Have you ever wondered who the toughest waitress is and wished there existed a martial arts tournament that can help you answer this intriguing question? Well me neither. But apparently someone had as this is the premise for a fighting anime called Variable Geo which features said tournament of the same name. I only picked up Variable Geo because Id played the original SNES game before a fiendishly hard game by the way I couldnt even get to the boss on the easiest mode and since the anime comprises only three episodes I thought: why not? Id braced myself for a bad anime but the shittiness of Variable Geo somehow managed to surpass my expectations. Its first mistake like many other fighting game adaptations is pretending to be something its not. Instead of fully embracing its shallowness and concentrating on just being a great fighting anime Variable Geo fancies itself as something deeper and more philosophical. As a result you get meaningless pseudophilosophical drivel such as Id like to see the petals in the tea strewn all over the place along with illjudged attempts to do some soul searching on why the characters fight like when I fight I feel like Im communicating with them thats why I fight. I guess no one told this character the existence of an obscure communication method called talking. Is it just me who get really irritated by fighting anime trying to come up with inane reasons to justify the fighting no one fucking cares start beating the shit out of each other already I also couldnt extract much sense out of the story and the parts I did understand seems laughably flimsy. When a fighter in a martial arts tournament turns up for a match with glowing metal rods sticking out of her back you would think that in the very least her opponent would smell something fishy going on but no. Precisely zero eyebrows were raised at this strange occurrence. If youre wondering whether you should pick up this anime to see some asskicking action dont bother. None of the fights last long enough and most of them quickly descend into dull affairs where the fighters start blasting energy at each other and the fight would get resolved by whos got the stronger fireball. Have you ever seen one of those Street Fighter matches where Ryu and Ken are spamming fireballs at each other from across the screen? Well most of the fights here feels just like that. You might wonder what is the point of Variable Geo. As the terribly uninteresting fights play out on screen the anime finally reveals its raison detre ... in the form of girls getting their clothes ripped off by the attacks of their opponents. THATs the kind of audience its fishing for. And if that sounds like the kind of thing that floats your boat then congratulations on discovering a new anime to watch. But for everyone else Variable Geo is a hard sell: it isnt just bad its ludicrously bad and not even in a sobaditsgood kind of way. Its only redeeming factor is its length: at three episodes the torture didnt last too long fortunately.