Whoever said War Never Changes must have never witnessed the fallout of mankinds first encounter with extraterrestrials. They did not come in peace and we responded in kind launching a multicentury intergalactic war that would evolve in technological sophistication to the point that we werent really even fighting each other anymore... Our machines were basically fighting unmanned at that point and we were at such a stalemate that war itself started to feel fruitless. Looking for another way to solve our differences we began holding athletic competitions... Big grand events involving people from across the solar system competing to become the next champion... Or after the focus on the competition shifted towards the development of female athletes in particular the Cosmo Beauty If any of that sounds confusing or dubious to you I know the anime doesnt explain it much better. Anyway its the year 4999 and one special competitor has turned up at the University Satellite Akari Kanzaki the daughter of the legendary Tomoe Midoh Will she be able to live up to her mothers legacy? Battle Athletes has a pretty interesting history behind it at least as far as what Ive been able to dig up. It originated as a multimedia franchise from the mind of Hiroki Hayashi the creative mind behind Magical Playwhich is a strange connection if Ive ever heard one as well as one of the driving forces behind Tenchi Muyo and El Hazard. It started out as a Sega Saturn game in 1996 and while Im not entirely sure what the plot of the game wasI dont think its ever been translated Im fairly certain youre supposed to play the role of the main characters manager/trainer working with her idolmaster style to support her career. My biggest piece of evidence for this is the existence of a mangaexclusive character who plays exactly this role and from the few playthrough videos Ive seen it looks like youre supposed to guide her through her school year choosing what stats she builds and who she interacts with. The following year three more titles would go into production... The aforementioned manga a six episode OVA series and a 26 episode TV series and this all came out within the space of two years... Why? Well the best sources I can find say that AIC was trying to profit off of the 1998 Winter Olympics taking place in Nagano Japan. A similar sportsrelated anime boom happened around the date of the 1964 Japanese olympics and Battle Athletes even received a terrible sequel just in time for the 2021 Tokyo Olympics so theres some decent support for this theory. Im not entirely sure what counts as the actual source material but I have a working theory about how all of these titles tie in together. After the game the manga was released debuting in Dengeki comics to present the concept in a linear narrative format with a bit more ecchi. The OVA was most likely a sequel to the game which Im gathering from the fact that characters from that portion of the story and beyond dont appear in any of the games artwork. This would imply that when Victory came out it was able to combine all of this into one complete story changing some details fixing some issueswhile creating a few new ones and looking to the previous entries as the drawing board so to speak. If you pay attention to the release schedule of all threethank god for Wikipedia and go through all three with that information in mind its hard to not notice these different adaptations taking influence from each other... And from the first episode of Gunbuster but thats a discussion for another day. The manga is considered to be the most explicitly ecchi out of the three the TV series is easily the most popular and critically acclaimed of the three... But where does that leave the OVA? Well in terms of visual quality ASCII didnt give either anime a high budget. This does kind of fall in line with my previous theory about them trying to profit off of the Winter Olympics as theyre not exactly going to pour money into something that was conceived as a ratings trap anyway. Still all background information aside this OVA is a major downgrade visually from the TV series. Dont get me wrong both shows look dirt cheap but you would think an OVA releasing bimonthly would have more freedom to manage its budget than a weekly episodic series right? Well it doesnt. They had the same studio AIC but they had different directors. Victory could look really cheap sometimes and there were a lot of corners cut throughout but at least director Katsuhito Akiyama never failed to pour the money hed saved into action and sport scenes putting as much fluid motion as possible where it really counted. For Battle Athletes it always feels like Kazuhiro Ozawa is struggling to tread water and keep the show over the line of okaylooking. The backgrounds are dull and lifeless theres no grace or energy in character movements and almost everything feels like the bare minimum of effort went into it which I refuse to believe is actually true. Despite having the same character designer Ryuuchi Makino the designs dont look nearly as polished or streamlined here as they would in the later entry. As far as I can tell the manga uses the same character designs as the game