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Within 24 hours of examining a patient presenting influenza symptoms, the patient dies from multiple-organ failure, followed by several others who have shown the same symptoms. Soon after, the mysterious virus quickly spreads across the country, and as the death toll rises, even the highly trained medical experts in Japan with all the most advanced medical technology available to them are at a loss over how what this virus is and how it spreads. Soon, the whole country goes into lock down trying to contain the virus as it continues to spread all over the world, doing whatever they can to further prevent it's spread ... within their own country.

Unfortunately as I was reading through this manga, it felt like the highlight reel or an edited down version of a much longer story, as it goes from scene to scene without much of a proper transition, making the pacing of the whole thing feel very rushed as it quickly takes the reader from situation to situation without stopping to give them some breathing room.

I'm assuming that the manga was trying to go for a breakneck speed to make you feel as tired as the scientists, politicians, as well as the population at large in the manga as they have to go through trying to find a cure for the virus as well as try to prevent it from spreading and have to watch the world around them suffer from something so awful, but it just feels like it still needed a few scenes to allow the manga to breath and give the reader a much needed break every so often as well as give a few of the characters a scene or two for the reader to get to know them better, even briefly, which could easily help reinforce just how much the characters have to hurry to prevent the spread of the virus.

At only one volume in length, the story might have been just too limited by it's short length, and probably should have been given another volume or at least another few chapters for it to not feel so rushed.

But the highlight of the manga is the art, done by Masasumi Kakizaki, who was also the author of the manga, as it really shines through, as it gives the manga some much needed weight to the situation that it's presenting. Masasumi Kakizaki's art is very visceral and detailed, and it really added some impact to seeing the effects of a large scale virus killing millions of people, as uncomfortable as it might be.

Kansen Rettou isn't my favorite out of Masasumi Kakizaki's work that I have read of his, and that's probably because it tried to bite off a bit more than it can chew with it's scale, especially since it ended up being so short, but with Masasumi Kakizaki's recognizable confronting art style, it does give what little there is some impact.

Ishikawa Takuya is your average high school student and he doesn't stand out in any particular way. So he is surprised when his principal asks him to take care of some transfer students. He is even more surprised to find that the transfer students are actually 30 female students who came from a boarding school that was destroyed in fire. At first it seemed like a dream come true, but he soon comes to find that the girls have knives, guns, and deadly training, making him curious as to what kind of school these girls came from.

There really isn't much to say about this manga. ... The first two volumes are the standard generic fare for an ecchi romance manga that relies heavily on a gimmick. A boy stumbles into relationship with a girl, the girl's behavior ranges from a bit weird to completely out there, and boy has to deal with the consequences of her antics. The moment that I was finished reading it, i forgot about it immediately almost completely.

The comedy also leaves much to be desired. I can't think of a single joke that lands. Other comedy series "Kill Me Baby" involves guns and it's jokes land much better than any joke in "Mission! School". But that's probably because it's a gag comic that has more than one joke. "Uppote!!" also has girls with military training and guns (and the girls themselves are actually guns, but that's for another time) and also does a better job than "Mission! School". The only good thing that this manga has going for it is that it's short, and when one of the compliments for something is that it doesn't overstay it's welcome, that's a clear sign that something has gone wrong.

The one compliment that I can give it is that it's art is decent and appropriate a lighthearted comedy manga, and looking at the authors other work, he does a pretty good job at the art.

But then the third volume shifts gears, switching from your typical comedy ecchi manga about girls with guns and military training to becoming a self-aware meta comedy manga about how the manga that these characters are in is being cancelled due to low numbers and the characters are doing everything they can to not get cancelled when the amount of pages gets to zero. Things that range from the female characters showing more skin to titillate readers to re-arranging volumes of the manga on store shelves to make it more noticeable to customers in hopes that more people pick it up.

It just makes me feel bad for the author who was clearly passionate about their work but ultimately ended up having their cancelled. Maybe this manga could have led somewhere interesting, but we'll never know, so the only thing that we're left with is are the three volumes that are presented to us, and what we got just wasn't very good.

Unfortunately, this shift in focus doesn't help the manga as it's comedy, characters, and overall style largely remain the same. I can't recommend "Mission! School".

