Review for Ikki Tousen: Xtreme Xecutor Complete Collection

Introduction

The bad news is that I have another instalment of my particular bête noire to review, Ikki Tousen. Loads of girls fighting, losing their clothes, panty shots and boob flashes, and a fair bit of inappropriate sexual content to boot, might all seem the dream combination for a hormonal teen male anime fan, but let’s face it, I’ve outgrown it by now. The good news is that this is the last of Ikki Tousen, and with it coming with the OVA, the previous collections also having come with their respective OVAs (the BBFC notwithstanding), that means that after I finish with this collection, I’ll have finished with Ikki Tousen full stop. Of course I wouldn’t put it past them to make some more, or to re-release all this on Blu-ray. The one small bright spot in all this is that I found the previous release, Great Guardians to be more than tolerable. It might just be that Xtreme Xecutor (I already hate that kewl spelling), carries on in that vein. Of course Great Guardians was a non-manga, original story. With XX we’re getting back to the manga.


It’s all about girls getting into fights. It’s all about intrusive camera angles, boobs and gusset shots. It’s all about explosions of chi so powerful that with a single impact, a blow can cause any girl’s clothes to completely disintegrate, leaving her naked and blushing. It’s all about sex and violence. And the boobs have to be independently minded, the animators have to have degrees in boob physics, and if booby bounce doesn’t have a corresponding sound effect, the sound director is going to be fired. It’s a loose retelling of the historical novel, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, itself inspiration for John Woo’s Red Cliffs and much, much more. The characters from 1800 years ago have been reincarnated as modern day high school students, but destiny is repeating itself, with the students almost compelled to relive their past lives through inter-school battles and tournaments. The Grand Tournament of Ikki Tousen: Battle Vixens may be over, but the battles most certainly aren’t, for now a new threat has arisen, the Emperor Kentei reborn, intent, with the fallen Nanban Academy on pulling the fighters into an orgy of destruction that lives out the Battle of Red Cliffs for once and for all.


12 episodes of Ikki Tousen: Xtreme Xecutor are presented across two discs from MVM, while the OVA episode gets a third disc all to itself.

Disc 1
1. The Wet Fighter
2. Gathering Allies
3. A Trained Lion
4. The Devil Beckons
5. Bonds of the Soul
6. Swarming Fangs
7. Silent Tears


Disc 2
8. Reunion of the Fists
9. Angry Love
10. Shredded Darkness
11. Fiery Castle
12. Future Unlimited

Disc 3
Ikki Tousen: Shu-gaku To-shi Keppu-roku OVA (43 minutes)
In which the fighters from Nanyo, Kyosho, and Seito High Schools all wind up on the same school trip to Kyoto, where they do battle with the locals and the local spirits to restore their own spiritual energy and recharge the Magatama beads.

Picture

It isn’t much different from MVM’s release of Great Guardians. The 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer is in NTSC format, although this time around it’s encoded progressively. The character designs remain consistent across all four series, as does the world design, both simple, but easy to animate to make the most of the action sequences, with the budget going to the boob physics and intrusive camera angles. It’s basically more Ikki Tousen, and by now you should know what to expect. Apparently the budget ran out during the final episodes, as the show resorts to a lot of freeze frame action for its finale. The OVA episode on disc 3 ups the production values though when it comes to the quality of the animation, including a battle between Kan’u and Hakufu that make up for that.

Sound

It’s your standard Funimation options of DD 5.1 Surround English, and DD 2.0 Stereo Japanese, with optional translated subtitles and a signs only track. I went with the Japanese audio, and it does what it says on the tin, with the characters appropriately cast, maintaining continuity from the earlier series, and the action and the music coming across well. I gave the dub a spin, and it’s you standard issue dub for shows such as these, the kind of dub I don’t pay attention to as I don’t want to watch this show more than I have to. The subtitles are timed accurately and are free of typographical error.

Extras

Ikki Tousen: Xtreme Xecutor presents its content with static menus, and jacket pictures to look at when the discs are at rest in compatible players.

