Shelf Life

Touched By An Angel

Normally, I don't really let animation quality phase me too much. Obviously, it can make a great story even better, or drag down an otherwise good title, but when the only thing you can focus on is how cheap it looks, that's when it starts seriously hampering your viewing experience. Angel's Feather is the animated equivalent of watching one of those old 70s movies where plane crashes are denoted by tilting the camera, and earthquakes are shown by shaking the camera. In this OVA, the animation largely consists of three things—pans, shaking the camera, and something I like to call the Animation Certainty Principle, which states that any moving object anchored onto a stationary item (like strands of hair, articles of clothing, etc) can only be in one of three positions at any given time. This gives rustling hair the appearance of a bandsaw, and everything else the distinct flavor of Low Budget.

Animation aside, Angel's Feather's other downside is that it simply makes no sense. To those who have played the game, there's probably plenty of plot points and nuances that make it work, but these 60 minutes are a clutter of bad writing and plot holes. The story takes place at an all-male boarding school. All the boys look the same, are pretty in some way or another, and are all vaguely homosexual. It's not until a new transfer student arrives that things get a little wild. Apparently, there's an ancient empire called the Winfield Kingdom, a place where everyone who has royal blood can sprout white wings. For whatever reason, rebel groups started popping up, and naturally, they are able to grow black wings.

Because this is a show about pretty boys, it therefore logically follows that some of them are also able to grow wings. Turns out, the most popular boy of them all has that special something which makes him able to sprout white wings. He and the other boys (some of them evil!) fall through floors, end up fighting zombie beasts, get into altercations with each other, and eventually end up doing battle in a place that looks like Superman's icy hideout. There's even a computer that's controlled entirely by crystal spikes, which somehow function like a keyboard. And, just in case viewers couldn't figure it out, there's even a speech near the end that informs you that yes, some of these boys are descendents of the original Winfield Kingdom bunch.

It's possible that my analytical skills have deteriorated since college, but I couldn't make heads or tails out of the two episodes. Nothing was explained, and way too much happened in the allotted 60 minutes.

With OVAs like this, it's far too hard to try to cram an entire game's events into two episodes. There's not enough time, there's not enough room for exposition, and it's almost impossible to have adequate character development. That's the case with Angel's Feather, which might very well be a very entertaining game. As an OVA though, it completely fails to deliver anything worthwhile, unless you want to see men stroking each other's lips.[TOP]

With the advent of the second volume, we discover that KOSMOS has a lot of cool powers that weren't previously revealed, like being able to obliterate entire armies of Gnosis with little effort. We also learn that there's some kind of shadowy organization that's the cause of everything bad in the world. And, because they needed to fill up time and space, viewers also get to watch a magical girl transformation scene because, big surprise, the characters eventually get stuck in a dream sequence.

The biggest problem with the series is that it's very messy. The story never really proceeds in a linear fashion, and it seemingly skips a lot of important expository events necessary to make the scenes flow together. There's also enough technobabble to choke an engineer, making the already clunky dialogue that much worse.

Given the popularity of the Xenosaga game franchise, it's a little disappointing that the anime series hasn't really matched up to my expectations. I was expecting a glimpse at what made the games so popular, but instead, all I've been getting is a cluttered mess of characters running around looking shocked. It's piquing my curiosity to finish the games, but I can't profess to have any interest in finishing the anime series at all.[TOP]