Manda-chan's Anime Blog

Which is also known as “Phoenix” caught my eye today. I haven’t seen it yet, nor even heard of the manga which was made by Osamu Tezuka. It sounds interesting enough, so i’ll try and get a copy soon.

Yeah i know, i have finished Death Note and Saikano though. Currently in the middle of writing the DN review to add to the hundreds of other reviews of the series But whats next? We have the Saikano live action, and the ova… or perhaps fma.

P.S If you know where this picture comes from you are a PERVERT!

Other names: Figure 17 - Tsubasa and Hikaru
Director: Naohito Takahashi
Studio: Oriental Light and Magic
Genre: action, drama, science fiction, slice of life
Themes: twins, children
Targeted Audience: Teens
Year: 2001
Type: TV (13 episodes, 46 min each)
Watched: Subbed
Status: Licensed

Synopsis:
Tsubasa Shiina is a 10-year-old girl who recently moved to Hokkaido to live with her father. In school, she is very quiet and unsociable with her classmates. Then one night, she witnesses a UFO crash in the forest near her home. She rushes to the scene and finds the pilot, codenamed “D.D.”, in a barely stable condition. Also in the scene is a Maguar, a hideous alien that hatched aboard D.D.’s ship. As the Maguar is close to taking Tsubasa’s life, an alien lifeform fuses with her body to form the Riberus battle armor Figure 17, which shortly destroys the alien threat. The life form takes the name Hikaru and turns into an identical twin of Tsubasa. As time passes, Tsubasa becomes more open to everyone around her, thanks to her new twin sister Hikaru. However, with Maguar eggs scattered all over Hokkaido, their ability to form Figure 17 is needed to eliminate all hatched Maguars until backup from D.D.’s home planet arrives on Earth.

Ratings (1-5):

Storyline:

Art:

Characters:

Audio/music:


Review/Overall:

Figure 17 (for the most part) consists of the first half surrounding the life of Tsubasa while the other half is reserved for a fight with one of the maguar. This gets rather repetitive after a while because you know what is going to happen each episode. The episodes are so long in fact, that it gets rather boring after a while. We could have easily watched about half the show, and still received the same amount of emotion. Another problem with this series is its so different from one half to the other. Slice of life fans will like the life of Tsubasa and Hikaru, while the action scenes might not appeal to them. Same goes for the action freaks. Putting two of them together like this with two different extremes isn’t the best idea. Even for me, who loves slice of life, had gotten bored of the slow progress of the story. I dont even want to mention the battles. Whenever they fight, its the same thing over and over. Use a shield, use a laser, cut the shell off the monster and gouge its eye out. Over. It doesn’t help that the monsters all look the same, so you are basically seeing the same battle over and over. It gets *really* boring. However, on the brighter side, i haven’t seen a anime go into the likes of fishing, ice skating or other hobbies like that. Its rather interesting. While the ending is a bit sad, it does hold a lot of emotions

My god. The artwork is absolutely terrible in this. It looks like it was made in the early 80s. The characters look good, but otherwise everything else is absolutely crappy. We see what looks like paintings but it doesn’t look realistic at all. Putting the high animation of the characters with the backgrounds makes it look even worse. I have to say this is one of the low grade shows i’ve ever seen. Some of the snow scenes sometimes looks decent, but thats as far as it goes.

Tsubasa feels like a real little girl. Shes shy, and by the end of the series you feel like shes really accomplished her goal of being herself. Hikaru is cute, funny and energetic. Sometimes i couldn’t tell them apart (lol) but other then that they are really good characters overall. DD is a odd one, but you grow to like him. One of the other aliens that comes in later wasn’t that great to me. I just wasn’t attached to her at all. Schoolmates come and go, about midway through the series we get a tragic blow which really tears at your heart.

DDs really deep voice bugged me a bit. Can a voice really be that deep? I guess so. Otherwise the voices were flawless. The opening and endings, by THE ALFEE were… not the best. But i did like the ending theme and the opening animation was neat. Background sounds could have been better..

Last comment: Rent.. maybe. If you just want action dont come near this. If your reeeealy patient, give it a try drama fans (and perhaps get the fast forward button ready).