brown.carolina - 2015-12-11 03:04:48

I had this feeling that this OVA has a better story somewhere else.
What I watched was a promotional advertisement for the manga.

The summary sounds nice, the story, suffered greatly.

ARK IX is an introductory avalanche; everything came crashing down: them trying to fit in the story, characters, and slivers of a plot. 

friesen.tiana - 2015-09-02 22:26:28

When you're making a one episode OVA, you've generally got a lot of restrictions - and said restrictions increase the shorter the OVA is.  Now, just because a 1-episode OVA is short does not automatically mean that it will suck - go look at The House of Small Cubes if you want a prime example of a short telling a fantastic story.

However, one genre that does not work with a time constraint less than the length of a standard episode would be the action genre - I guess you could just make an OVA that has a really intense fight scene for no reason, but this isn't what they did with Ark Nine.

I would normally give a summary of what the story is like here, but it's so rushed that I honestly can't say what it was.  Based on what I've read in other reviews, I'd say that this was supposed to be some hybrid between Black Lagoon and Parasyte: The Maxim.  If this had been a 2/3 part 20 minute OVA or a series of 9 minute OVAs, this actually might have been able to tell a competent, albeit rushed, story. 

The OVA actually looks good.  Hoods Entertainment has always struck me as a studio that could be the next A1 Pictures or Mappa if they actually got competent writers to work on their projects and tried adapting some good manga/light novels (if they had competent writers, I could see them making a successful adaptation of Psyren), but they seem to be more than happy to focus on fanservice action shows - we don't need them to do that; we already have Seven Arks for that (and they do a very good job at what they do).

The music is also great; the insert songs were really good.  I don't know who the performer was, but I am interested in hearing more of her work.  The tracks recorded for this OVA would be great in an adaptation of an action-heavy manga, like the aforementioned Psyren, or a reboot of Shaman King, but they feel very wasted on something as shallow as this.

There wasn't enough time to even establish characters, much less develop them - I kind of see where they were going with one of the characters (the blond girl, Rebecca Ross, seems like she would've been a tsundere if this had actually gotten a full series), but it's just one of those "What if" scenarios that plays out in my head.  Also, I have no way of knowing what they would do with the main character, since no one in the U.S. has licensed the light novels that this OVA is based on.

Just skip this one - go watch Parasyte or Blood + if you want a show with similar themes to this that's actually GOOD.  But if you must, this OVA is currently unlicensed in the U.S., so you can find it on Youtube.