The world of Waq Waq takes places in a future where the planet has become an endless desert and it's filled with machines that attack small villages dotted around the endless desert that are filled with humans that have black blood, whose only defense are the Sakimori, a group of humans chosen to partner with the Goujin-zou, a race of machines that grow stronger when they're melded with humans. Shio, who is traveling with his his Sakimori father, Al, are attacked soon after entering upon one of the small villages.

After his father is overwhelmed and defeated by the attacking machines, Al leaves his son with ... his Sakimori along with becoming the guarding of a mysterious young girl, who is believed to be god, who has red blood like the humans from long ago who created the machines. Soon, Shio finds out that several people with Sakimori are fighting each other instead of the machines for one thing, a chance for getting one wish granted.

Going into Waq Waq I had moderate but optimistic expectations, since I had never heard of it before and just randomly stumbled across it and both it's plot seemed fun enough and art was solid enough that it piqued my interest, and with it being only 4 volumes, it wasn't that much of a time investment. While reading it, there were a few things that I liked. The designs for the machines and the Sakimori along with their Goujin-zou are neat to look at, and the general plot was enjoyable, making for a fun adventure sci-fi manga and a breezy read. But it's brought down by it's one big problem, which is that some of it's scenes needed some more room to breathe.

There are times where secondary characters have to explain what's going on in some of the action scenes as they're watching from the sidelines, practically providing a play-by-play of every moment of what's going on, ruining some of the action scenes. This problem could have easily been solved by removing a few other elements, mostly a specific comic relief sidekick that adds nothing to the story, along with a few misplaced jokes throughout the manga, that could have easily been cut out of the manga and nothing would have been lost. If the character had been cut out, it would have allowed the action scenes to properly play out along with letting the characters not feel unnecessarily shoehorned into said scenes, taking away from the action. With such a slight rework, what is a fun little story could have been a lot more enjoyable.

My recommendation for Waq Waq might be lukewarm at best, which is probably still not enough for some people, but for those who like what they see might some fun here.

In the 16th century, a group of bandits known as the Kidoshu wander around Japan, plundering whatever they can find and storing their vast treasures on Toomariki Island. However, they don't escape the law for long and are eventually caught, crucified, and burned alive. Over time their legend fades, leaving the island and the museum on it as the only monument to their memory and the only proof of their existence.

A few centuries later and we arrive in modern times as Onitsuka Miaki and Koizumi Suzuka, along with with the ten other girls from the naginata club and their advisor go to Toomariki, go to ... a retreat to hone their skills. However, the gruesome past of the island quickly makes itself known and soon the members of the club get brutally killed off one by one by an unknown force, with the survivors having to band together to find out who the killer is before it's too late.

Bloody Maiden is a supernatural tinted slasher film distilled into the form of a manga and it doesn't try to be anything else. There's no fluff and it gets into the action almost immediately. It's filled with gratuitous amounts of violence, blood, gore, nudity, and lesbians, and it even has it's mostly female cast decided to change into their swimwear randomly out of nowhere and for no reason. It's sleazy but it's not pretending to by anything else. It knows exactly what it wants to be and runs with it, having fun with it's silly premise and going all in with just how absurd the whole thing is.

I can't even talk more about the plot beyond it's initial premise because I would end up spoiling it, that's how little to the plot there is, but nobody is here for the plot outside of it being an excuse to have a killer going around killing people and for the female characters to show off some skin. The manga is only one volume long and it's a fairly quick and breezy reason, and could probably be read in the same time as a 2 hour slasher movie.

The killer even has an iPod filled with bands and artists like Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, and Alice Cooper, easily setting the tone of just how campy it is. Both the design of the iPod and song titles are all just conveniently covered up just enough to now get sued, but clear enough to make it obvious as to what it's trying to get across.

If you're into slasher films like Friday the 13th, Nightmare On Elm Street, or Child's Play, like sleazy campy horror movies from the 80s in general, or could easily name at least 3 films that John Carpenter, Wes Craven, and/or David Cronenberg has directed or written, you'll get something out of this. If this doesn't sound like your cup of tea, you should probably avoid.