and the OVA kept those designs for the characters it used... And then Victory changed those designs and kept the designs of the characters the OVA left behind with the exception of Aylas weird fluffy bangs. I guess you could argue the designs look more or less fine in both cases but that doesnt excuse all the inconsistencies. Character faces are often off model and facial proportions can change between shots. Theres fanservice but not as much as in the manga and despite the fact that an OVA like this one doesnt have to answer to censors the way a TV show does its all really badly drawn barbie doll nudity and theres a fair amount of it on display. The only visual change I kind of like is the way an athlete is depicted when theyre transcending. In both Victory and Restart a character would develop a glow that was visible to other racers whenever they reached a higher level of performance well here its represented as the character entering this rainbow pocket dimension which doesnt make a whole lot of sense but I guess I dig it. The English dub is also a major step down and not just because of the material. Early on but especially in the first episode the dub writers essentially completely ignored the script and tried to insert more jokey snarky dialogue none of which is even remotely funny. They stopped doing this pretty quickly thankfully and by the time they reached the halfway point they were adapting it more faithfully and respectfully. The cast however is not particularly great. Dyanne DiRosario is by no means an acting legend putting together a very brief resume in the nineties before disappearing off the face of the earth and while she was kind of amazing as Akaris mother in Victory she sounds bland as hell in the actual role of Akari here. Brianne Siddall has the same issue as Tanya while Julie Maddallena gave her a lot more impish energy in Victory. Dorothy EliasFahn and Bridget Hoffman are probably the strongest performers here and while Steve Blum is okay as the principal hed grow into the role better in Victory. Mary Elizabeth McGlynn does a fine Lahri FeldnuntFernando? but she was always more suited to Ayla. So yeah hate to sound like a broken record but Victory was better sub honestly preferred. So this is a fairly difficult review for me because I really dont want to keep throwing out comparisons to Battle Athletes Victory but the compulsion to do so is overwhelming. Objectively speaking I think those comparisons are kind of fair because the two entries tell the same story but also kind of not fair because if my theories are correctand you should take them with a huge grain of salt by the by then the OVA had a much harder job than Victory and I really dont envy the position they were probably in. For the sake of fairness Im going to give this OVA the benefit of the doubt and assume they were handed a game with a semisatisfying conclusion and told to make up a continuation of the story on the fly with likely very little direction and probably a few character restrictions to boot. This isnt meant to be an excuse for any lack of quality the series possesses but more like context for why things turned out the way they did. It feels very strongly like for whatever reason the studio gave director Kazuhiro Ozawa lemons and he was left to make lemonade as well as he possibly could. They definitely tried to make this project work but they faced several limitations right off the bat. Starting where it does it skips a lot of content and starts at the beginning of a new arc including the entire training school part of the story and drops us right into the scene where Akari is arriving at University Satellite accompanied by a toned down Tanyawell get to that and a nameless standin for Jessie Gurtland who is very quickly forgotten by the narrative and dropped from the story. I havent seen enough footage of the game to know if this is canonical... If Jessie and Tanya are the default runners up if you get Akari to first place... Or if the OVA just picked them and set the precedent but it doesnt amount to much. Characters who got left behind are simply treated as though they never existed and Akari... Who was in the middle of a very long and complex character arc at this point in the TV series... Is portrayed very simply as a bland protagonist who has a generally friendly and positive disposition but just wants to get stronger. She has her teammates the athletically gifted Kris Kristopher and the sweetnatured Anna Resphigi who... Well get to that. The worst part of the whole series is the lengthy and tedious exposition dump at the beginning the one that did a really poor job explaining how this world came to be but after that when we actually get to Akari and her story the writing is fine. Because of all the character building and development they had to skip the story from here isnt that emotionally strong or engaging and Akari isnt as charming or likeable as she should be but she isnt annoying or anything. This is fine. Its fine. Were fine. They try in earnest to hit two of the biggest emotional elements of her character and they dont do a bad job but they do fall short of the mark. They address Akaris mommy issues living up