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I'm not a big fan of Koichi Ohata. I thought that MD Geist was laughably bad, that MD Geist 2 was horrible, that Cybernetic Guardian was forgettable, that Ikkitousen was laughable but a bit of a guilty pleasure, and that Burst Angel was mediocre but had its moments. He has yet to do anything that I truly enjoyed, nevertheless, I have derived some enjoyment from his works, on one level or another. Nothing, however, prepared me for Genocyber.

The story in Genocyber is...poorly told, at best. Scenes skip around with reckless abandon, never staying too long on any single point long enough for the viewer to ... get a feel for what's going on why its worth caring about. It also skips ahead, in the last two episodes, about two hundred years.

Considering that this is an OVA from the mid-90's, I'd expect it to at least have decent animation. There are a few scenes with decent animation, but most look like they were pulled directly from a cheap OVA that came out ten years prior. Now, I'm not a stickler for animation, but I do ask that it's at least accompanied by something interesting in the art. Genocyber doesn't have that either and it leaves the whole affair looking rather generic and boring. Some of the action scenes look okay, but those are few and far between. And very short.

Now, the characters. There are characters in Genocyber, I know this much. Unfortunately, there is not one character that is developed beyond a single line of description. You've got an evil genius, wait, scratch that, TWO evil geniuses that want to rule the world or something, a super-powerful girl that can't talk, her super-powerful sister who's sole purpose is to complain to her father about her sister, hard-nosed detective looking for the truth who disappears after midway through the first episode, and a host of others who serve no reasonable purpose. All five episodes have enough character development to fill a thimble halfway. The only characters that are even remotely likable are the two mains from the episodes 4 and 5, but, as with every other character in the series, they have little development.

Enjoyment? I didn't enjoy it. At all. The two and half hours that this OVA ran were beyond painful, easily amongst the most depressing and bloated I've ever put myself through. The shows takes everything it does with the utmost seriousness. There's no humor here, even unintentionally. At best, you can chuckle a bit at how bad the dub is, which I attempted to, but that really didn't last long since it the horribleness of the dub slowly bled into the horribleness of the rest of the show and succeeded in only making me feel more depressed about the whole affair.

I don't know why I gave this a 3 instead of a 1. I really don't.

Alright, take the director of the Pokemon movies and have him do a sequel movie to a fighting force mecha show from the early 80's. It sounds like a recipe for unadulterated mediocrity, yet somehow it manages to be one of the most bizarre, surreal, and personal animes ever created.

In a way, I would liken this to Watchmen, even though it came out over a year before that famous comic. Both weave tales of heroes who had their moment in the sun, but when the war was over, they faded into obscurity. They're all older now and one has turned his one-time fame into ... a successful commercial enterprise. Another is the Surgeon General. They haven't seen each other in years, but they quickly rally when one of their own is threatened.

While Time Stranger does have several action scenes, action is not the focus. Rather it focuses on Remy's internal struggle and how she deals with almost insurmountable odds. She realizes that her death is almost a certainty, but she never gives up.

But let's get one thing out of the way: Time Strange is 14 years old and it looks it. The animation gets the job done, and there are some moments where a lot is done with a little, but it's not going to blow anyone away. More than anything else, that's the main gripe with the show. However, it should, in no way, take away from enjoyment one gets from viewing this movie.

The music is a mix of haunting and surreal, with a pure 80's power ballad at the end. Again, nothing truly exceptional here, but it holds up better than the animation

The main draw here is the characters, or, specifically, Remy. She is one of the strongest and most unique female characters I've seen in an anime. She can fight when she needs to, but it's her strong will and never-say-die attitude that make her truly standout.

This is one that's not to be missed.

*THIS IS A REVIEW OF THE FIRST EPISODE*

Lucy is a young wizard who wants to join the magic guild Fairy Tail. During her travels she meets Natsu, a fellow wizard, and his mascot pet Happy. Together they travel the world and get into lots of fights, presumably, in her quest to join Fairy Tail. This is, after all, a shonen series, so that's to be expected.

The characters are standard fair for the genre: plucky, but slightly air-headed, girl, awesome fighter guy who's also an idiot, and a cute mascot pet that explains everything to the air-headed girl. Really nothing here to make them stand out ... from any of the other series from this genre.

Outside of the CG from Bantorra, this is probably the cheapest and blandest animation I've seen in the Fall '09. It's flat, has a low framerate, and minimal movements. Background characters are embarrassingly undetailed. Spell effects are mainly just some CG plastered on the screen.

It doesn't really help that everything Fairy Tail does has been done before and better by a lot of other shows like One Piece or Rave Master.

The only real saving grace of the first episode is that it has a smattering of genuinely funny moments and some nice looking backgrounds in a few place.

'Bland' is the word for this series. Art is bland, animation is bland, story is bland, characters are bland. Inoffensive, but tasteless.

I guess if you really, really like these sorts of shows [shounen] then you might enjoy Fairy Tail, otherwise you can probably avoid it and not feel as though you're missing out on anything.