Something as simple as “Prison School” shouldn’t be that hard to mess up. It has some pretty decent jokes, some pretty good titillation, and is an overall good time for anyone who would find it’s concept and characters interesting and appealing. But somehow the manga “Prison School” decides to purposefully drive itself off a cliff. But we’ll get into that later in the review, as I need to summarize the plot before I can start talking about my issues with the manga.

Hachimitsu Private Academy is an elite all-girls high school, or was, as it finally opens it’s doors to male students for the first time ... in it’s history. But only 5 boys end up enrolling to the school, with a total of 1000 students, including them. These 5 boys are the foreign delinquent Shingo, the strange and sickly “Jo”, the overweight “Andrei”, he intelligent “Gakuto”, and Kiyoshi, who is the most normal out of the 5 male students.

But they soon find the female students giving them the could shoulder, and unbeknownst to them, the notorious and powerful “Underground Student Council”, consisting of the misandric president Mari Kurihara, the sadistic vice-president Meiko Shiraki, and the cut but abusive secretary Hana Midorikawan, have issued an edict forbidding any communication between the genders.

Feeling troubled due to their lack of female interaction, the five boys embark on a dangerous mission to peek on several girls while they are bathing, much to Kiyoshi’s objections. Due to a series of mishaps, their operation fails, resulting in the boys having their actions being exposed to the entire school. For their crimes, the boys are sentenced to one month of imprisonment in the school’s prison in a “rehabilitation program” devised by the Underground Student Council. But does the Underground Student Council have something up their sleeves?

To start with the compliments, as they’re going to quickly be overshadowed by infamous second half of this manga, Akria Hiramoto, the author and artist of the manga, has done a fantastic job with the art. With it’s high level of detail working well to contrast with the over-the-top serious reactions that the characters give to things that are both simple and absurd. It gels well together.

And the first arc of the manga, the “Boy’s Imprisonment” Arc, which is the Arc that got adapted into the anime and live action series, and is the Arc that everyone is familiar with, starts the manga off strong. Yes, the anime and live action series have truncated some stuff, and in one case it took roughly 6 chapters and crammed it into one episode of the anime, making it feel a tad rushed, but the anime ends up being a decent adaptation of the source material, and I wouldn’t be surprised if people came to read the manga purely based on how entertaining the anime was.

There was even a spin-off called “Shadow Student Council Vice President Gives Her All” that entirely focuses on Meiko with little to no dialogue in a series of short stories and it is some of the best content for Prison School.

But unfortunately, just after this Arc finishes the rest of the manga starts to slowly decline before just deciding to become an absolute train wreck in the second half. Now, I know that a concept like Prison School doesn’t really have too much room for variety, but there is some room for playing with it’s concept as well as expanding on it. The second arc goes on to develop the characters, which is nice, but towards the middle of the manga is where the author is clearly stretching his ideas thin.

The third arc of the manga, the “Sports Festival” Arc, drags on for a small eternity, especially with the Horseback Challenge. It’s page after page, chapter after chapter, and I’m pretty sure volume after volume, of two teams of four students, three students holding up a forth, trying to knock the fourth student off the other three. The whole thing could be cut down significantly and nothing could be lost. Even one of the side characters manages to get their own chapter. I can’t imagine having to read this on a week to week basis.

And it doesn’t help that all while this is going on, there is a subplot involving the chairman having amnesia and getting caught up with a woman and her husband all while this is happening. You would even need to remove this subplot if the main arc was just cut down to what was necessary.

But when reaching the last arc, there are 4 plots going on all at once, which is way too many plots going on at once. The moment you’ve forgotten one of them, it immediately rears it’s head, reminding you that it exists. And then the manga just ends on a cliffhanger. There is nothing to spoil because there is no ending for this manga. There was even a more expanded and better epilogue for the fans who bought the last volume, but that only amounted to a few pages that don’t give closure to anything. Not even with a one last shot of a promised wet t-shirt contest.

