#but the very nature of looking at those kind of unexplained things through the lense of Ephesians 6:12 can be hair-raising

[dragonanne4fun]

If Fox Mulder were a Christian living in the year of our Lord 2024, he would be listening to the Haunted Cosmos podcast. Just sayin'

[scope-dogg]

New Story of Aura Battler Dunbine: Final Thoughts

As I just posted a while ago, I just got through Aura Battler Dunbine, which is a series that I was overall impressed by on a number of different levels. Therefore, it stands to reason that this OVA followup would be something to look forward to. However, in my quest to see everything that’ll feature in SRW T, the last thing I had to chalk off my list is also probably the first real dud I’ve seen so far. A short and anticlimactic story that nevertheless manages to be confusing, combined with the most bizarrely inconsistent presentation I’ve seen in some time really marred this and caused it to fall well short of my expectations.

The setup is that 700 years after the end of the great Aura Machine war, Rabaan, the reincarnation of the original TV series’ Bern Bunnings, seeks to gain control over Byston Well. To that end he attacks the kingdom of Baran-Baran seeking to capture their princess Remul (who is herself the reincarnation of Rimul Luft from the original series) and take a great treasure they are rumoured to possess. This turns out to be a powerful Aura Battler named Sirbine, which is taken by a young man named Shion, the reincarnation of Dunbine’s hero Shoh Zama. Shion is dragged into conflict with Rabaan. Meanwhile, a dark spectre from the past seeks to further his own mysterious plans.

At three episodes, the plot was too short to really build any momentum or let any characters develop, and most of the actual story doesn’t even happen until the third (and final) episode. I found that there was too much left unexplained or ill-defined. In particular the entire second episode felt like a waste of time - when your anime is three episodes long it’s really not good for one of them to feel like filler. Overall I felt like there wasn’t much to talk about - it didn’t really expand on any of the interesting themes or ideas of the original TV series and it didn’t really entertain on its own merits that much. The ending in particular left me scratching my head and left me feeling confused and unfulfilled - not to mention the fact that it left with a bit of a headache for reasons I’ll touch on in a moment.

The great thing about some of these OVAs is that they had a relatively much higher budget for animation and artwork, so it stands to reason that this would look great. Well, it does - and also it doesn’t. The artwork and the animation for human characters is fantastic - it takes the fantastical elements of Byston Well and ramps them up to the max in excellent detail. This detail extends to the Aura Battlers, who are drawn in exquisite detail, really realising the strange insectoid look that they were aiming for in the original series. However, this was utterly undermined by their animation, or rather the baffling lack thereof. Sirbine and Zwauth are essentially animated using cardboard cutouts in this, where they’re drawn in excruciating detail but animated with a single frame at a time that just slowly slides around the screen. I’ve never seen anything like it before and I absolutely hated it. You can kind of see what they were going for, but honestly the effect is utterly dreadful, rendering them both into cardboard golems that feel like they barely move - it’d look bad applied to virtually any mecha design, but especially to Aura Battlers, that were established as airborne and highly maneuverable in the original series. The few moments when they do (I suspect because they had no other option) animate them “normally” they look good. As an aside, though, the hyper-insectoid, very organic look they went for here was definitely interesting, but now that I’ve actually seen it up close for myself, I don’t know how much I actually care for it - in the original series, they were insectoid looking, yes, but they were still meant to be machines once all was said and done. Here they look like monsters, and even look kind of gross once you look really up close - in particular giving them organic-looking eyes instead of lenses was creepy. I might be by myself on this, but I actually liked the original series’ version of Aura Battlers overall, despite the fact that I usually like overall mecha design more the more original it is. The biggest presentation sin however came right at the end, where the episode promptly assaults the viewer with a minutes-long sequence of non-stop red and blue flashing strobe lighting, which in addition to looking absolutely fucking hideous, is basically guaranteed to trigger a fit in anybody who’s epileptic. Yes, this was before that one Pokemon episode that got banned, but it’s inexcusable all the same - it made my head hurt and my eyes water and I’m not even slightly epileptic. That combined with the baffling nature of the plot events they were trying to portray just left me coming away from this feeling slightly disgusted.

This was kind of a pain to track down too, not being available on any of the usual streaming sites, at least with good subtitles. I don’t normally bother with torrents because I’m lazy, and I don’t feel like this was worth the effort to even watch in the first place. With that in mind, this is a hard sell and I can’t really recommend it. It’s kind of a shame since it’s obvious that a lot of effort went into it, but I just don’t care for the final product much. It also bears repeating that anybody with photosensitive epilepsy needs to stay the hell away from this - even the original series isn’t good in that regard, but this makes that and even other big offenders like Gaogaigar look like small potatoes.

As for as SRW T goes, it actually raises a bit of a dilemma because they’re including both characters and mecha from both this and the original series, despite the fact that the two stories just won’t make sense if you put them side by side - you’ve got to gimp one or the other. If that’s the case, I hope that they gimp this and give us the original Dunbine’s story. Even if they do that, they’ve got to do some pretty creative rewriting to make it work - honestly I can’t think of a good solution myself. In truth I kind of suspect that it’s only been included at all so that players don’t end up with surplus Aura Battlers and not enough pilots as the case was in X when this series was a units-only member of the roster (although with the fact that Bellvine’s being included this time that might still ironically end up being the case.)

With that, I can now say that I’ve seen everything that will feature in SRW T. I’m glad that I managed to watch all that and still have a couple of months to spare before the game comes out. That said, now there’s time for me to rewatch some old favourites that I’ve not seen in a while - one of those is next.