This is the third time I've been trying to write this introduction. At first, I was going on an elongated, MGS-inspired philosophical tirade about the concept of information and oblivion and why certain data is lost while some other is preserved. Then I scrapped it and decided to center it around the concept of OVA and how I believe the format is unjustly hated by the mainstream audience. Then I scrapped it too and now, I'm realizing why I've written those: I just truly believe Alice in Cyberland is the kind of anime works that 1) would give a bad name to anime OVAs, and 2) should have been left to be buried under the sands of time.

Now you might be thinking:

"Hey wait a sec, isn't that a bit harsh? And why are you starting with the conclusion, anyway?".

Dear reader, it's because honestly, my mind has been drawing a blank ever since I've finished watching this. I haven't managed to squeeze anything out of this viewing session: no deeper meaning, no exciting experience, no particular message, not even some raw, dumb enjoyment, nothing. Just a feeling that nothing interesting happened at all and I just want to forget and go on with my life as if nothing had happened. Except I want to write this review so I need to hold onto whatever remnants of recollection I still have in my head.

For the presentation of this work, Alice in Cyberland is actually a multimedia franchise published in 1997, counting a game, 2 OVAs, a soundtrack and some audio dramas. Already, if like me, you are curious and have looked up "Alice in Cyberland" or "ありす in Cyberland", you'll immediately notice that the various works of that franchise are close to "lost media" status, and as a matter of fact, episode 2 of this OVA was indeed "lost" at some point, having never been released as home video. Old works tend not to have a big following, but you can still judge how fondly something is remembered/loved by the amount of entries/views/comments on those, like Gunsmith Cats, Bubblegum Crisis, etc.. In the case of Alice in Cyberland, the situation is pretty dire to say the least, as there are very few videos, often with very few comments, and the few encyclopedia entries aren't exactly very detailed. The multimedia franchise doesn't seem to have marked the consciousness of even the Japanese people and it's not really difficult to understand why: the gameplay I have seen looks incredibly barebones, with rather average 3D for PS1 standards, and the dating sim aspect is nowhere near as fun/interesting as something like Sakura Taisen, a series which actually predates Alice in Cyberland and was a success in the same video game niche.

The anime itself is nothing more than an ad for the game to sell and while this is nothing particularly new or noteworthy on its own, it still constitutes an indirect statement if you factor in that it's an OVA, with all the time constraints attached to the concept. As a result, each episode needs to be self-contained, which poses a lot of issues when you consider the amount of information that happen on-screen. In the same episode 1, bad things happen in the city due to a virus attack from a group called "Cyber Anarchists", there's some infodump from what I'm assuming is a government office, Alice is shown with her friends playing (probably featuring more gameplay elements from the game but that's just a guess), then it's shown that actually her Dad went missing, then it's more SoL, then she's contacted by a mysterious person called Lucia, then there's more damage spreading throughout the city (and somehow humans are having their memories deleted by a virus attacking the memory banks?! What is this, a cyberpunk dystopia where people's brains are connected to a net infrastructure akin to a hivemind?!) then it turns out Alice is a programming genius of sorts, then the lines between what's real and what's virtual are getting blurred and Alice is attacked by... tentacles coming out of a TV screen?! What is even going on at this point?

Well, we can only do guesswork because nothing is explained and nothing is truly clear. As per the title, this franchise tries to superimpose the internet with the rabbit hole from Alice in Wonderland, which actually is a very fitting metaphor very endemic of the late 90s, a time during which the internet started to reach some household and was technically the "Last Frontier" of humanity, ripe with savages and unexplored wonders, but the anime never settles down to actually explain how the internet is so pervasive to the point of allowing hackers to directly attack people's psyche through a screen, and prefers having the main heroine call upon the powers that the mysterious "Lucia" gave to her earlier to cut down a hacker's avatar represented as a gigantic monster. Worse even, episode 2 even makes the Net browsing process unclear: sometimes the heroines need to bathe in their tank using their special suits to dive in, sometimes their minds just wander off and they end up in the internet, which deepens the confusion of the viewer.

Speaking of episode 2, Glams was obviously in dire straits at that point because whatever few good aspects episode one had (alright 90s aesthetics, actually commendable animation, proper BGM) are completely gone. To be brutally honest, episode 2 is ugly as sin. The designs take a huge blow in the transition, the animation is incomplete and jerky, the labial sync is forgotten, the sound effects and the images sometimes don't match at all and the shading just disappears. The directing is also extremely poor and awkward, with some scenes lasting longer than they should. And let's not talk about the story, which is nonsensical. Why is the... "cracker"?... attacking those children's avatars? Nobody knows. Why would the AI necessarily try to go full cancer cell on the internet despite having obvious human awareness? No idea. I'll just chalk it up to "excuse for the monster of the week" and call it a night.
Note : Glams went bankrupt the very year this OVA came out, which makes it obvious that the CEO blew a lot of money into this project, probably hoping for the franchise to become the next Sakura Taisen, so I can only guess the conditions in which this episode was made.

Even the music is nothing interesting. It exists in there, that's for certain (at least in episode 1) but it's incredibly generic moe gal J-pop badly sung by your average female seiyuu trying to keep the cute voice of her character. The Cyber Anarchists must have done a number on me as well because I have no recollection of the melodies and I have no desire to listen to them again.

All in all, outside of being a very, very distant cousin of the Rockman.EXE series due to overlapping thematics, Alice in Cyberland is nothing remotely interesting, memorable or entertaining. As it stands and as far as I'm concerned, it only still exists because some hardcore otaku out there probably still had fond memories of that OVA on VHS and wanted to preserve it out of pure nostalgia. Or maybe that person genuinely enjoyed this and thought about sharing it. Or maybe they did so out of some sense of duty that that particular piece of media should be "preserved in all its triteness". That being said, I will not be that kind and give that creation the sweet release of oblivion from my drive and my memory shortly after finishing this review.