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Burst Angel Review
by Voss Ausviss
(To be posted on my own website eventually)

Burst angel, from the box cover, looked promising. It had artistic merit (meaning caught a warm blooded post American males attention), technology and some violence to boot. ‘What could go wrong’ I thought to myself as I was scrounging about the HMV’s in the midst of its close out sale. Oh how wrong I was.
Synopsis: A bunch of teenage female bounty hunters and their one male cook live in a world where everyone is allowed to own a gun. As such there is a huge spike in crime. There are a group of robots ... called cybots which are just robots with human brains and the all-female bounty hunters fight them too. At the centre of this group is Jo, a cold hearted and emotionless super-solder/gun wielder. She is to an extent romantically involved with a ditzy redhead named Meg. The genres (according to Wikipedia) are cyperpunk, mecha and yuri. Although considering Wikipedia never lies, I will not dispute the cyberpunk attribute.
1: Let’s just check all the boxes for this one shall we?
Plugging the DVD into my gaming desktop, I started my binge. Right from the start, I noticed that the box cover did not lie about its promises. It had giant robots, a large group of female characters, and lots and lots of guns of all varieties. There were a few males protagonists but they were just there to show that it was not entirely one sided. In my mind I could see the creators, dressed in business suits trying to create a masterpiece:
Business man 1: “We need to make a classic that will appeal to the teenage male demographic! What have you!?
Business man 2: Younger males tend to like scantily clad women and lots of violence, mostly women though. Giant mecha seem to be highly praised as well.
Business man 1: GREAT! Make a list and send them to our artist at once!
Business man 3: Don’t we need a story to put them in…?
Business man 1: Please, the teenage demographic are hardly people, they wouldn’t be able to tell a story if a pan pan girl sat on their face and read it to them.
Business man 2: Check list is done.
Business man 1: GREAT! Ship it to our artist slaves and let’s go do some blow.
This unfortunately, kept repeating in my mind throughout the anime. The story was weak and the characters were just there. Normally when I watch an anime like this, I try and find an alternative viewpoint to fixate on, normally the artistic style. Which was unfortunate because…
2: The art was akin to watching a high school art student learn anatomy.
The art was sup par. The human body was poorly represented in this anime which is quite sad because this anime came out right around the time of some decent classics. However, this one was not one of them. Not only were the characters poorly drawn but at times the animations were clunky and even out of time and place. This actually became more apparent near the end. Not only was the art poor but it was not constant. Characters hair colour changed from one episode to another. The first time I noticed this was a filler episode (FILLER!) where it showed some of the back story between the budding relationship between two of the female protagonists the ditzy redhead had silver hair. When it went to the next episode, she was back to red hair. But then the next episode her hair goes blue for no reason. However, art takes many forms and this is where the good promising bits of my review come in because…
3: The nothing was absolute in this anime.
I am a candid person by nature, and, one of the things that makes me want to duct tape story writers mouths to tail pipes more than anything else is when a ending occurs when it is not warranted. A cliché example is all the 1980’s films where everything is going against the protagonist luck and somehow, he survives AND defeats the enemy. The world does not function on Disney logic and neither should stories (in my candid opinion). I will not spoil any of the story, but I will say that no character, whether she/he be a main character or a character that adds to the plot is safe. This is one of the saving graces in this anime for me. I say that plural because…
4: The CGI was actually decent at times for this era.
This anime came out in 2003 and looked like it may have been a budget anime. Near the end of the anime, some of the CGI Mecha battles were quite decent. To the point that I sort of stopped and said, “that was actually gripping”. Now I know that the characters would not die in this battle (or so I thought considering number 3 caught me off guard). Unfortunately, this was not a constant. Some of the battles were cliché (good robot blows up bad robot and looks at the screen during explosion) but some of them were very fluid and quite fun to watch. The saddest bit however is the fact that….
5: They left out the 4th check box, story.
This anime meanders. I mean, it really meanders. At times, it tries to be a comedy but the jokes are so bad that you wonder if it was just an attempt to add character depth. Then at times the characters will be all serious which actually suits this anime better. But then some episodes will be fan service which kills it because the animations were so poorly drawn a man would be better at sitting a Barbie doll on a table and just staring at it (would be less creepy as well because one of the female characters has the body of a 10 year old boy which made me sick to watch her, and she is the main character). The worst bit is that half of the anime, there actually is no defined goal. The viewer watches a bunch of skimpily clad bounty hunters killing their targets. It’s not till the end that they package some of the marks as plot devices in such as a way that showed some planning. Unfortunately, it’s so played down even in the end that it makes little difference to the whole anime.
Overall: It’s a yuri, story took a back seat to making sure there were plenty of women to kiss and make out. Unfortunately, there was a lot more they could get of done to make this a decent anime. Skip the humour, stay gritty, and keep the plot going so it would be important. Now, this review sounds harsh but over all, it was watchable. And since the ending was actually unexpected, I give it 4 out of 10 with 1 being akin to Devil lady and 10 being Akira esque. So for a Yuri, it was not half bad.
Would I recommend it? Its 24 episodes and the ending was worth watching. If you have some time and you want an anime that you can let your mind tune out a bit, then sure. Would I buy it? Only if you’re collection on your shelf lacks pretty art covers, it’s not worth the money and I only bought it because it cost me 25 pounds instead of the average 50 due to HMV doing its close out sale.