Its the distant future year 5997. A series of massive catastrophic events have reshaped humanity forever. Not only is the Earth itself unrecognizable in its current form but humanity has managed to accomplish the oncethought impossible task of spreading out throughout the solar system colonizing most of the celestial bodies making up their corner of the universe. Theyve bent moons and entire planets to their will and the galaxys unifying government... As was once predicted by The Lonely Island of all people... Is built around a sort of space olympics called The Divine Games where representatives of each celestial body meet every year in competition to crown the Cosmo Beauty... A title once held akin to a mere championship up until 100 years ago when Akira Kanzaki won the crown and successfully defended Earth against an alien invasion. However with that threat out of the way the competition continued only now the Cosmo Beauty is kind of like the Queen of the Galaxy or something. I dont know its not entirely clear. Either way the descendants of the 4997th game have pretty randomly reunited to crown the next Cosmo Beauty Battle Athletes Victory Restart was produced by Studio Seven and I swear to God you have no idea how tempting it is to just sit here and spend 5 pages of text roasting them. Theyre a fairly new production company in the anime market they were founded in 2007 and they made their first nonhentai release in 2011 I am not making that up. Granted its not impossible for great anime to come from such a source... For example Gen Urobuchi is one of the most celebrated anime writers and directors of all time and rightly so given his ability to wring engaging stories out of terrible ideas which is why PsychoPass and Aldnoah Zero went from greatness to shit as soon as he stepped away from them and hes just generally seen as an artist who can bring complex emotion and unfathomable depth to the darkest of subject matter. He got his start in hentai. Sure it was really dark problematic edgelord hentai but it was still hentai. Then again you also have Studio Arms who had a similar start but their entire mainstream output has been terrible torture porn that just barely qualifies as NON hentai and the only thing they made that anyone likes is Elfen Lied. Studio Seven made a ton of hentai from 2007 to 2011 and while Im no hentai watcher myself Ive seen one... Theres this nudist beach hentai based on an old doujin... The doujin is better frankly and its still not one of my favorites. As for their actual mainstream anime output Ive only seen a few of their titles and the only one I kind of liked was I Cant Understand What My Husband is Saying which was a pretty cute shortlength ONA about relatable newlywed drama. They also did My Wife is the Student Council President which I didnt really get into and Kings Game which I hated entirely. Oh and its called Kings Game the Animation so we dont confuse it with the party game Im pretty sure. They also apparently made a reboot of Irresponsible Captain Tylor back in 2017 that I literally heard about for the first time about tn minutes ago when I opened up their wikipedia page for this review and Im sorry but that feels like it should have been bigger news right? But anyway if they made a reboot to one cult classic late nineties scifi epic that was instantly forgotten it really shouldnt be a surprise that they tried again with the Battle Athletes franchise. As far as the visuals go you dont have to go too far into the first episode to see how ugly this show looks which is a bold feat for a show that has such a bright and vibrant color palette. Thats probably the only improvement Studio Seven made over the previous installment but every other aspect is the opposite in the worst way possible. Where Victory had a low budget that it struggled against Restart clearly poured a ton of money into CG backgrounds and shiny rippling water and then just lazily let the character animations suffer to make up the difference. Where Victory spared no expense in making the athletic animations look as impressive as possible given their limitations paying total attention to anatomic movement and making each step a runner takes feel impactful and dynamic Restart takes the easy way out at every possible opportunity moving frozen images across the screen to simulate flips and dives and reusing the same three running animation cycles over and over again with every single character. The character designs are fine... Everybody looks like less interesting versions of the ancestor theyre supposed to be representing... But the new unitards look like they took inspiration from the space suits from Heroic Age in the way they ride up the girls buttcracks which is a design choice I THINK was supposed to look sexy but it just looks like everyone has the most uncomfortable wedgies in history even when theyre wearing fucking jeans shorts. The music is fine if a bit too repetitive but speaking of recycled animation am I the only one who noticed a few seconds of animation in the opening that were clearly stolen from the first opening of Cardcaptor Sakura? There are other moments in the opening that look vaguely familiar although Im struggling to place them. I dont mind so much the parts that pay homage to Victorys original opening but this is such a different feeling anime that they feel anachronistic to say the least. An homage I definitely didnt appreciate was a remixed version of the original opening that plays in the credits of the final episodes. The first few notes are right then everything goes to shit