Finished watching Megazone 23 Part II

Finished watching Megazone 23 Part II (1986, Artland, AIC, Tatsunoko, 80 mins.) on 12/05/2017.

Attempting to return to a normal life with "Trash", his bike gang and Yui, his girlfriend, Yahagi Shogo finds himself answering the call for help from EVE, the digital songstress idol programmed to protect the city of Megazone, as the government that rules the people plots to take control over EVE's capabilities.

Well, this was... interesting. And a bit hard to follow. The first thing you'll notice about this second entry in the Megazone 23 series is the drastic change in the visual style. And it's one I'm not very fond of, to be honest. It got a bit distracting. But I can't say I completely hate it either. I think I understand its appeal. It has to do with the age it was produced in, and I have to say it's certainly a style from the 80's. I'm sure they picked it up from some other media, maybe even western media like the Heavy Metal movie. The art style is especially distracting with the scene where human ships get attacked by alien robots and it's really gory, unnecessarily so and they just keep playing it over and over or whatever. And then there's the Captain of the ship who just looks like a Muppet character. It was cringy for sure. But let's move on. The visual style was not the only thing that changed. It was the character's basic design. The girl's hair, for example used to be blue, now it's just brown. Funny enough however, EVE, the digital music idol seems to have retained her original appearance from the previous movie. Other than that, the movie was alright. Animation quality was pretty good and the story wasn't too bad, maybe some plot points were skimmed over.

6.5/10 - It didn't really catch my attention that much, but I still enjoyed it... somewhat.

Finished watching Megazone 23

Finished watching Megazone 23 (1985, AIC, Artland, Tatsunoko, 80mins) on 10/18/2017.

Yahagi Shogo is given ownership of an unusual-looking, red motorcycle from a friend. Immediately after, black suits show up looking for the bike and Shogo drives off with it to later find out that the bike turns into an armed fighting robot. Looking for a place to hide, he then contacts Takanaka Yui, a girl he had just met to help him out. After a series of strange events, the two find themselves in the middle of a government conspiracy hiding secrets that question what's real and what's not, including a popular musical idol named Tokimatsuri Eve.

So first off, this movie was put together by the same staff as the original Macross series. Cool, right? I love their style. There's a lot of similarities with the two IPs. Visual. Thematic. Robots. Idols. Space. 80s. It's great! The music of course is pretty awesome with Eve's songs and the soundtrack just has that typical 80s synth stuff. What I enjoyed about the story was the conspiracy going on with Eve and how she gets the main characters involved in it. It's an interesting concept.

8/10 - But despite all my praise, I think the storytelling suffers from its age. Old anime seem to always have thing that don't quite add up and this one's no different. But it wasn't too bad.