Burn Up Scramble's issue is it tries to take a goofy 90's OVA series and make it "grounded". And it doesn't do a good job of that either. The beautiful animation of previous iterations? Gone, you get budget mid 2000s Great Value artwork. The outrageous characters? Downsized into less entertaining and more annoying versions of themselves. The "plot" is purely episodic and mostly revolves around Rio's misadventures. This is less a problem for an OVA, but for an anime, even a 12-episode anime, some kind of plot is necessary. Burn Up Scramble doesn't even have that. And it doesn't have anything else to carry it. It's all mediocre, all of it.

The animation being desaturated and mediocre is a huge downgrade because that is a HUGE part of Burn Up. This is flashy sexy ecchi 90's police OVA action! You're not here to think, you're here to feel! Rio without the 90's floofy hair and super slender fashion model proportions completely mogs the regular boring ANNOYING Rio of Burn Up Scramble. Lilica goes from a twin-tailed nerdy pinkette to a still-cute-but-not-the-same super-shy psychic. She's kinda cute. I feel bad for her getting stuck here. Maya is the only decent character in Burn Up Scramble. She goes from green haired hairband spastic to a twin braid hairband cutie who alternates between a quiet gun nerd and a cheeky smartass gun nerd.

Mediocre. Sanitized. Repressed. Those are the words I would use to describe this anime. The artstyle is no longer sexy. It's not sharp or aggressive like the OVAs. The show rarely pushes the humor to actually be any kind of fun. There is no real push to PUSH any part of the animation, characters, or story to any extreme, nor even to any interesting level. It barely tries. Nothing of consequence happens in the show. Fine for the OVAs, bad for an anime. See a pattern? Yeah. When I say "grounded" I mean the anime jerks back and forth between slapstick comedy in one scene and then trying to make emotional appeals for the viewer to feel sympathy for Rio, who, as a complete bimbo with zero sense or financial planning ability, is the least sympathetic character in the anime. This is counting Yuji.

The "twist" to the show is in episode 9 it tries to pivot from being a silly comedy series to being "serious". Burn Up Scramble barely had enough energy to limp along as a comedy series, to try to extend itself to cover something remotely serious with its limited resources is absurd. It doesn't work on any level, especially emotionally. Emotionally, this switch triggered the "I'm done" instinct, which is why I dropped it. Insufficient return on time investment, or, in a word, bored. It's not worth it. I'm done. 1/5, I wish I'd skipped this.