Battle Athletes

Whoever said War Never Changes must have never witnessed the fallout of mankind’s first encounter with extraterrestrials. They did not come in peace, and we responded in kind, launching a multi-century intergalactic war that would evolve in technological sophistication to the point that we weren’t really even fighting each other anymore... Our machines were basically fighting unmanned at that point, and we were at such a stalemate that war itself started to feel fruitless. Looking for another way to solve our differences, we began holding athletic competitions... Big, grand events involving people from across the solar system, competing to become the next champion... Or, after the focus on the competition shifted towards the development of female athletes in particular, the Cosmo Beauty! If any of that sounds confusing or dubious to you, I know, the anime doesn’t explain it much better. Anyway, it’s the year 4999, and one special competitor has turned up at the University Satellite; Akari Kanzaki, the daughter of the legendary Tomoe Midoh! Will she be able to live up to her mother’s legacy?

Battle Athlete’s has a pretty interesting history behind it, at least as far as what I’ve been able to dig up. It originated as a multimedia franchise from the mind of Hiroki Hayashi, the creative mind behind Magical Play(which is a strange connection if I’ve ever heard one) as well as one of the driving forces behind Tenchi Muyo and El Hazard. It started out as a Sega Saturn game in 1996, and while I’m not entirely sure what the plot of the game was(I don’t think it’s ever been translated) I’m fairly certain you’re supposed to play the role of the main character’s manager/trainer, working with her idolmaster style to support her career. My biggest piece of evidence for this is the existence of a manga-exclusive character who plays exactly this role, and from the few playthrough videos I’ve seen, it looks like you’re supposed to guide her through her school year, choosing what stats she builds and who she interacts with. The following year, three more titles would go into production... The aforementioned manga, a six episode OVA series, and a 26 episode TV series, and this all came out within the space of two years... Why? Well, the best sources I can find say that AIC was trying to profit off of the 1998 Winter Olympics, taking place in Nagano Japan. A similar sports-related anime boom happened around the date of the 1964 Japanese olympics, and Battle Athletes even received a terrible sequel just in time for the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, so there’s some decent support for this theory.

I’m not entirely sure what counts as the actual source material, but I have a working theory about how all of these titles tie in together. After the game, the manga was released, debuting in Dengeki comics to present the concept in a linear narrative format, with a bit more ecchi. The OVA was most likely a sequel to the game, which I’m gathering from the fact that characters from that portion of the story and beyond don’t appear in any of the game’s artwork. This would imply that when Victory came out, it was able to combine all of this into one complete story, changing some details, fixing some issues(while creating a few new ones) and looking to the previous entries as the ‘drawing board,’ so to speak. If you pay attention to the release schedule of all three(thank god for Wikipedia) and go through all three with that information in mind, it’s hard to not notice these different adaptations taking influence from each other... And from the first episode of Gunbuster, but that’s a discussion for another day. The manga is considered to be the most explicitly ecchi out of the three, the TV series is easily the most popular and critically acclaimed of the three... But where does that leave the OVA?

Well, in terms of visual quality, ASCII didn’t give either anime a high budget. This does kind of fall in line with my previous theory about them trying to profit off of the Winter Olympics, as they’re not exactly going to pour money into something that was conceived as a ratings trap anyway. Still, all background information aside, this OVA is a major downgrade visually from the TV series. Don’t get me wrong, both shows look dirt cheap, but you would think an OVA releasing bimonthly would have more freedom to manage its budget than a weekly episodic series, right? Well, it doesn’t. They had the same studio, AIC, but they had different directors. Victory could look really cheap sometimes, and there were a lot of corners cut throughout, but at least director Katsuhito Akiyama never failed to pour the money he’d saved into action and sport scenes, putting as much fluid motion as possible where it really counted. For Battle Athletes, it always feels like Kazuhiro Ozawa is struggling to tread water and keep the show over the line of ‘okay-looking.’ The backgrounds are dull and lifeless, there’s no grace or energy in character movements, and almost everything feels like the bare minimum of effort went into it, which I refuse to believe is actually true.

