grudge where there previously was none? Are you fucking high? I know you want to try and match the emotional potency of Victory, but is this the best you can do?
And yes, I said emotional potency. As ridiculous as it might be on the surface, Victory was a powerful show. There were more individual tear-jerking moments in the first eight episodes than most shows can pull off in 26 episodes, and there’s a DAMN sight more than Restart was able to pull off in twelve. It is, ultimately, a matter of execution. The same concept, executed well or poorly, can yield drastically different results. Take, for example, the divine glow. In Victory, there was this phenomenon where when a character was putting on a transcendent performance, a golden aura would form around them, but it was never entirely clear what this was. It happened to multiple characters, and was established as something first achieved by the legendary Tomoe Mido, but we only ever saw it second-hand by other characters who were competing against them, were pushing their limits, and were either inspired or devastated to see someone performing on a level they couldn’t reach. It was even animated like said character was viewing it through double vision. In Restart, it’s just a literal, tangible glow that everyone can see, and it is complete bullshit that would feel out of nowhere if you didn’t know what they were trying to copy.
And hell, because the fanboy train has already left the station, let's throw out a few more examples. In the old series, Kris Kristopher had a cow as an animal companion. This is an incredibly stupid idea on paper, but she was able to use it in a lot of scenes as a comedy prop, so it worked. This time, Yana Kristopher has a kangaroo companion, and while that actually is a solid follow-up on paper, it barely has any connection to her in the story, and just seems to exist as the show's pointless animal mascot. In the old show, the main character's best friend has to drop out because she reinjures an old fracture, something she's had to overcome that gave her tenacity meaning. In the new show, the main character's best friend has to drop out because her prosthetic limbs short-circuit in the rain, because of course she's never been out in the fucking rain before. I've seen people complain that the final event is just a short-length race, which feels anticlimactic to them, but the old show did the same thing... But with stakes, tension, pageantry, personal consequences for both characters, and a sense that like the Final Destination stage in Smash Bros, this was going to be the purist competition, no gimmicks, just a raw athletic challenge. It's like it's trying to pay homage to the original series at every opportunity, but it just never sticks a single landing.
Look, I didn’t go into this show wanting to hate it... I understand why some people like to get defensive over their favorite pieces of media, but I’ve never been much of a gatekeeper(Well, maybe a little bit with wrestling). If I like a particular franchise, I like getting more content, even if it’s not as good as the original. I still love all of the Pirates of the Caribbean and Starship Troopers titles, despite the fact that the newer entries in both kinda suck, because I’m in for a penny, in for a pound at this point, and nothing would have made me happier than to add one of my favorite nineties anime to that list with an unexpected addition in 2021. I don’t know what people who don’t know the franchise thought of this title... Probably not a lot, considering the amount of people who have it on their ‘worst of 2021’ lists... but I wanted to be the lone dissenting voice. I wanted to defend it, hell, I was even prepared to don my Apologist gear, but I came away feeling nothing but pain and hatred for the world. If this is what happens when you try to Restart, then you need a new battery.
Battle Athletes Victory Restart is available for streaming through funimation. The original series is available in a convenient DVD/Blu-Ray set from Discotek Media, or if you’d like, the original single-volume DVDs are pretty easy to track down online and in used DVD stores.
If bad is the absence of good, this anime is the new mascot for that phrase. I am quite possibly the most forgiving and accepting audience this show could have possible had, and yet I found nothing in it but disappointment. There is no humor, no passion, no imagination or inspiration, no joy to be had in this series. I suspected while watching that this series was the result of some greedy producer looking at a cult classic and seeing a cash cow, and while I obviously have no proof of that suspicion, seeing that they tried and failed previously to revive Captain Tylor has only strengthened my belief. Speaking of beliefs, I haven’t changed my mind about one that I’ve held for a long time, that a sequel or reboot, no matter how bad, cannot possibly ruin the source material... I still believe that, because long after people have forgotten this train wreck ever happened, Battle Athletes Victory will still be there, waiting for people to discover it and realize just how much fun dated anime from the past can be.
I give Battle Athletes Victory Restart a 1/10.
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