Ronin Warriors OAV #2: Message (1989)
Review by Doc Ezra
Film:
DVD:

Written by Mamoru Hamazu
Character Design by Norio Shioyama and Shukou Murase
Armor Design by Hideo Okamoto

Features:

• English and Japanese audio
  
• English subtitles
  
• Reversible jacket art
  

Released by: Bandai Entertainment
Region: 1
Rating: 13+
Anamorphic: No

My Advice: Pass.

Having defeated the evil Talpa, the Warriors are adjusting to their less violent lives. Alas, as is typically the case when you're a group of world-saving magical samurai, the respite was doomed to be brief. A mysterious tome is unearthed, which details the exploits of the Ronin Warriors but was recorded several hundred years before any of them were even born. Soon after the book's appearance, the warriors are visited one by one by an enigmatic woman named Suzunagi. Each warrior ponders their experiences as a member of the legendary team, providing for some flashback montages of earlier installments in the Ronin Warriors saga. There's lots of pretentious pseudophilosophical babble, and an extended sequence of Ryo listening to phone messages. No, I'm not kidding.

It doesn't take long into this "movie" to figure out that you, the viewer, have been had. Message is little more than a clip show, composed of about seventy-five percent recycled footage from the television series. The remaining twenty-five percent is nothing to get terribly excited about, and is essentially used to set up the clips from the show. Hoping desperately to wring a few more dollars out of a very, very tired franchise, the creators no doubt figured the repackaged summary of the TV series would appeal to the hardcore fans of the show. But given that the show was pretty lukewarm to begin with, a hacked up reduction of the original is even less appealing.

The OAV is divided into five twenty-five minute episodes, available in either English or Japanese with English subtitles. The video has all the same problems that the original shows had: fuzzy picture, color bleeding, the occasional transfer artifact. The audio is decent enough, though there's nothing particularly fancy about it. There are no special features to speak of other than reversible cover art.

There are so many more recent incarnations of the sentai concept than this one that I can't really fathom the ongoing attention it has received. It's not even a particularly sterling example of the genre. With any luck, the surge in popularity of manga and anime in the U.S. will translate into more recent Japanese releases hitting Region 1's shores soon. Then we can put behind us all the recycled 1980s mediocrity that was America's only real anime option for so long.