Rumors have circulated about this manga’s ending. If they are to be believed, this author was annoyed that “Prison School” was the one manga that he wrote that became popular when the one serious manga that he wrote, a manga by the name of “Me and the Devil Blues: The Unreal Life of Robert Johnson”, which seems to be on hiatus, was his passion project. There was no source to this, but the fact that these rumors even exist just go to show just how much people loved this manga and the fact that they had to come up with something just to explain why the ending was so shit and why the promised improved epilogue was so disappointing.

At this point, people refuse to read anything else that the author has written because of just how bad the ending was. I’m not willing to rule out the authors other manga out quite yet, but if your going into this, consider this your warning. Maybe you can get something out of it despite it’s infamous disappointing ending, but it’s hard to recommend something that had such a drop in quality, regardless of the redeeming qualities that it does have.

When people talk about the 80s Japanese economic bubble that produced some of the weirdest anime out there, they’re often talking about stuff that’s weird mostly in execution. Sometimes the reason that an anime gets made is the reason that it’s so weird. One of those anime is “Ziggy: Soreyuke! R&R Band”. It was made entirely to advertise the band ‘Ziggy’. While using a product in one medium to sell a product in another medium isn’t that weird, having it completely dictate the plot is the the reason a lot of movies and TV shows end up being weird, which is what we’re looking at ... here.

Ziggy: Soreyuke! R&R Band follows Japanese rock Ziggy as they come to London for a recording session, only to find themselves getting attacked by a group of men as the arrive at the hotel. The musicians barely escape with their lives, but soon find out that their producer has been murdered, and they are the suspects. Chased by the police and a mysterious organization who has murdered their producer, they soon find shelter at a local rockers' place.

And that mysterious organization? The Nazis. That's right, the Nazis are back and want to take over over the world, but this time they want to take over the world through popular music. I know that this is technically a spoiler, but would you even be paying attention if not for the twist being that hilariously contrived? And to top it all off, the anime has members of Ziggy working with a cop from Scotland Yard who pilots an old World War II plane to attack a Nazi zeppelin to save another member of the band and to try and stop the Nazis.

Now, to pull it back a bit so that I don't oversell this OVA, you have to approach this with moderate expectations. As awesome as that premise is for something, it's still not as memorably crazy or over-the-top as some other anime is, like Angel Cop or Mad Bull 34, but I'd argue that in some ways that's better. Sometimes being that over the top is tiring, so seeing something like this being a lot more low key can be a bit more enjoyable to some extent.

But considering that the anime's plot is just an excuse to get the whole OVA going and the music being front and center of the whole thing, it's pretty obvious that this was meant to to push the soundtrack that was being heavily featured throughout the whole thing, with the songs being features prominently in the credits.

And that's because this was a promotional piece for the real world Japanese rock band Ziggy. But for those who aren't in the know, who exactly are Ziggy?

Ziggy was and still kinda is (more on that later) a blues rock/hard rock band that was founded in Morishige Juichi in 1984. Throughout the years, the bands line-up has been constantly changing, with multiple members joining, leaving, and rejoining the band.

In the year 2000, they changed their name to "SNAKE HIP SHAKES" and released a few albums under than name, but they eventually changed it back to "ZIGGY" in 2003. In 2008, the band announced an indefinite hiatus and have only come back for short periods of time in 2010 and 2014, with 2014 being Ziggy's 30th anniversary.

The TL;DR read version of it is that this 70 minute OVA was nothing but a promotional piece to put on store shelves to promote the band that it was designed around.

The band members didn't even voice the characters in the anime, but I suppose that's because either the band was touring at the time, it would have been too expensive, or the band members either couldn't be bothered to do the voices for the anime or knew that actors would have been a better choice.

And this wasn't the only anime to feature the music of Ziggy, with the long-running anime Detective Conan/Case Closed featuring other songs by Ziggy, including "Happy End" and "Step by Step".

Ziggy is an anime that not only could have been made in the 80s, with it's cheesy "Take down the man with the power of heart and music" plot and silly soundtrack, but it could have only been made during the Japanese bubble economy where Japan was having an exponential economic growth, which, coincidentally, would pop the year after the released of this anime.

And while it's nothing more than a way to sell people on the band, it still enjoyed it. Don't get me wrong, it's not some hidden classic, but it is a mildly amusing romp with a silly plot solely meant to get people to buy more CDs, but it was fun seeing some random 80s band take down the Nazis.

