Shamanic Princess CPM 180 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles 02/31/2001

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Tiara : The size of your creature is not what counts!

Whenever someone asks me about an anime I've picked up before I watch it, I usually say "I've heard good things". I must get my information from the Associated Press on Good Things or something because this is just getting ridiculous. I even "heard good things" about Kite for gods sake! So I went into Shamanic Princess armed with the knowledge that it was THREE HOURS LONG and I'd "heard good things". Now three hours is an assload of anime, even skipping intros and endings after the first time only saves you 20 minutes max. That's why me and these six disc collections have a love/hate relationship going on. They're the discs I love to hate. Nobody can complain about getting 6 episodes of anime for around $20, especially when the approximate cost PER EPISODE of the Japanese market was almost $20 from what I can garner from CD Japan. That's just crazy, take that Japan! Reverse import THIS!** So I went into Shamanic Princess completely blind, like I do with pretty much every anime I buy. Believe me, I had a lot of exposure back in the day, but DVD has really boardened my horzions...to the sheer load of crap that can come out. I really could've lived without the knowledge that Amazing Nurse Nanako ever blighted the planet with its weird ass art and themes of abuse. But back to the show! What do I think of Shamanic Princess?

I have no clue what so ever. It's not just that it's long, though brain drain is a bitch, I can take three plus hours of anime if I put my mind to it. I think it's more the fact that you have absolutely NO idea what's going on in this show. The first four episodes are this crazy quest to recover an artifact stolen from the Guardian World, the last two are the explanation of HOW it was stolen. That backwards storytelling crap is never gonna fly, personally I find it pretty strange to drop the viewers into two hours with them sitting there completely beffudled as they try and find out what neutralizers, princesses, parteners, and the "Throne Of Yord" is. You'll stumble over which of the characters is a lesbian and which is just trying to humor the other. If you can find your way out of this anime without a map and compass than you must be Davey-freakin-Crocket. Drop on your 'coon-skin cap partener, 'cause you're in for a bumpy ride!

Tiara is just a normal school girl, albiet one with magical powers from a alternate world who's just posing as a school girl to find a stolen treasure. So she's not really much of a school girl at all. Okay, point. Is she in high school or college? I know this is a common hentai trick to make the characters of legal age for American viewing, but...this isn't a hentai series***. Anyway, along with her partener Japolo, the mink or squirrel or some other such rodent, she fights the magic user who beat her to the chase. If they're from the same place trying to recover the same artifact for the same people, you'd wonder why they were competing. This is how it goes, you MAY eventually piece it together...but don't get your hopes up spotty. But Shamanic Princess sits you down and MAKES you like it. The art is beautiful, character designs are wonderful, even the voice acting is good. Hell, the DUB is okay for a CPM job. The fight scenes are cool, especially when the summoned monsters hitting each other, the sounds of impact seem like they come right out of Karate Champ for the Nintendo. Pap pap pap! To tell the truth, I can't really find a single thing wrong with these OVAs, I just didn't exactly like it for some reason. They keep pulling me back, and back, and back. I feel like I might be watching it again once I get through my 50 some DVD backlog.

**You know what? They probably do.