Despite having the same character designer, Ryuuchi Makino, the designs don’t look nearly as polished or streamlined here as they would in the later entry. As far as I can tell the manga uses the same character designs as the game, and the OVA kept those designs for the characters it used... And then Victory changed those designs, and kept the designs of the characters the OVA left behind, with the exception of Ayla’s weird fluffy bangs. I guess you could argue the designs look more or less fine in both cases, but that doesn’t excuse all the inconsistencies. Character faces are often off model, and facial proportions can change between shots. There’s fanservice, but not as much as in the manga, and despite the fact that an OVA like this one doesn’t have to answer to censors the way a TV show does, it’s all really badly drawn barbie doll nudity, and there’s a fair amount of it on display. The only visual change I kind of like is the way an athlete is depicted when they’re transcending. In both Victory and Restart, a character would develop a glow that was visible to other racers whenever they reached a higher level of performance, well, here, it’s represented as the character entering this rainbow pocket dimension, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I guess I dig it.

The English dub is also a major step down, and not just because of the material. Early on, but especially in the first episode, the dub writers essentially completely ignored the script and tried to insert more jokey, snarky dialogue, none of which is even remotely funny. They stopped doing this pretty quickly, thankfully, and by the time they reached the halfway point, they were adapting it more faithfully and respectfully. The cast, however, is not particularly great. Dyanne DiRosario is by no means an acting legend, putting together a very brief resume in the nineties before disappearing off the face of the earth, and while she was kind of amazing as Akari’s mother in Victory, she sounds bland as hell in the actual role of Akari here. Brianne Siddall has the same issue as Tanya, while Julie Maddallena gave her a lot more impish energy in Victory. Dorothy Elias-Fahn and Bridget Hoffman are probably the strongest performers here, and while Steve Blum is okay as the principal, he’d grow into the role better in Victory. Mary Elizabeth McGlynn does a fine Lahri Feldnunt(Fernando?), but she was always more suited to Ayla. So yeah, hate to sound like a broken record, but Victory was better, sub honestly preferred.

So this is a fairly difficult review for me, because I really don’t want to keep throwing out comparisons to Battle Athletes Victory, but the compulsion to do so is overwhelming. Objectively speaking, I think those comparisons are kind of fair, because the two entries tell the same story, but also kind of not fair, because if my theories are correct(and you should take them with a huge grain of salt by the by), then the OVA had a much harder job than Victory, and I really don’t envy the position they were probably in. For the sake of fairness, I’m going to give this OVA the benefit of the doubt, and assume they were handed a game with a semi-satisfying conclusion and told to make up a continuation of the story on the fly, with likely very little direction and probably a few character restrictions to boot. This isn’t meant to be an excuse for any lack of quality the series possesses, but more like context for why things turned out the way they did.

It feels very strongly like, for whatever reason, the studio gave director Kazuhiro Ozawa lemons, and he was left to make lemonade as well as he possibly could. They definitely tried to make this project work, but they faced several limitations right off the bat. Starting where it does, it skips a lot of content and starts at the beginning of a new arc, including the entire training school part of the story, and drops us right into the scene where Akari is arriving at University Satellite, accompanied by a toned down Tanya(we’ll get to that) and a nameless stand-in for Jessie Gurtland who is very quickly forgotten by the narrative and dropped from the story. I haven’t seen enough footage of the game to know if this is canonical... If Jessie and Tanya are the default runners up if you get Akari to first place... Or if the OVA just picked them and set the precedent, but it doesn’t amount to much. Characters who got left behind are simply treated as though they never existed, and Akari... Who was in the middle of a very long and complex character arc at this point in the TV series... Is portrayed very simply as a bland protagonist who has a generally friendly and positive disposition, but just wants to get stronger. She has her teammates, the athletically gifted Kris Kristopher and the sweet-natured Anna Resphigi, who... We’ll get to that.

The worst part of the whole series is the lengthy and tedious exposition dump at the beginning, the one that did a really poor job explaining how this world came to be, but after that, when we actually get to Akari and her story, the writing is fine. Because of all the character building and development they had to skip, the story from here isn’t that emotionally strong or engaging, and Akari isn’t as charming or likeable as she should be, but she isn’t annoying or anything. This is fine. It’s fine. We’re fine. They try in earnest to hit two of the biggest emotional elements of her character, and they don’t do a bad job, but they do fall short of the mark. They address Akari’s mommy issues, living up to Tomoe Midoh’s legacy and dealing with her death, but it doesn’t feel organic or natural. Still, it’s there, and I’d rather have it than not have it. The other element is her relationship with Jessie in the game, which is transferred to Kris in the OVA, and, which... Honestly, her relationship with Kris is actually better here than it is in Victory. Sure, neither girl is as interesting here, but Kris’s religious side feels more compelling and less like a joke, even if the pay-off of her final decision doesn’t feel as consequential.

