The internet is filled with sequentially numbered,
attention-getting listsicles all claiming to be the authoritative judgment on
the top fifteen party schools to visit after you master your five best workouts
or the twenty-five movies you must not fail to see with the ten people you meet
when you die. And here at Let’s Anime we’re just as lame, even though our focus
is classic Japanese cartoons. So here’s
an exhaustively researched, completely subjective and arbitrary list of the Top
Ten Least Essential OVAs That Honestly, You Don’t Need To Watch. You can safely go on about your life without
ever having wasted your time watching these 1980s Japanese anime OVAs; other
than filling the shelves of neighborhood video rental shops, they are
inconsequential in every sense of the word.
Some of them are bad, some of them are boring, and others make no sense
whatsoever, their only common denominator being their total uselessness. And
remember, like every other stupid list you find on the internets, this is
completely arbitrary, subject only to the reviewer’s whimsical notions, and may
not reflect your personal taste or reality in any way whatsoever.
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Headbands are an essential part of your 1980s fashion |
Cosmos Pink Shock - 7-21-1986
This one’s a lightweight and knows it, but the great Toshiki “Iczer One” Hirano
is here at the height of his powers, giving us the story of Michi, a space
leotard girl who blasts across a goofy universe in her ship, the Pink
Shock, in pursuit of her boyfriend. It’s got good AIC animation, some gags – not
great gags, but gags nonetheless – and cultural references that we didn’t get
in the 80s because our knowledge of Japan
was limited to Robotech, ninja movies and metal robot toys. It’s the OVA
equivalent of a 12” remix by Bananarama or the Mary Jane Girls – a perfect
artifact of its time whose greatest virtue is being a perfect artifact of its
time.
Dead Heat - 8-7-1987
In the future, auto racing is known as ‘FX’ and the drivers don’t drive cars,
they drive car-robot hybrid vehicles, and they don’t just race, they grapple
with each other as they go around the track. Seems like a lot of mechanical
engineering simply to replicate roller derby, but who am I to argue with the
future? This Sunrise OVA is of interest
mostly to people who for some reason are unable to watch either roller derby or
auto racing, and who wonder if our hero Makoto will win the big race so he can
take his surprisingly male-looking girlfriend to a love hotel. If you had a
dedicated 3D compatible VHD player with 3D glasses, you could watch Dead Heat in thrilling
3D, with the exciting bonus of witnessing an extra character who was only
visible in 3D. Legend has it this character holds up a sign marked with the
Japanese characters for “sucker”.
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Makoto and "girlfriend" |
Elf 17 - 1-4-1987 Based on the manga by Atsuji Yamamoto, Elf 17
is a cutesy lightweight romp through the galaxy as our title character, the
strongest little teenage girl elf in the universe, teams up with the eccentric
zillionaire prince Mascot Tyler and the battle-suit otaku K.K. as they battle
their way through the pro-wrestling areas of outer space. This airy trifle
comes complete with giant walking tanuki statues and a Mitokomon reference, and
it completely misrepresents Yamamoto’s manga work, which started off kinda
lurid and just got more lurid with time. Later Yamamoto works include “Battle
Goddess” and the super bloody, ultra lurid “Arnis In Sword Land.” Yamamoto also provided the story for another
completely non-essential OVA, Ultimate Teacher.
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Ruu, aka Elf 17, will kick your ass |
Phantom Gentleman aka Dream Detective Gentleman (Mugen
Shinshi: Boken Katsugeki Hen) - 2-21-1987
Mamiya Mugen is a famous detective, a famous, kinda girly-looking kid
detective, who works in a weird retro 1930s Japan. Strange kidnappers target club dancer Atsuko “Akko”
Fukune - but Mugen is on the case to protect Tokyo’s
exotic dancers! This 49 minute video mixes cutesy character designs with what
you’re led to believe is going to be some kind of detective story but instead
detours into magical relics, mythical monsters, and Indiana Jones-style
adventure, but all the busty dancing girls or archeological destruction can’t
help make this inexplicable film any more explicable. If we were Japanese we’d
be familiar with the popular Mugen Shinshi manga by Yosuke Takahashi, but his
eerily sensual pen line failed utterly to make the transition to this anime.