when they switch up the beat. Theres no English dub and Id personally recommend Funimation to not waste their money producing one so lets move on. So Im in a bit of a predicament with this review. Obviously Im not coming into the Battle Athletes franchise blind and Restart is not my first exposure to it. I love the TV series Victory so much its at the very edge of my top ten favorite anime series and I honestly consider it superior in every way to the original OVA... You can call me blasphemous for that I dont care. In any case the reason Im bringing this up is because while I may be a biased fanboy I dont want it to sound like this review is coming from such a perspective. I dont want to sound like one of those butthurt reviewers who whines about shit not being accurate or the lore being changed. If all I wanted was to see Battle Athletes Victory well I could just DO that. Thanks to Discotek Media doing the lords work by rescuing and rereleasing itlike I literally asked them to do in my previous review of the series I own it on BluRay. When I watch a sequel I want to see something new... I want to see the concept and universe evolved and explored in exciting and well hell why not daring and inventive new ways. Spoiler alert Restart did not do that. I feel its safe to say that if I was coming into this franchise blind the biggest compliment Id give this show is that it had a ton of really cool ideas but they were poorly thought out and needed to be workshopped a bit more. Since thats not the case I know those cool ideas WERE cool at one point until Studio Seven got hold of them and because the two shows do share an inseparable connection Im just going to rip the bandaid off now and explain why Victory worked and Restart doesnt. First off the oldiebutagoody writing rule show dont tell. The very concept of the Battle Athletes franchise is ridiculous and nonsensical but you can get away with a lot of weird bullshit if you let the audience experience it for themselves rather than try to explain it all to them. Victory did this really well focusing almost entirely on character development comedy and action while giving out lore and exposition in small doses through natural dialogue and at the very worst the occasional TV broadcast. Restart just explains everything to you at any given opportunity. One particularly egregious example is that before every scifi sport they came up with for the series they tell the audience what it is and how it works where Victory explained by you know showing you the characters competing. Secondly the characters. This if you ask me is the number one strength of Victory. Characters were complex flawed and had depth that reached surprising... Well depths. Theres this concept in character writing called Mask CounterMask and Dark Room. The Mask is the top layer the persona a character chooses to show the world. CounterMask is whats directly underneath... Their insecurities their complexes etcetera. The Dark Room is much farther down its the disturbing secrets they cant even admit to themselves let alone show to other people. In Victory at least half the cast had their dark room explored and every one of them had their mask removed at some point. You could spend an episode warming up to a character only to find out some shocking disturbing fact about them ten episodes later that SOMEHOW makes perfect sense. The drawback to all this is that a lot of the characters were based on really insensitive stereotypes and yeah Im not gonna excuse that but they were all still likeable. This is why its so disappointing to see just how one dimensional everybody in Restart is. The deepest any of them get is just conflict between principals and friendship and those conflicts are stupid by the way. I mentioned earlier that the cast of this show is almost entirely made up of descendants of the cast of Victory and yeah thats true. Almost none of it makes any gorram sense but yep its true. I guess I can buy Aylas descendant being an old lady in charge of the games and having Tanyas descendant be a detective investigating them is an okay workaround for the insanely racist character she was in the past. Kris Kristophers descendant is still a Beginner that checks out. Now how the fuck did Jessie Gurtlands descendants become arms dealers on Mars? Why is comedy antagonist LingPhas descendant occupying the Ichino role while Ichinos descendant is a coach and not a competitor? Why is Annas descendant the only one that looks 100 percent nothing like her? And why the hell is Akari... One of the most loveable yet deeply complex heroines in anime history fight me... Represented by a descendant that is in every sense of the term a bland MarySue? Shes already physically gifted going into the competition she has no real wants or desires outside of friendship and every one of her flaws is played for awkward laughs. Friendship was a part of Akaris development but she also had to overcome her mental physical and psychological limitations part of which was a crippling sense of codependency learning to stand on her own two feet and run for herself when the people she relied on couldnt be there. Meanwhile Kanata just happens to get a burst of speed or strength when she thinks about her friends only two of which she has any defined relationship with the others just happened to float into the same social group as her. She isnt even involved in that stupid conflict I alluded to before which... Okay spoilers. Yana Kristopher is from the moon where a civil war is going on. Her partner Lydia Gurtland is from a family thats supplying