Air Gear Vol. 1: East Side Showdown Review

Originally published on otakureview.net

Intro

Another series taking me by surprise with the fact that it’s actually good!

The Story

In this futuristic anime, our hero is named Ikki Minami who rides on motor powered inline skates called ‘Air Treks’ and lives with four mysterious sisters. In the first episode, we instantly meet Ikki and the four sisters: 17 year old Mikan, 10 year old Shiraume, 22 year old Rika and 14 year old Ringo.

Right away the audience learns that Ikki has recently suffered a very humiliating defeat in a fight to a tough gang called the ‘Skull Saders’. He desperately wants to become an air trek rider though and enter the underground races to earn some respect amongst his friends the sisters. After stumbling into one of the rooms (clearly marked no trespassing no less), he finds a pair of air treks and gives them a spin and finds himself in a secret meeting of air trek teams, around his secret crush Simca and also finds himself in a fight but before anything can happen, the head of the Air Trek regulation office (the AT police) Kaito Wanijima, busts in on the meeting to make some arrests with his assistant Agito.

Caught in a battle now though, Ikki must beat the leaders of the gang or else lose the sister’s emblem which would cause major embarrassment for them and major punishment for him. After the battle with the gang, Ikki decides that he wants to form his own team of Storm Riders with his friends Kazu and Onigiri in hopes of impressing his crush Simca. But after helping Simca out of a jam, he finds himself in yet another fight against another Storm Rider team which Ringo takes serious exception to.

In the third episode of the volume, Ikki and his team are on the search for new parts and so they look up a ‘parts war’ which is when a storm rider challenges another and bet parts instead of their emblem. While Ikki takes care of that though, Kazu and Onigiri learn of another gang that rules their turf at night called the Yaohs.

When the two of them stay at the school till dark to take on this gang they learn the truth about who runs the gang and the nice guy that Ikki is facing in a parts war and Ikki has to clean up the mess afterwards.

The Good And The Bad

Upon starting this volume, I was really unsure that it was going to meet my usually high expectations from a series but I was pleasantly surprised to see so much good coming out of this series already even though we’re only four episodes in.

The animation in this series is really great looking with very smooth lines and bright colors that blend flawlessly into each other. The use of CG animation is really limited which is really nice with only a few scenes throughout these first episodes that really show obvious CG animation. One scene in particular that I thought that CG animation was used particularly effectively was in the final episode of the volume when Ikki is learning the layout of the race where he will be taking parts in the parts battle.

The character design in this volume is also incredibly well done. Kazu and Onigiri weren’t designed particularly great but that quickly became a non-issue as the characters became more serious supporting players within the cast and their character personalities started to shine through much more. In particular I really enjoyed the character designs of Simca, Ringo and Spitfire. These three characters really stood out from the rest and made me pay closer attention to them despite their roles as supporting characters.

The writing in this series really impressed me the most though. With a series such as this which is half sci-fi and half sports, I was really worried about the writing becoming formulaic and repetitive really quickly and while it has started showing signs of already falling into a small pattern of ‘intro-conflict-battle’ in each episode, it manages to keep ahead of itself slightly so that it doesn’t become boring.

The conflicts are where the writing is already shining though with so many being introduced quickly. Between Ikki’s internal conflict of wanting to become a better Storm Rider, the romantic conflict between Ringo and Simca over Ikki and the external conflicts of Ikki’s constant battles against other teams to improve his standing, the story is already showing many story lines that are moving ahead at a very well timed pace. The only downside I’m seeing to this is that the series stands a very strong chance of accidently (or purposely) placing one conflict over the other leading to plot timing issues down the road and possible loose ends if the series doesn’t come back to one in time but my instincts are telling me that this is going to be another non-issue before too long.

This series really goes out of it’s way to be funny though which was nice to see since it did provide me with some great laughs along the way but it was slightly annoying to see the series always take such obvious jokes instead of trying to be clever along the way. There are some very intelligent characters in this series and so I really would’ve liked to have heard some more clever jokes used instead of the usual visual gags and using curse words as comedy but the jokes were effective none the less and still managed to entertain me.

Music

The theme songs for this anime were an interesting mix from the opening to the closing themes. The opening theme is a nice J-rap tune and the closing theme is a little less impressive techno theme, I didn’t particularly enjoy the closing theme but the opening theme was fun and I’ve already begun my search for the opening single.

The background music was really well done with a few vocal tracks thrown in though they weren’t used as insert songs and instead were turned down fairly low and so there was no way to really hear the lyrics which was disappointing.

Dub vs. Sub

The dub cast is filled with great talents who really show their talents. Chris Patton is a great pick for Ikki, Luci Christian is fabulous as Ringo, Hilary Haag is perfect for the child Ume, Monica Rial shows how well she can play a flirty tease with her portrayal of Simca and Jay Hickman shows his chops with the heavily accented character of Spitfire.

The sub cast was equally fun to listen to and so I have no clear preference over the two.

Extras

Clean animations.

Overall

When I first read the plot synopsis for this series I was really worried about the whole premise and was pretty convinced from the start that this was going to be a hard sell for me but I was glad to see that I was quite wrong about it. The series was fun from the start and I really have high hopes that it’s going to continue its high octane trend and keep going strong until the end. It’s not a great series but it’s certainly high above average and worth picking up if you like action with a fun hero and cute female interests.

Final Grade: 88% - B