Before I go into my long-awaited review of the third season and second OVA of UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie, I feel like it’s important to take a step back and figure out how we got here, as this is NOT a popular or relevant franchise, and anyone who hasn’t previously read my reviews of seasons 1 and 2 might be a little bit lost. The only exceptions to this rule are the four people who automatically downvote every review I post. You know exactly why you’re here, and I appreciate you, because I’m a whore for all kinds of attention, even the negative kinds.
UFO Princess Valkyrie was a manga and anime series about a teenage boy who runs the family bathhouse with his sister, in a version of modern day where humans coexist with extraterrestrial beings. One day, a princess named Valkyrie is fleeing Valhalla, when she crashes her ship into the bathhouse, accidentally killing the boy, which she feels so remorseful about that she decides to revive him by sacrificing half her life force. This brings him back, but it turns her into a child, and also they’re engaged to be married now, and whenever they kiss Valkyrie becomes human again. The rest of the series... Well, the franchise, really, is just them and the far more interesting characters around them going through bizarre hijinks under the vague promise that the boy(Kazuto) and Valkyrie are probably eventually going to totally get married for realsies.
Unlike most anime franchises that jump from studio to studio with each installment, Valkyrie is entirely the product of TNK, which I’ve talked about before. I talked about them in my School Days review, so you know, nothing positive. I said it before, but I’ll say it again; The best looking thing TNK has ever animated was Highschool DXD, and while DXD isn’t a bad looking show, it’s also not something you want to have held up as the highlight of your resume. The animation is extremely cheap, to the point that I don’t think it would have been finished if the director didn’t abuse static panning shots so much. Character designs are solid, with all the aliens looking colorful and creative, and the human characters looking down-to-earth enough to distinguish themselves from all the Martian madness, but still unique enough to not look bland... Except in their animation, which is stiff and off-model even at the best of times. Three seasons in, this has not gotten any better.
I will say that the second season does stand out, because for whatever reason, that season and that season alone feels like it had an unprecedented amount of effort poured into it... Not from a visual standpoint, but with the story and writing. There was an actual genuine overarching plot in that season, and the way it was written, it was possible to actually feel things... Even for Valkyrie herself, despite her being as boring as a buxom alien waifu princess can possibly be. I’ve never really been sure how to describe Valkyrie... I think I’ve called her just as milquetoast and forgettable as Kazuto before... But I can think of a much better description now. You know how in Steven Universe, Steven’s Mom is described as a powerful, inspirational revolutionary who everyone loves, but she also had a really selfish personality that led her to unintentionally hurt a lot of people, and the writers of the show were well aware of this and did a ton of shit with it? Well imagine the same character, but without that awareness. The writers really are trying to make a perfect heroine and all her negative qualities are accidental and go completely unobserved and unexplored. That’s kind of who Valkyrie is.
And Kazuto really just is completely bland and boring. Like, probably the least interesting protagonist in anime, period. The rest of the cast starts out promising... Kazuto’s sister is pretty likeable, Princess Hydra is an awesome ball of fury. Princesses Laine and Chorus have their quirks, but they also have some depth to them, and they each bring their own unique comedic element to the series. Akina and Miss Sanada are walking cliches, respectively the childhood friend who’s hopelessly and obsessively in love with the protagonist, and a catgirl maid... And yeah, they kind of suck, but they at least have some interesting qualities. Unfortunately, by the third season, they’ve both gotten worse, and every princess that’s been introduced has been less and less interesting. You’ve got a pirate princess, a judgemental princess, and a glasses girl who’s obsessed with glasses girls, which I guess is good news for the guy who wrote Ready Player One. The best material in the series is always the stuff revolving around the four or five good characters, and for season 3, that’s like an episode and a half out of a six episode OVA.
Now I clearly don’t have anything nice to say about this show, so why am I reviewing the third season? Why am I so invested in a show nobody remembers and nobody likes? For a review maybe one or two people will ever read? Well, the answer is two-fold. First of all, Valkyrie is an integral part of my history as an otaku.
