Ore no Sora: Keiji-hen

Before I begin this review, it's worth noting that I am the first to review this title on MAL. It is my belief that every anime deserves at least one proper review, deserves to have its content engaged and reckoned with. No matter how obscure it is, and no matter how long ago it was made, an anime still represents the creative passion of its creators, the hopes and dreams of the team that made it, and as such, I will give this one a fair and honest accounting here. Ore no Sora is a fairly typical cop vs yakuza crime drama from the early90s which boasts of some pretty compelling and well-written mysteries, but suffers from low production values and a totally jarring tonal mismatch. It reads like a goofy buddy-cop romp, but the crimes they're dealing with are extremely dark, with this common theme of betrayed innocence, driven by criminals motivated by a type of terrible animal craving that, at many points, seems totally inhuman. The neon 80s-style goofball police work, with funny sidekicks and witty banter and drinks on the town, backed by an upbeat soundtrack the whole time, feels extremely out of place for the types of monstrous crimes they're investigating throughout. This huge mistake, planted right at the root of the story itself, is what really holds this anime back more than anything, even more than the fact the pacing feels all over the place, blazing past certain moments and lingering for ages in others. This holds true even considering the art, which suffers from some extreme shortfalls beyond a technically sufficient art style. Namely, the animation itself seems to oscillate between total stillness and rapid movement, all while not having the animation frames to spare for such maneuvers in the first place. Even the illustration itself is amateurish and sketchy, lending itself to this sloppy and unfinished general style that leaves only the idea of what the art was supposed to look like intact. The sound suffers from these subpar production values as well, with dialogue that sounds rushed and clunky at the same time, abundantly clear that the voice talent was struggling to translate their scripts to spoken dialogue, even if the dialogue itself was actually not that bad. Finally, the characters feel thin and unrelatable, jerked around where necessary by the story as it so pleases. Overall, Ore no Sora is an anime that has an admittedly alright vision, but absolutely bungles the execution, especially in regards to the mismatch between the lighthearted buddy cop atmosphere and the deranged, psychopathic crimes they're investigating. Maybe this could be worth your while if you ignore its shortfalls to focus on the merit of the mysteries themselves, or if you're especially into this kind of crime drama anime as a particular genre of interest, but I still think that, even then, this anime has too much wrong with it to overlook how it mishandled what could have otherwise been an exciting, well-written, cop anime.