Surprisingly, Kite managed to get a sequel.

I know that Kite holds some relative importance in the world of anime since Quinten Tarintino was inspired enough by it to give to actress Chiaki Kuriyama in preparation for her role as Gogo Uubari in Kill Bill Vol. 1, along with having a few scenes from the anime being recreated for the music video for "Ex-Girlfriend" by 'No Doubt', and even having a live action movie adaptation starring Samuel L. Jackson, but it still had a small cult following and it's not really really well known enough to inspire a sequel.

While it isn't as explicit as the first ... Kite, it still features a few short scenes of characters doing creepy shit with underage girls, so if you're not into that, keep away.

After the events of the first Kite, Sawa suddenly disappears after avenger her parents death with no trace of where she went. Several years later, Kite Liberator now follows Monoka, a girl working at a maid cafe who leads a double life as an assassin, much like Sawa.

And then an alien shows up. Yes, you read that right, Kite Liberator has aliens.

Well, technically they're not aliens, and it is connected to the rest of the plot, but there is still a giant monster running around Japan destroying stuff. How does a sequel to Kite have aliens, or monsters, of all things? Maybe have a similar story to the first, or include a conspiracy or two, or even just have balls to the wall action. But having a alien/monster?

To be fair, the anime does star on a space station orbiting Earth, do it doesn't completely come out of nowhere, but it's still a weird direction to take the series.

But just as soon as it introduces all of it's plots, it ends just as quickly with a cliffhanger 50 minutes later. Kite Liberator is not especially long at less than an hour later, but the original Kite was around the same length too, and it still managed to have a conclusion, even if it was left a bit vague on what the ending was.

Maybe this was supposed to be another episode after this one to resolve a lot of the dangling plot threads, but it probably didn't do well enough enough to warrant making another episode, which I personally find disappointing, because It would have loved to see what the writers would have written as the conclusion for this entry of Kite.

And to top it all off, it's sister series Mezzo Forte, written by the creator of this and the original Kite, Yasuomi Umetsu, managed to get a 12-episode series in the form of Mezzo DSA. Sure, it went for more of an episodic approach, but 12 episodes still had enough room to develop on what it was trying to do. Here, there's barely enough room to develop on the one idea that it did have.

On a technical level, Kite Liberator incorporates a few shots of CGI, which is surprisingly solid, but in a few shots where it mixes the 2D and 3D animation, it is a bit awkward. But considering that this came out the same year as The Sky Crawlers and Ponyo, I'm going to assume it had to do with the budget.

However, I am still a big fan of Yasuomi Umetsu's art style.

I can't really recommend Kite Liberator. The only people who would get anything out of it, let alone watch it in the first place, would be fans of the original Kite, and I'm pretty sure all of them would be just as confused about the plot as the people coming into it blind. And here I was thinking that my complaints would be entirely nitpicks or general complaints.

Apparently a sequel was announced back in September of 2008, but considering that it's been 13 years as of this review and nothing more has come of it, I don't think it's going to come out, which is a shame.

Surprisingly, eX-Driver managed to get a movie, with the uncreatively titled “eX-Driver: The Movie”. And it's using the word 'movie' in it's title in the loosest sense popssible, since it's closer to an hour long direct-to-DVD special that managed to get a bump in animation quality.

The movie follows the three leads from the series as they enter and win a domestic preliminary round and advance to the eX-Driver world race competition held in Los Angeles as a representative team from Japan. Not long after arriving in LA, an AI car goes haywire, setting off a chain of events that leads out main trio into a ... conspiracy involving the race competition and some of the people involved with it.

If my reaction to the series was lukewarm at best, the movie doesn’t do much to change that. We don’t even get to see that many differences between how Japan and America deal with how they handle their AI cars, which would have made for some good world building and could have been a neat culture shock for the three main characters, and would have made the movie stand out more by giving it some personality.

Like I mentioned earlier, the animation is a step up from the series since the team behind it probably either had a bigger budget or had less to work on so what they ended up making ended up looking better, but unfortunately, much like the series was stuck with early digital animation, the movie is stuck with the early 2000s CGI used for it's cars. To be fair, it’s not the worst CGI that I’ve seen from the era, but that's such a backhanded compliment that there was no point in even bring it up.

