Alice in Cyberland

Definitely a product of its time with a moderately strong start and a pretty weak finish. Fans of the early internet's promise may find this entertaining, back when the world wide web was imagined as an alternative world for users to explore. Here, "cyberland" comes in layers to be delved by the avatars of heroes and misfits alike. The first episode is definitely the superior one. The animation is better, the story is stronger, the jokes hit better, the stakes are higher. The end-boss monster is tentaclicious per the era's norms. Its tendrils are probably the best animated things in the OVA. The second episode is alet down by comparison. The budget must have been blown on episode 1, because the animation is shoddy and stilted. The characters even appear to have been drawn from different stylesheet. Gone are the civilization-ending hackers. Instead our trio of protagonists get mixed up with a couple computer programs playing cat and mouse. Who cares? Frankly, it feels like a filler episode, even though it's 50% of the saga. Feeling nostalgic for a time when the internet was best understood by the movie "The Lawnmower Man"? Want to groove on a vaporwave soundtrack while three anime girls swing swords and dive past numerals? Then this might be for you. If none of that interests you, skip this and head for greener pastures.

It had a good 90s retrofuture aesthetic for a bit, but this was really gross and pervy and not worth watching because it's too short. The file I have for it has some neat ads attached to it at the end, though. I always liked the Sega Saturn/Playstation era of Japanese games aesthetically even if they didn't age well. There was also an ad for a second episode, but I am 90% sure that doesn't exist. Oh what it would be to live in that era where they made promotional anime episodes for stupid video games and whatnot. Oh wait, they still do that? Nevermind then.

This ova being subbed is such a dangerous double edged sword for it. The first episode is gorgeous but the second episode is basically entirely irrelevant to both the previous episode and, importantly, the entire video game following it, which remains untranslated. Taken on its own this ova is not very good but I can't say it's actually... bad? The animation in the second episode is terrible and the core plotline of it is flatly not very good, but it still has pretty entertaining dialog and some decent jokes. Having played the game, it shares some of the same problems as this ova but for havingmore casual downtime with the characters, and an actual ending, they're both much more satisfying placed in that fuller context. There's a lot of weird grey space between the ova and the game where it feels like there might have been plans for other media in between that never happened, but all of the basic ideas established in episode 1 are brought back up and resolved by the end of the game, including, surprisingly, smaller character stuff like Alice's reaction to Julie teasing her in the locker room, which isn't brought up directly but. The game has an entire optional chapter about Alice going on a date with a girl and effectively realizing that she's into women. So it's hard to say these two events are wholly unrelated. If you're able to play the game, and plan on doing so, this ova is worth watching. If you can't, you might be able to appreciate certain aspects of it but it is definitely going to feel extremely incomplete.

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