Disc 1

Episode 1 gets a commentary with ADR Director Jonathan Klein, and voice of Mouki Bachou, Cherami Leigh. Be warned for spoilers for the whole series. It’s a nice, measured, and interesting commentary, very different from the usual Funimation yak-tracks. Note that if you are an Ikki Tousen fan, you’ll find a bit of repetition from the Great Guardians commentaries when it comes to the four series as a whole, as well as the casting process.

Episode 2’s commentary sees Jonathan Klein return, this time with voice of Uncho Kan’u, Rachel Robinson. It’s a little bit more of a wry observational commentary, again easy to listen to, but again heavy on the repetition.


Disc 2

The BBFC deign to let us watch some more Ikki Tousen OVA episodes for the second time in a row, after cracking down on Dragon Destiny. We get six mini episodes here, pure fan service to go along with the series, which run for a total of 18 minutes, thanks to a Play All option. These are presented in subtitle only form.

You also get Promo videos for the show, just under 11 minutes worth, again in subtitle only form.

Of course you get the Textless Credits and the US trailer, but there aren’t any further Funimation trailers, indicating that this fourth series has passed through Madman Entertainment’s hands before getting to the UK.


Disc 3

Here you will find a commentary for the OVA with Jonathan Klein, and actresses Jessica Calvello, Michelle Knotz, and Georgette Reilly. They all put on fake British accents to do a comedy commentary about feminism and Ikki Tousen. 30 seconds of the accents and I had to throw up.

You’ll also find half a minute of Japanese commercials and 3½ minutes of Promo Video.

Conclusion

Well, this is no use to anyone. Give three discs of a series to a reviewer that patently dislikes that series, no loathes that series, and you’ll wind up with a rant instead of a review, and for anyone looking for some kind of endorsement of a franchise that they are into, some kind of comparative analysis between the series, well, they’re in for a disappointment. I did hold out a little hope for Xtreme Xecutor, as the series that preceded it, Great Guardians, I found almost watchable. The thing was that it took a diversion from the main storyline to tell an original tale, and as a result, all of the Three Kingdoms references and historical mumbo jumbo that means nothing to someone out of the loop, was put on the back burner to tell a more character focussed story, something that I as a viewer and layman could relate to.


Xtreme Xecutor returns to the main storyline, even though it makes reference to Great Guardians, and once again we get a series aimed at amateur history and literature buffs, fans of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Red Cliffs, who are also entertained by girls beating the clothes of each other in ever more pneumatic and inventive ways. You’d think that would be a small cross-section on a Venn diagram, but it’s big enough to have made this series reach its fourth season to date. Suffice it to say that now that I have reviewed this final season so far, I have no intention of watching any Ikki Tousen ever again. Of course now I’ve said that, they’ll go and make season 5.


Anyway, the mystical babble returns, as an evil dark lord (because he wears a cloak and mask, obviously) objects to the current state of relative peace in the Kanto high school region, so he goes about engineering a recreation of the Battle of Red Cliffs by any means necessary. This he does by luring the main fighters of the three schools to an isolated island (a bit like the Mortal Kombat movie) so they can be forced to beat the clothes of each other. To add a little light-hearted humour to the show, Xtreme Xecutor introduces a new character, Mouki Bachou, a young fighter looking to avenge her brother, constantly biting off more than she can chew, and looking for a master to train her in the combat arts (she winds up picking Hakufu), and along the way she gets into loads of fights where she either gets the clothes beaten off her, or she beats the clothes off her opponents. And then boobs, panties, boobs, panties, boobs, panties and boobs.


And we also get the double length OVA episode on the third disc, highlighting a little more of the comedy, as the main Ikki Tousen characters go to Kyoto to beat the clothes off each other, and boobs, panties, nipples and finally pudenda!


Ignore me and my Camel Toe-sen Tourettes. Fans of the show will want to know if the presentation is any good, and the progressive NTSC transfer shows off the anime better than ever before, the audio presentation is at a similar level to before, and you get the 6 breastacular mini-OVA episodes, and the double length OVA (fnar), so you aren’t let down when it comes to extras. You can go and buy in confidence. As for me, I’m going to wash my brain out with soap.