Soreyuke! Uchuu Senkan Yamamoto Youko (1999)

(As written on 'The Hateful Anime Truth' on Facebook)

As a pre-teen, I loved animes. I literally walked, stepped, breathed, drink and excrement out anime. During my time, my sister would drag me to the front of the house where the TV is to watch some anime on AXN and Animax.

So I'd like to thank her for giving me this little gem that is Starship Girl Yamamoto Yoko. It's fast-paced, action packed, quirky and light-hearted all at the same time. Well, anything will do for this one, and I believe it's actually better than that stupid Evangelion and the stupid expositionsWith that, let's get on with ... the review.

STORY:

Usually, it's your typical standard good vs evil anime. 4 ordinary girls become goddesses of their starships to take out evil tyrants from destroying the world... or taking over it. I forgot, it's a REALLY old anime. The story's actually pretty good, with its extra bit of charm and quirkiness.

ART:

Well, this IS an old anime, and at the time, the art style isn't like today's, so it's slightly grainy, but the detail they give to the girls, the spaceships and the attacks are pretty much top-notch.

Oh and SHINY FOREHEAD.

SOUND:

Not much to say about sound except god damn that opening intro is classic. The music is pretty badass when it gets to the fighting parts. Really fitting especially at the last parts of the anime.

CHARACTER:

My favorite part, the characters. The 4 heroines are really different in of style. Yoko happens to be the average all-arounder, and then there's the shy one, the sporty one, and the one that wants to beat Yoko. The modern day version of Yoko Yamamoto would be Misaka Mikoto from To Aru Majutsu no Index/To Aru Kagaku no Railgun, since they both use the patented 100 yen coins to fire off giant f*cking lasers.

OVERALL:

This is actually a pretty good anime. I'm surprised as to something being actually better than Evangelion or Gundam. If you like action, but at the same time a light-hearted feel to an anime, then I suggest you pick this up.

9/10

Early last year, I watched the OVA of Starship Girl Yamamoto Youko. The premise is ridiculous, but it was a lot of fun. Youko is a fun character.

I was excited to watch the anime series, but I was disappointed that it's not as fun as the OVAs.

The premise is similar. Yamamoto Youko is an ordinary high school girl, except that she is a highly skilled arcade gamer, and we're not even taking into that she's good with a bunch of other stuff like sports. One day, she is invited to travel to the third millennium where Terra and Ness are fighting for control ... of different planets and star systems. Instead of a war, games and space battles take place between select pilots of each side. If someone's starship is destroyed, the pilot is teleported, so no one dies.

Whereas the OVA seems to be so fun, the anime that came later is dreary in comparison. Even Youko didn't seem as fun of a character compared to her OVA version. She is still competent but bored.

So if you like the OVA, should you skip the anime? It's your call. There's a benefit to watching the anime, but it won't be as fun as the OVA.

The OVA seems to be random episodes and lacks a plot. The anime, for all its faults, has a semblance of a plot. The OVA Youko is a fun Mary Sue, but TV Youko can sometimes lose, even though she's highly skilled and competent.

If you only watch the OVA, the ing characters are forgettable. But if you watch the anime, the ing characters are much more memorable, especially Madoka and Ayano. Too bad Momiji isn't as well written as these other two.

They become memorable due to them having some character arcs that highlight their quirks. If you rewatch the OVA, you will start to notice these quirks as well, which is something you might overlook on your first viewing.

Now let's talk about the bad. It starts out slow with Youko and Ayano refusing the call of adventure. It starts to pick up at around Episode 6 to Episode 8, but still slow compared to the OVA. If this were to air today, many people would have dropped this.

Another element that makes this difficult to recommend is the Shimboisms. the unusual sequence in the final two episodes of Evangelion? Other people find that it's executed similarly. I'm not surprised. The director of this anime is Shimbou Akiyuki, the same director as Bakemonogatari. The unusual visuals in Bakemonogatari reminded me of Evangelion. Even though no staff from Eva are present in either of Shimbou's two projects, the influence of Evangelion is clear and apparent.

Perhaps we should thank that this anime existed so Shimbou could experiment with his visual style and found its way in full bloom in shows like Bakemonogatari. This however doesn't mean it's good. It makes it a slog. The experience of watching this anime is similar to trying to kick while your body is submerged. The use of contrasting colours and shadows, and sometimes in a wide shot make it feel oppressive. I very much prefer the direction Shimbou did in the OVA. Speaking of the OVA, something similar to the anime can be seen developing in the final two episodes of OVA II.