But that’s not all, because on the same day that the movie was released, a short called “eX-Driver: Nina & Rei - Danger Zone”, which was featured as a bonus on the same DVD as the movie, and is a prequel to the series featuring two minor characters, who are the top eX-Driver team.

I’m going to include this as part of my review for the movie because I still want to talk about it, but I don’t think I can justify a whole review for it, especially since it’s only 24 minutes long, and doing a stand alone review with a minimum character/word limit would be stretching it out to it's breaking point.

The plot of "Nina & Rei - Danger Zone" focuses on a mysterious mini-AI car that terrorizes the city, and it’s up to Nina and Rei to stop it, all while having to deal with something or someone from the eX-Driver's past.

Out of the entire series, this is the most entertaining entry purely because it has no filler. Instead of 6 drawn out episodes or an hour long movie, this special gets straight to the point. The whole thing felt like an homage to an 80s or 90s buddy cop action movie, with the angry police chief cliche and everything. The villain for this special was also pretty fun, and I’m not going to spoil it.

While the OVA wasn't anything special, compared to the rest of the series it feels like a breath of fresh air, where something fun is happening instead of having to watch three under developed characters repeat the same thing over and over again. If anything, it feels like an episode of "You're Under Arrest!", which just makes me want to go watch that series again.

If anything, you could probably watch this without knowing anything about the rest of the series, even if you know nothing about the characters, and you would have to only spend 24 minutes at most to watch it, no more than a lunch break.

When I saw that this series was written by Kosuke Fujishima, creator of the "Oh My Goddess!" and "You're Under Arrest" anime series, and with me being a fan of "You're Under Arrest" and hearing good things about "Oh My Goddess!" before I watched series, I became interested in checking it out. After seeing that it wasn't as popular as his other works and getting some less than good, I went into eX-Driver with moderately set expectations that I would get at least some entertainment out of the six episodes knowing what the creator was capable of. And after watching it, I can easily see ... why this wasn't as well remembered or well reviewed as his other works.

Set at some point in the 22nd century, people no longer drive cars themselves, instead relying on cars with an artificial intelligence to drive for them. But when the AI systems in these cars started malfunctioning, causing the cars to lose control, a team called eX-Drivers (or eX-D for short) were formed, driven by actual drivers, to chase down the cars that have gone crazy. I don't know why the group of people who actually drive cars are the ones called eX-Drivers, but whatever.

The series follows three such eX-Drivers, Lorna, Lisa, and new addition to the group, Soichi. Soichi is the youngest of the group at 12 years old, and the other two are in their teens. I imagine that making them younger was to appeal to a younger audience, and I don't really mind having three kids as the main characters since this is more geared to a younger audience, but it just raises questions to me, like how does a 12 year get a license, especially for such a dangerous job. But I'm guessing this is going off of Pokemon rules, with how children are often put into dangerous situations but somehow never get hurt, with this series relying on the same set of convenient rules.

eX-Driver does bring up some neat concepts to explore, such as an underground community of drivers mentioned in the first episode where characters have a boost button in their car and have modified the cars programming, and later in the series, there are characters with gasoline cars that can't be tracked by the same system as the AI cars and are off the grid. It would have been neat if the series explored this stuff, but unfortunately due to it being only 6 episodes, it never really gets to do that.

And that's not taking into account other stuff that it could have brought up. Is there no one would doesn't trust the automated systems of the cars, and even cites statistics of AI failures, or at least talks about all of the news stories of failing AI as a reason to not have an AI car? Or even just dislikes the idea in general, based purely on personal preference. What about people who simply can't afford the AI cars, or simply don't care about what car they drive, and just want a way of getting to where they're going? And I'm pretty sure there are car enthusiasts out there who would want to drive, tune, and build their own cars, or just want to buy and deal with classic cars. You could have even had an episode where a mentor once shows his skills of to the kids, who hope to be as good of a driver as him one day.

