Tenchi Muyou! GXP: Paradise Shidou-hen

This is great, but like everything in the mainline Tenchi continuity over the last 10 years, it's aimed at hardcore fans that remember everything and makes no attempt to hold your hand or get you caught up. Casuals BTFO, and that's the way we like it. In order understand everything you are seeing you need to have decent recall on all of these: Tenchi OVA 1-5 GXP NOVELS (the GXP anime is officially non-cannon and considered bad fanfiction botched by IRL Nabeshin from Excel Saga, the books only exist because Nabeshin's "changes"/removing half of the story for NB jokes pissed Kajishima off something fierce and he onlygot more mad as time went on) Dual Parallel Runrun Monogatari (very important, this is beginning of the Tenchi timeline and plays a big part in both the GXP novels and Shidou-hen, find my translation on my blog) Space Ofera Agga Ruter (GXP is the sequel to Agga Ruter's story, I did subs for this one too, the eroge is also canon but was never translated) There are references to Photon and Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari, but having a basic familiarity with the premise is sufficient. There is a time skip between the most recent GXP book (vol.18 as I write this) and the OVA. Fortunately, the missing big picture details are easy enough to figure out. To further complicate things, the Paradise Shidou-hen novel is considered the first draft and the anime is canon. With aaaaaaaaalll of that out of the way.......if you're still here, and you liked OVA4 and OVA5, you'll like this too. Every episode is incredibly dense. You can tell Kajishima killed himself to cram everything into 6 episodes. It could easily be twice as long. It probably should be 12-13 episodes, but nobody has had the balls to do an OVA series that long since the 90s. Somehow it can feel slow with no BGM (the budget clearly went in to the animation and voice talent) despite its breakneck pace. The story is always progressing and building on something that set it up somewhere else in the timeline. There is zero downtime. Look away for a minute and you will miss something important. Stylistically it's similar to OVA4 and OVA5 with dense dialogue that has multiple layers of subtext. Without spoiling anything, this delivers on a lot of things that are set up in the GXP novels that are not in the anime. Things about Tsukiko that were cut, major plot points that are only introduced in the last 3 books are heavily referenced, characters that didn't exist in the anime at all are featured, how there are four more *spoiler redacted*...you get the idea. Kajishima knows what the paying customer wants and delivers it in spades. Paradise War takes place immediately after this OVA so those books finally make sense. tldr strongly recommended for real fans but casuals have some homework to do first