to Tomoe Midohs legacy and dealing with her death but it doesnt feel organic or natural. Still its there and Id rather have it than not have it. The other element is her relationship with Jessie in the game which is transferred to Kris in the OVA and which... Honestly her relationship with Kris is actually better here than it is in Victory. Sure neither girl is as interesting here but Kriss religious side feels more compelling and less like a joke even if the payoff of her final decision doesnt feel as consequential. And since were talking about Kris Kristopher I should mention that the more problematic elements of Victory are nowhere to be found here which should be a good thing but sadly this OVA has its own problematic issues making it feel like kind of a lateral move. Tanya isnt an exaggerated animalistic stereotype here but that portion of racism was replaced by some poorlyaged and actually downright stupid transphobia towards the middle of the series. Akaria relationship with Kris still reeks of queerbaiting but at least Kris isnt so sexually aggressive and predatory anymore... With the tradeoff being that the principal Grant Oldman is SO FUCKING CREEPY. He overtly pervs out on his teenage students to a level that would make Mr. Kimura blush and he even has a bet going with the principal of a rival boys school that each year whosoevers school wins a sporting competition will get to be principal of the girls school. Yeah old men perving on young girls is so normalized here that two of them hold open wagers over who gets better access to them. And speaking of the boys school why is that a thing? I mean I didnt exactly understand why the fate of the galaxy began to hinge on female athletes in the first place but since that is what happened why is there a boys equivalent to this school? Did I miss something? Why does it take so long to expel the borderline attempted murderer Mylandah? I know I shouldnt be harping on this franchise for not making sense... And I mean especially for that... But as ridiculous as this whole multimedia project is the OVA just isnt silly enough to make such a blatant deviation from the concept work without the viewer asking questions. Unlike Victory it doesnt lean hard enough into the silliness of its concept to justify the viewers expanding our suspension of disbelief and to make matters worse it also doesnt lean hard enough into Victorys goshdarn sincerity to trick the audience into caring deeply in our hearts about the results of the competition. As much as Id love to draw this OVAs myriad of issues into the fact that they were forced to only tell a small portion of a larger story it still could have been done. Theres so much they could have done to make this work and they didnt. They hit the beats they were supposed to but they put almost no effort into endearing Akari and her plight to us. I watch every important race in Victory with my heart in my throat on the verge of tears. I watch every important race in the OVA feeling nothing other than oh well if she loses better luck next year. The races themselves arent the point. Watching a character win a prize or a trophy or a championship means nothing if you dont create stakes to make the audience care or hell the results of the race dont have to matter at all. In Yuri on Ice nobody cared about the trophy. Only one character cared about the trophy everyone else cared about their own personal arcs and focusing on building lives for themselves after the competition. Only one character cared about the trophy and in the epilogue after he won he was still just chasing another trophy. Well aside from winning Cosmo Beauty there is nothing at stake in this OVA. Characters race to win. They struggle and strive to win. Characters suffer brutal injuries to try and win but when someone finally does win it doesnt feel like anything about them has changed. The reason this OVA isnt as fondly remembered as its successor isnt because its missing a ton of plot its because its missing a ton of heart. Battle Athletes is currently available alongside Victory in a recent BluRay release from Diskotek Media. A recent reboot called Restart is not yet available stateside and much like the original manga and Sega Saturn game it likely never will be. At this point Im the only person on Anilist who has reviewed any entry in the Battle Athletes franchise let alone all three of them. My critique of the OVA so far has not been a hit piece but a labor of love as I didnt even hold back on criticizing my favorite entry over its myriad of flaws. I dont hate the OVA. At its best its competent and at its worst... Well lets just say that its not always competent but its still nowhere near as bad as that Restart reboot garbage fire and I honestly wonder what I would think of it if I had seen it first rather than starting my journey on Victory so long ago. Still regardless of what I started with I do strongly believe that Victory wouldnt be as good as it is if the OVA hadnt come out first and laid out so much groundwork for it. I dont like it very much but I respect it and I appreciate the fact that it walked so that my favorite sports anime could run. I give Battle Athletes a 5/10.