| Battle Vixens (Ikki Tousen) Complete Collection |
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| Monday, 18 December 2006 | |
 Roll up, roll up! Get your scantily-clad girls who'll knock the living daylights out of just about anyone here! Battle Vixens makes an early return in complete collection format, which at half the price of the single releases may just make it a tempting proposition. Fanservice and fighting in one large boxed portion? Even that can't save some shows...Back in the good ol' days, it seemed all you had to do was label something "anime" and it got an 18 certificate slapped on it. It's a lot less common these days, but Battle Vixens has managed it - and I'd guess it's more to do with the amount of overt sexual behavior on display here than the violence. Let's just say that Ryofu gets around, and doesn't much care if her partner is willing or not. It certainly doesn't do the fanservice level any harm - the last series I saw with this much underwear on display was Najica Blitz Tactics. A great show it was, too - and in sheer acreage of white cotton, it probably has Battle Vixens beaten, but there's a danger with this much fanservice in that you soon become numb to it. There needs to be a decent story behind all the fun stuff otherwise you're going to lose the audience's attention pretty quickly. Najica pulled off that side of the combination well, but Battle Vixens sadly seems to be coming up lacking.   Let's take the characters, for a start. Hakufu's enough of an airhead that it's hard to believe she could possibly have the fighting nous to beat up her own shadow, and yet here she is cleaning the clock of all and sundry. Fine, she's the reincarnation of the legendary Haou, but since that little corner of her personality only emerges when she's under serious threat I can't really find it in myself to believe she can be as good as she is. Add in all the other fighters - and there are a lot of them, most of them with paper-thin characterisations and motivations - and you begin to wonder why this inter-school rivalry exists and why all these people have been drawn into it, other than through some vague notion of historical destiny. The show certainly doesn't tell us. Ikkitousen's story turns out to be a complete bust, but it does have one or two saving graces. The supporting females are an interesting bunch, and don't always rely on getting into compromising & titillating situations to make them interesting, either - even if their blind devotion to fate will probably have you screaming at the screen. Goei (Hakufu's mother) almost makes the show herself, being the one person in the series who really has her own mind and a plan to get her way. Past that, though, there's not much here that you can latch onto to really get into the show - with one exception (one side character who really doesn't deserve what happens to her), none of the characters evoke any sort of sympathy, and for most of them you genuinely don't care what happens to them. That's a fairly big problem for any series to overcome.   Ikkitousen does have its moments over the course of the series, usually in the shameless titillation and fanservice departments - because The Maker alone knows it needs the distraction to stop people getting thoroughly disillusioned with the storyline and the fighting. Overall, it's hard to really recommend it as anything other than a rental, as the good stuff is such a small percentage of the whole. The reduced price that goes along with these complete collections makes it maybe more worth the risk if you're inclined towards this type of show in the first place, but it's certainly not an essential buy by any measure. For full episode summaries and screenshots, check out our reviews of the individual discs: » Volume 1: Legendary Fighter » Volume 2: Historic Battles » Volume 3: Water Wars » Volume 4: Fighting Fate  |