And since we’re talking about Kris Kristopher, I should mention that the more problematic elements of Victory are nowhere to be found here, which should be a good thing, but sadly, this OVA has its own problematic issues, making it feel like kind of a lateral move. Tanya isn’t an exaggerated, animalistic stereotype here, but that portion of racism was replaced by some poorly-aged and actually downright stupid transphobia towards the middle of the series. Akari’a relationship with Kris still reeks of queer-baiting, but at least Kris isn’t so sexually aggressive and predatory anymore... With the trade-off being that the principal Grant Oldman is SO FUCKING CREEPY. He overtly pervs out on his teenage students to a level that would make Mr. Kimura blush, and he even has a bet going with the principal of a rival boy’s school that each year, whosoever’s school wins a sporting competition will get to be principal of the girl’s school. Yeah, old men perving on young girls is so normalized here that two of them hold open wagers over who gets better access to them.

And speaking of the boys’ school, why is that a thing? I mean I didn’t exactly understand why the fate of the galaxy began to hinge on female athletes in the first place, but since that is what happened, why is there a boys’ equivalent to this school? Did I miss something? Why does it take so long to expel the borderline attempted murderer Mylandah? I know I shouldn’t be harping on this franchise for not making sense... And I mean especially for that... But as ridiculous as this whole multimedia project is, the OVA just isn’t silly enough to make such a blatant deviation from the concept work without the viewer asking questions. Unlike Victory, it doesn’t lean hard enough into the silliness of its concept to justify the viewers expanding our suspension of disbelief, and to make matters worse, it also doesn’t lean hard enough into Victory’s gosh-darn sincerity to trick the audience into caring deeply in our hearts about the results of the competition. As much as I’d love to draw this OVA’s myriad of issues into the fact that they were forced to only tell a small portion of a larger story, it still could have been done. There’s so much they could have done to make this work, and they didn’t. They hit the beats they were supposed to, but they put almost no effort into endearing Akari and her plight to us.

I watch every important race in Victory with my heart in my throat, on the verge of tears. I watch every important race in the OVA feeling nothing, other than ‘oh well, if she loses, better luck next year.’ The races themselves aren’t the point. Watching a character win a prize or a trophy or a championship means nothing if you don’t create stakes to make the audience care, or hell, the results of the race don’t have to matter at all. In Yuri on Ice, nobody cared about the trophy. Only one character cared about the trophy, everyone else cared about their own personal arcs, and focusing on building lives for themselves after the competition. Only one character cared about the trophy, and in the epilogue, after he won, he was still just chasing another trophy. Well, aside from winning Cosmo Beauty, there is nothing at stake in this OVA. Characters race to win. They struggle and strive to win. Characters suffer brutal injuries to try and win, but when someone finally does win, it doesn’t feel like anything about them has changed. The reason this OVA isn’t as fondly remembered as its successor isn’t because it’s missing a ton of plot, it’s because it’s missing a ton of heart.

Battle Athletes is currently available alongside Victory in a recent Blu-Ray release from Diskotek Media. A recent reboot called Restart! is not yet available stateside, and much like the original manga and Sega Saturn game, it likely never will be.

At this point, I’m the only person on Anilist who has reviewed any entry in the Battle Athletes franchise, let alone all three of them. My critique of the OVA so far has not been a hit piece, but a labor of love, as I didn’t even hold back on criticizing my favorite entry over its myriad of flaws. I don't hate the OVA. At its best, it’s competent, and at its worst... Well, let’s just say that it’s not always competent, but it’s still nowhere near as bad as that Restart reboot garbage fire, and I honestly wonder what I would think of it if I had seen it first, rather than starting my journey on Victory so long ago. Still, regardless of what I started with, I do strongly believe that Victory wouldn’t be as good as it is if the OVA hadn’t come out first and laid out so much groundwork for it. I don’t like it very much, but I respect it, and I appreciate the fact that it walked so that my favorite sports anime could run.

I give Battle Athletes a 5/10.