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underage drinkin', underage detectin' |

Good Morning Althea - 12-16-1987 This might be the exact point where Japan
just gave up and decided to just throw mechanical designs at their OVA projects
in the hope that the resulting confusion would resolve itself into some kind of
interesting pattern. This is the sort of OVA you watch without subtitles and
naturally assume that what’s going on makes sense and is in some way purposeful
and of interest, and then later somebody fansubs it and you find out that the
pattern your brain attempted to impose upon it actually made more sense than
what was originally intended. There’s a spaceship, there are robots, there are
people in robots fighting other people in robots from another spaceship.
Somebody wakes up.
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rise and shine Althea |




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get detecting, you |
What’s that? I didn’t mention The Wanna-Bes or Twilight Q or
Twinkle Heart or even Twinkle Rock Me Nora? Didn’t see your favorite least
essential OVA listed here? Ready to take this to social media and tell the
world how Let’s Anime arbitrarily ignored your favorite least essential OVA in
its totally subjective list? Sure, why not. Make sure to let us know what YOUR
time-wastingest OVA is, or was; maybe we can get another column out of ‘em.
21 comments:
Watch out Regan Strongblood lives in Canada too.
I'm a little disappointed that I've only seen two of these.
On Digital Devil Story: "Apparently there are a lot of video games based on this novel, and I suspect they aren’t very essential either."
lol.
Though I've only seen a couple things on this list, one OVA I bothered finding on eBay that I curiously bought was called "TWD EXPRESS Rolling Takeoff". I haven't seen the darn thing yet but I see someone stuck it on YouTube anyway. Just thought I pass it along but I wasn't sure if it was "least essential" anyway.
i've seen one of these time wasting ova^^;; you forgot to mention greed or nora those videos were really bad^^;;
You would be wrong about those Persona games. They're very good, on average.
Very good, perhaps. But are they essential?
Yes. As essential as that SMT movie was not.
Having never heard of the video game before last week, its effect on my life has been, and continues to be, zero. I suppose values for "essential" may differ.
Don't feel bad ydy, ive seen Cosmo Pink Shock and Sammy Missing 99 on that list as my 2. The rest are on my external HD waiting (some for months and years) to be watched by me eventually.
Basically the entire BOX fansubs collection,no California Crisis and Body Jack WHAT!!!
The Box fansubs of these and many other titles have been terrific, my hat's off to those guys.
Globian seemed to specialize in covering anime like these.
A lot of these titles are just fun, I really love all these ovas you named. Im surprised California Crisis didnt make the list. I wish we could get BOX fansubs rolling again, im gonna see what I can do. I really hope to get Scoopers fansubbed.
I quite like the Persona games, the Playstation 2 Devil Summoner games, Soul Hackers, and SMT: Nocturne. But, y'know, they're video *games* and therefore not essential by definition.
Speaking of video games, the OVAs based on Falcom's Xanadu and Dragon Slayer series are highly inconsequential. And terribad. Although I think the latter was made in the 90's
My nomination for least essential OVA is Battle Royal High School, which remains the only video I have ever seen to come with a note from the company which translated it and released it in English apologizing because it is so terrible. They got it as part of a licensing job lot and couldn't get out of releasing it. It's even worse than you'd expect from its coming with a disclaimer.
Battle Royale High School is my second favorite anime by Ichiro Itano.
Most of these sound like a fine waste of time....so long as you don't pay anything for them or waste time, postage or gas money to get them.
The Urban Vision production music for the Dragon Slayer trailer had me air-guitaring as if I were possessed by the very late 90's themselves. *sigh*
It's hard to tell if you're making a joke about the SMT games or being serious. Judging from your comments it sounds like you're serious. The SMT series absolutely is essential, to the extent that video games can be essential at all. They're one of the most highly regarded series of Japanese RPGs, even if, like many other series, the early games never reached us, and even if there is the occasional stinker among them. It's actually pretty hard for a game series to last 26 years.
That was about the equivalent of reviewing the Ni no Kuni game, saying it's not all that great, and adding "apparently there are also a lot of anime films put out by Studio Ghibli, and I suspect they aren't essential either".
Their existence upon the Earth has failed to ever impact my life in any meaningful way, so I guess you could say I'm serious, in that I could not care less about "the SMT games", whatever they may be. I'm sure people find them enjoyable, and that's great. Still; don't care.
I know you reeeeally want to hear from another Shin Megami Tensei fan about how categorizing the OAV/games 'unessential' is incorrect, but consider this--Shin Megami Tensei is all about using a computer to talk to, befriend, and meet up with demons. Predating internet social media sites and easily accessible chatrooms, which is how many of us communicate with and meet demons nowadays. So basically SMT predicted this phenomenon before it became widespread. How unessential is it now???
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