Ikkitousen: Xtreme Xecutor – First Episode Review

Episode Summary: A perky girl in pink, Mouki Bachou, barges in what turns out to be the back door of the Kyoshou high school building and dispatches a couple of the thuggish students there.  She's got a bone to pick with a certain Sousou Moutoku, and some minor-league henchmen just aren't going to cut it.  She's briefly delayed by Soujin Shikou, a self-proclaimed A-Rank fighter (but in reality, kind of a bumbling goofball) before breaking inside the building and making her way up to the rooftop.

The reason she's after Sousou Moutoku is that she believes that he's responsible for the death of her older brother.  Upon discovering this, Kyocho Chuukou, who was rescued by Sousou and admires him, walks to the roof and begins to battle against the interloper. After being hung by her ankle over the edge of the roof and kicked through a window, Mouki is feeling a lot less enthusiastic, but as she sits in the pouring rain, a sympathetic individual comes to lend her umbrella.

Thoughts: My first experience with Ikkitousen was waaaay back in the early days of my attendance at the anime club that I eventually helped to run.  A friend had it playing on his laptop during a break, and I distinctly remember my jaw dropping as two female characters in the midst of battle got a little more hot-and-heavy than I was used to.  Nowadays the exploding clothing and other ecchi content of this franchise seem almost quaint in comparison to the levels of lewdness in more recent series. So even though I was apprehensive about diving into the 4th season of a series that I hadn't watched, I figured that, after a crummy day at work, something this silly might be just the thing to give me a good laugh and lift my spirits.

Unfortunately, things weren't quite that simple, and rather than relax my brain I suddenly found myself struggling to make sense of all the story elements, plot twists, deaths, betrayals and transformations that were bombarding my eyes.  The first 5 or 6 minutes of this opening episode consist of an extended flashback sequence that revisits many of the more dramatic moments from previous seasons, at least that's as much as I could discern; the events depicted in the flashback aren't given any introduction, nor are they explained.  History tells me that generally these types of recaps are meant to be helpful to newcomers, but without any grounding or verbal explanation, it's nothing more than a bunch of stuff happening. I suppose this is what I get for stopping in to visit so late in the game.

This is very rare for me to say so you may want to bookmark this review, but I was actually sort of disappointed by the amount of ecchi content in this episode.  For a series that bills itself mostly on its characters' high-kicking martial-arts moves and exploding clothes, there was very little of that here, other than a few scattered panty shots and some bare breasts in the flashback montage.  Perhaps I've become a hardened viewer as the years have gone by; I know that watching sleaze like Seikon no Qwaser (even just an episode or 2) can really change a person, and stuff of that level is more likely to make me roll my eyes or get angry than it is to disgust or shock me.  In any case, the ecchi content seemed a little bit bland, uninspired and passé to me

As ho-hum as the level of perverseness is, it has nothing on the mediocrity of the animation and artwork.  When a series gets to be this long, I have to consider one of two scenarios as being applicable.  The first is that the series is a great success and makes a lot of money, so the company behind the production will consistently have more money to pour back into the production of subsequent seasons, making them look better and better. The second is that the series is a great success and makes a lot of money, so the production company figures that, with an established fan base, they can skimp on the artistry and nobody will really care all that much.  I'm thinking that scenario 2 is play here, because a lot of the art is just junk.  I noticed that the animators seemed to have an especially difficult time depicting full-body shots of the characters, often resorting to very amateurish off-model and poorly-drawn frames.  After Chuukou leaps from atop the roof and lands in front of the school building, the foreshortening on her left leg is so tragically mis-drawn that it looks like it's freakishly short and beefy.  There are plenty of QUALITY facial expressions scattered throughout as well. Fans can only hope and pray for a nicer-looking DVD version.

Call me crazy, but I'm sort of disappointed that I wasn't able to get a fix of brainless fun from this episode.  It's not the type of thing I would ever want to watch on a long-term basis or that I would recommend to others, but there are times when I just feel the urge to watch something trashy, stupid and laughable, and this episode didn't even really fulfill those expectations very well. It's also not a great advertisement for the earlier incarnations of the series, since the opening flashback is such a jumbled mess.

Pros:

• There were no lolis in this episode.

Cons:

• For an ecchi series, it seems a little light on the ecchi content.  Or maybe I've just seen it all at this point.
• The artwork and animation are just plain crummy.
• The recap doesn't help at all with comprehension of the plot.

Recommended? No.  I probably wouldn't have recommended it either way, but the sheer blandness of the episode totally turned me off.