Fluger's character design is better in the anime and his OVA design seems to have been thrown to a nuisance character. In general, I dislike the character designs in this anime. It reminds me of moe blob and not the rich details that older anime from the 90s and earlier bring. I prefer the design from the OVA.

Is this a must-watch? No. Fans of Shimbou Akiyuki might consider watching this, but they might dislike the anime's slow pace. If you like the OVA, consider watching this even though it's a downgrade. You will get to know Ayano and Madoka more.

The TV anime version of Starship Girl Yamamoto Youko tries to have a satisfying story, and I think it's a somewhat satisfactory watch, but the fact that it's not as fun as I had expected, coming from the OVA, makes this hard to recommend. I still give it a ing mark.


NOTA BENE: A rating of 5 out of 10 means that 1) I find this anime to be average, 2) I enjoyed it to some extent, but it has some flaws. 3) Or simply, I rank it below my 6's but above my 4's.

A 5 means a ing score. If you think that a score of 5 out of 10 means TRASH, YOU'RE AN IDIOT!

Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko is an anime based on novels by Takashi Shoji. It aired in 1999 in Japan, but was never licensed outside of it. Is it like Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight and worth looking into or is there a very good reason it was never licenced? Let's take a look.

The story begins with a High School girl named Yamamoto Yohko doing athletics. She's bribed into examining a strange event involving a door that only seems to open at certain times and a certain student seems to keep disappearing into. She finds a portal that takes her a thousand years into the future where ... she's greeted by several people who seem to know her including a girl from her school named Momiji. She regains her memories during a starship fight and re the truth, she's the one who's been disappearing. She was going to the future to battle in a war between two factions for control over different territories. She and Momiji return to their battles and recruit two other girls from their time, Ayano and Madoka, to fight with them. Things get complicated when they discover a mystery called "The Old Timers' Inheritance" and looking into it quickly leads the group into trouble. The premise isn't bad and there are some good moments, but overall the execution is terrible. There are multiple plot holes, the fight scenes are boring and the series is full of pointless transitions and forced expository dialogue. There are several pointless romance subplots that don't affect the narrative and only affect the characters temporarily before getting dropped. The only romance subplot that they actually need for the story is the one between Madoka and Yohsuke. The rest are pointless padding. Speaking of which, there's a lot of that.

The characters aren't so bad. The main four get some good interactions and are pretty complex and developed characters. The main issue is that the vast majority of the other characters are completely one dimensional. The antagonists suffer from the "needlessly toy with the enemy giving them a chance to beat you" cliche. Each of the main characters also gets one episode where they spend an inordinate amount of time moping over something relatively minor. Which ruins part of the tension when they're moping over something serious.

I didn't want to say this after last week, but the art is lazy and schizophrenic. They don't change the art technique completely like they did in Leave it to Piyoko, but they're constantly doing bad effects with the animation that just get annoying really quickly. They frequently save time on doing the colour simply by shading everything one colour. There are moments where they draw a simple scene and just tile it. The result is that the art goes all over the place. Even when they aren't doing anything screwy with it, it's not good. Rather, it would be pretty mediocre without the horrendous effects. What makes this worse is that the key animation was done by Sushio, who did animation work for several very well drawn series like Berserk, Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 and Mushishi. I have no idea what happened here.

The voice acting is actually really good, overall. They got a lot of strong actors like Hayashibara Megumi, Yukino Satsuki, Miyamura Yuko and Matsumoto Yasunori. The music is pretty good as well. One issue is that the characters almost always refer to Yamamoto Yohko by her full name and it gets annoying pretty quickly. Another is that there are moments where the sound effects are so loud that it's hard to hear the actors.

I'm going to give Starship Girl a yuri factor of 3/10. The main four protagonists all get some homoerotic moments, especially Ayano and Yohko but they go out of their way to give them all gratuitous romance subplots, except for the aforementioned Madoka one, and nothing too substantial ever happens among them.

My final rating for Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko is a 3/10. The voice acting and music are really the only strong points. The plot and art are both messes and the few decent moments really aren't worth watching the series for. Even if I've watched worse anime that did get licensed, I can understand why the license was never picked up.