There could have even been an episode where the characters didn't have access to cars, like being stranded somewhere where they didn't have access to the system, or being forced to take a break since the job is clearly stressing them out, and it ends up being a bonding experience. There was enough here for it to expand out to a 12-episode series at least, but unfortunately we got stuck with what we have.

All of these could have been good ideas for episodes, and could have easily broken up the repetitive monotony of the series and at least taken the series from a completely forgotten for good reason series to a beloved cult classic with a few neat ideas.

The series also came out at that time when anime was transitioning from traditionally done animation cels to digital animation, and it obviously shows. Characters look flat and overly bright at times and the whole thing just looks mediocre at the best of times.

Which is unfortunate, because the series clearly shows off Kosuke Fujishima's love of cars, and by extension, motorcycles, and seeing it either be done a few years earlier with cel animation or a few years later when studios were more experienced with digital animation and the detail of the cars would have really popped out more, it would have at least made it worth watching for the eye candy.

And it seems like such a waste to not let Kosuke to show off his love of said vehicles and let him stretch his creativity a bit for a sci-fi series with cars we haven't seen before. If this couldn't have been continued as an anime, it would have been nice to see Kosuke continue it as a manga at least.

The only interesting thing about this series is just how predictive of self-driving cars it was. But since it never goes that in-depth with the concept either, so there's no real reason to watch the series based on that alone.

While eX-Driver is nowhere near the worst thing that I've watched, I doubt that anyone is clamoring for a re-release. But considering some of the stuff that Discotek have picked up, I wonder how long it would be before they get their hands on a release for this. Unless this get some sort of new series that actually expands on the concepts of the series, I can't really recommend it.

You know what's a rarity in anime and manga. The western, as in the genre. Sure, you get a lot of anime inspired by westerns, like "Cowboy Bebop", "Trigun", "Gun X Sword", "El Cazador de la Bruja", "Outlaw Star", and "Coyote Ragtime Show", but nothing that's just a straight up western. Sure, there are a few manga that are westerns, such as "Gun Blaze West", "Green Blood", "Miriam", and "Angel Gunfighter", but since there is a lot more manga, you're bound to get more variety in manga, but the genre is still few and far between, and it's certainly an untapped genre when it comes ... the mediums of anime and manga. But one of the anime to pop up that is a straight western is 'Early Reins'.

Set during the early 1800s, the early years of the United States of America, Early Reins takes place entirely on a train en route to Sunshine Hill, shortly before it gets hijacked by robbers. While the soldiers onboard are caught unawares, the tables are turned as several women on board manage to stand up to the robbers and fight back. The heroine of this story, Margaret Hart, a young woman determined to become a sheriff, but lacks experience.

Unfortunately there isn't much to say about the anime outside of it's basic plot synopsis without spoiling specific details, since it's only 40 minutes long, barely long enough to qualify as a movie, there aren't any more episodes beyond this OVA, or even a manga to fall back on to read more of if you happened to really like what Early Reins has to offer.

Since it's so short, all of the good things that I could say about it feel like backhanded compliments due to just how short it is. The fact that it not only has an all female cast but each one of the characters has a distinct personality is nice. Even the English dub giving the cast era appropriate accents is a nice touch, as cliche as it is. But that's where my compliments end.

While a lot of it looks alright, it clearly uses early digital painting, which gives it a flat look, and some of the animations are clearly underdeveloped. It also came out when CGI was first being used on a wider scale for anime, and it clearly didn't have enough money put into it to make it look good, since there was no real guarantee if it was going to make it's money back.

I know that it seems like my review isn't exactly all that fair towards Early Reins, but that's because all there is a test pilot for a series that clearly never got off the ground. I actually liked this OVA, and it certainly has a lot of charm to it that a lot of other anime doesn't. It would have been neat to see our main characters as they went about their daily lives in an old timey western town, with each episode featuring a new conflict for our main characters to deal with and see the characters interacting with each other, or have a character centered episode.

Honestly, there should be a few more western inspired anime. Even though Japan doesn't really have the history with westerns that America does, the fact that several anime and manga, weather it be through it being a dedicated western or simply one of the things to influence it, have done a good enough job that I feel anime and manga could easily take the genre on under the right person or people.