Mars

soloship★ 5

Mars had the potential to be a classic OVA by virtue of the manga's storyline and the OVA's paranoid tone, but its untimely cancellation made it nothing more than a half-baked product that goes nowhere, a collection of large-scale robot battles with paltry story. Taking cues from kaiju movies, the battles show the full scale of the robots' destructive power. An orchestral soundtrack and a strong focus on the military's ineffectual efforts enhance the suspense and awe. Sadly, KSS's low budget forced the inclusion of several still frames and a lot of dead air between the battles (the latter is another element of kaiju movies),making a potentially mind-blowing experience sluggish. A telltale sign of the project's restrictive budget is the lack of an OP song and an instrumental ED accompanied by covers from the Mars manga. The potential to be mind-blowing was further kneecapped by not adapting the manga's apocalyptic, brutal ending. Next to 64 episodes of GodMars standing still and Akira Tsuburaya's chintzy TV adaptation, this OVA is probably the best adaptation of the manga, but sadly, KSS's insufficient budget and premature cancellation (which hurt several other OVAs, like Mighty Space Miners and Iczelion) prevented the OVA from reaching its full, mind-blowing potential.