Ringo’s position in Sleeping Forest can no longer be ignored. As the time draws closer to the opening of Trophaeum Tower, Sleeping Forest begins targeting all major teams and riders capable of challenging them. Among the victims is Simca, who is attacked and temporarily crippled under Ringo’s orders. When Ikki discovers Ringo’s role in incapacitating Simca, he considers her a traitor and runs from her. Realizing she has no other method of showing Ikki her and Sleeping Forest’s true intentions, Ringo challenges Ikki to a one-on-one Dash-Type Battle.

The ever popular mangaka Oh Great!’s Air Gear was a fun little shonen battle action anime which featured over the top characters on rather over the top, powered up inline skates. However, despite the actually pretty cool concept, the series (both manga and anime) quickly lost sight of the really cool inline skate dynamic and instead got bogged down by stupid power and ability escalations, leading to a very overwrought and somewhat silly franchise.

Nevertheless, four years on from the end of the original anime run in 2006, someone decided that the fanservice-laden silliness needed some screen time again, and so the Break on the Sky OVA series was announced, this time animated by studio Satelight in place of Toei, with Shinji Ishihara as director and Jun Maekawa as script writer.

The result is thus far three 28 minute long episodes, the first of which I’m discussing here.

First off, the animation is really cool as per usual. High octane, high detail, very kinetic and loads of fun to watch. The character designs are pretty cool as always, and as expected, the girls are looking pretty hot, with loads of unnecessary fanservice thrown in to boot (well, this is a show courtesy of Oh Great! after all).

The voices all fit the tone and action perfectly, and the soundtrack and opening and closing musical tracks all work well.

However, then there is the story. Yeah, not particularly good. Plenty of action as to be expected, but very, very overwrought, very silly over the top antics, and in the end, serves to remind one just how difficult it was to watch the original anime series through it’s entirety. Unless of course you are a hardened Air Gear fan – in that case you’ll no doubt enjoy this outing (though be warned, it isn’t particularly high on the usual Air Gear comedy hijinks).

So in other words, don’t worry too much about missing out on this one.

Related Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Gear#OVA