weapons to both sides of the war. Yana is urged to kill Lydia by an old friend who occasionally makes insane faces because killing Lydia will show her family what happens when Okay stop thats not going to end the conflict. All its going to do is justify more violence. Are you fucking high? The Gurtlands have these weapons theyre selling your people they probably have access to a ton more and your plan is to create a grudge where there previously was none? Are you fucking high? I know you want to try and match the emotional potency of Victory but is this the best you can do? And yes I said emotional potency. As ridiculous as it might be on the surface Victory was a powerful show. There were more individual tearjerking moments in the first eight episodes than most shows can pull off in 26 episodes and theres a DAMN sight more than Restart was able to pull off in twelve. It is ultimately a matter of execution. The same concept executed well or poorly can yield drastically different results. Take for example the divine glow. In Victory there was this phenomenon where when a character was putting on a transcendent performance a golden aura would form around them but it was never entirely clear what this was. It happened to multiple characters and was established as something first achieved by the legendary Tomoe Mido but we only ever saw it secondhand by other characters who were competing against them were pushing their limits and were either inspired or devastated to see someone performing on a level they couldnt reach. It was even animated like said character was viewing it through double vision. In Restart its just a literal tangible glow that everyone can see and it is complete bullshit that would feel out of nowhere if you didnt know what they were trying to copy. And hell because the fanboy train has already left the station lets throw out a few more examples. In the old series Kris Kristopher had a cow as an animal companion. This is an incredibly stupid idea on paper but she was able to use it in a lot of scenes as a comedy prop so it worked. This time Yana Kristopher has a kangaroo companion and while that actually is a solid followup on paper it barely has any connection to her in the story and just seems to exist as the shows pointless animal mascot. In the old show the main characters best friend has to drop out because she reinjures an old fracture something shes had to overcome that gave her tenacity meaning. In the new show the main characters best friend has to drop out because her prosthetic limbs shortcircuit in the rain because of course shes never been out in the fucking rain before. Ive seen people complain that the final event is just a shortlength race which feels anticlimactic to them but the old show did the same thing... But with stakes tension pageantry personal consequences for both characters and a sense that like the Final Destination stage in Smash Bros this was going to be the purist competition no gimmicks just a raw athletic challenge. Its like its trying to pay homage to the original series at every opportunity but it just never sticks a single landing. Look I didnt go into this show wanting to hate it... I understand why some people like to get defensive over their favorite pieces of media but Ive never been much of a gatekeeperWell maybe a little bit with wrestling. If I like a particular franchise I like getting more content even if its not as good as the original. I still love all of the Pirates of the Caribbean and Starship Troopers titles despite the fact that the newer entries in both kinda suck because Im in for a penny in for a pound at this point and nothing would have made me happier than to add one of my favorite nineties anime to that list with an unexpected addition in 2021. I dont know what people who dont know the franchise thought of this title... Probably not a lot considering the amount of people who have it on their worst of 2021 lists... but I wanted to be the lone dissenting voice. I wanted to defend it hell I was even prepared to don my Apologist gear but I came away feeling nothing but pain and hatred for the world. If this is what happens when you try to Restart then you need a new battery. Battle Athletes Victory Restart is available for streaming through funimation. The original series is available in a convenient DVD/BluRay set from Discotek Media or if youd like the original singlevolume DVDs are pretty easy to track down online and in used DVD stores. If bad is the absence of good this anime is the new mascot for that phrase. I am quite possibly the most forgiving and accepting audience this show could have possible had and yet I found nothing in it but disappointment. There is no humor no passion no imagination or inspiration no joy to be had in this series. I suspected while watching that this series was the result of some greedy producer looking at a cult classic and seeing a cash cow and while I obviously have no proof of that suspicion seeing that they tried and failed previously to revive Captain Tylor has only strengthened my belief. Speaking of beliefs I havent changed my mind about one that Ive held for a long time that a sequel or reboot no matter how bad cannot possibly ruin the source material... I still believe that because long after people have forgotten this train wreck ever happened Battle Athletes Victory will still be there waiting for people to discover it and realize just how much fun dated anime from the past can be. I give Battle Athletes Victory Restart a 1/10.
10 /100
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