When I was a teenager, I mostly stuck to anime I could find on TV... Pokemon and Cardcaptors on Kids WB, Sailor Moon and DBZ on Cartoon Network, and so on and so forth. My first venture a little further down the rabbit hole came from manga that was available at my school and public libraries, and when I started seeking out the DVDs of some of those titles... Namely Azumanga Daioh and Excel Saga... I found new anime to seek out from the previews page in the special features, which is why some of the earliest pages of my otaku history is littered with ADV titles.
One of those titles was UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie, a show that I could tell right away was bottom-of-the-barrel garbage, but it had two things I was especially interested in... It had the creative energy of a series that knows it’s never gonna be popular, so it just does it’s own thing and has fun being weird(think Girls Bravo cranked up to 11) and it also had nudity, which was implied to be in abundance because the show took place at an anime bathhouse. For these two qualities, I soldiered through the first season, even though I knew it was garbage(and for the record, this is back when I was so inexperienced I actually thought This Ugly Yet Beautiful World was an underrated masterpiece). When the second season came out, I didn’t watch it... At least not right away.
This was all in the mid-2000s. Around about 2010, I had caught the reviewing bug, and because I felt like I had some unfinished business with this series, I rewatched the first season. This was long before I had my blog, and the handful of reviews I wrote back then are nothing compared to the ones I would put out later. Every single one of these proto-reviews would eventually be rewritten and officially published(Except an old Gantz review that’s been lost to time) and Valkyrie is no exception. I would also review the second season, because I honestly do think it’s a shocking step up from the rest of the franchise.
So why am I reviewing this piece of obscure trash? Because I’m obsessed with the list I’ve been keeping of every anime I’ve ever published a review of, and about a week ago I thought “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to add another Valkyrie review to that list before I hit review #200?” That’s literally the only reason.
Season 3 does not have the effort that season two had. It spends less time pretending to have a plot than season one did. It doesn’t even have any nudity, unless you count non-descript Barbie-doll bodies as nudity, which I don’t(But some people must, if Food Wars was able to get that tag). It’s just six tired episodes of tired characters engaging in tired gimmick-related shenanigans, for a series that ran out of steam at the end of the second season, the season it apparently wasted all of its energy on. The only kind of fun episode involves Laine traveling through time to different stages in her life in what you could call the original Hot Tub Time Machine, and I know it’s random to bring this up now, but there’s a modified version of Gymnopedies they use a few times in the soundtrack that I really like.
Kazuto and Valkyrie aren’t any better... The fact that Valkyrie spends 90% of her screen time in child form, and she’s supposed to be in a romantic relationship with nearly-adult Kazuto, and he has to kiss her child lips to turn her into an adult, makes for a romance that is still completely terrible... Not just for all of the pedophilic overtones, but for the fact that with Kazuto and Valkyrie spending almost no time together as adults, they have no fucking chemistry whatsoever, and they spend the series alternating between being creepy together and boring together, for fuck’s sake who actually thought this concept had any fucking potential to be anything other than a trainwreck?! Well, at least most of this season doesn’t really involve them(Which I’m just realizing now is a horrendously weird thing to say about a show’s two main characters).
Oh, and you wanna know why the name changed from Princess to Ultramaiden? When ADV picked it up, they changed it because at the time, the last several anime they released with Princess in the title didn’t do so well financially. That’s literally the reason. I mean I personally would have blamed their decision to sell each 4-episode disk for forty bucks, but hey, what do I know.
Over-all though, it’s kind of hard to rate this season on its own, as it belongs to an overall franchise that most people have never experienced... The franchise itself is interesting in its own way, and I can see plenty of reasons someone might enjoy it, all of which are varying degrees of ironic, but I still think season two AT LEAST is worth getting into the franchise for. I still haven’t finished the series, I still have the fourth season to watch, which is only... Two episodes? Seriously? But yeah, it’s a cheap and easy series to find, the SAVE edition DVDs from Funimation are all over the place, enter at your own risk.
I give UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie season 3 a 2/10.
7 out of 9 users liked this review
