Simulwatch - Gunsmith Cats/Riding Bean/Bubblegum Crisis/Crash/AD Police/Parasite Dolls [all complete]

[HWR]

Bubblegum Crash episodes 1 & 2

Forgot to watch episode 1 last night as I was pretty knackered so it’s 2-for-1 tonight. I liked the second episode more than the first as it felt closer to Crisis. The voice acting is still pretty mediocre but I’m getting used to it and the music is still solid enough. If this got a kickstarter Blu Ray I may be tempted to take a punt.

 

[Professor Irony]

Bubblegum Crash Episode 2 - Adama Adamant Lives

To my surprise, this is the first time I’ve seen this episode, but I’m not sure there’s too much else for me to add otherwise - just chiming in to say I liked it more than the first one as well. It’s very goofy (again, this feels so much like a sentai show now), but Adama’s Bizarre Adventure was a lot of fun, giant enemy boss crab and all. I imagine if BGC had become a TV anime in the early 90s, this is what it would have been like. The animation seems a bit tighter this time too - the characters faces are more consistently on model than in the previous ep.

Plot wise, it did interest me to see them revisit Professor Stingray, surely an advocate of Supermarionation, and his work on making boomer AI more human like, mostly as it seems like they've definitely discarded any notion of Sylia being a boomer by this point. The nature of Stingray's research practically screams that this was the original intention, but they'd have their work cut out now to explain away Sylia's flashback showing her as a child, being consoled by Haynes at the time of her father's death. I suppose fake memories would be a get out but, augh, I don't know. I know it looks like like Crisis was at least contemplating that route, but I've never subscribed to the idea as canon. Wouldn't Mackie have given the game away?

Coming back to what I was saying about episode 1 feeling like we've gone more of a timeskip than the characters seem to acknowledge, anti-boomer pistols have come a long way. Unfortunately, I didn't screencap it, but the gun Leon pulled on Nene (really, Leon?) at the shooting range seemed far more compact than his hand-cannon from the later Crisis episodes, and Priss's weapon here seems far more effective than anything we've previously seen at that size. It's the wrong shape, but it also seems to function a bit like a Deckard's pistol in Blade Runner with an alternate 'high power' firing mode.

View attachment 12143

I took this exact same screenshot of the perfect boomer waifu. She even has an advert for bridal wear behind her! Joking not joking aside, she's quite striking for a background character - he's not credited, but I can't help wondering if she might be a Takezaki invention.

Speaking of minor details, Linna's car continues to be a source of subtle characterisation - she has a stick-on Garfield!

From there it's basically Bubblegum Short Circuit

Also thought this too. Adama has Number 5's eyes.

The text that reads downwards below that says MUTEKI, which is a Japanese word that translates as "invincible". Its literal meaning is "without enemy".

Leaving that behind, did anyone else think that there were shades of Akira's score during the sequences where Priss and ADAMA are being shot at by the female Voomer? Akira was released in 1988 and Crash in 1991, so there was surely influence there.

It's a stretch, but that guy appears to be blind and has a cane - maybe this is a Zatoichi joke?

I got the Akira vibe as well when I heard the drums.

The dub was also leagues better than episode 1, again especially Adama. Incidentally is Adama a reference to Battlestar Galactica? A show about AI robots.

Yeah - I've never done Galactica, but if AI is a big part of it, that's got to be a nod, surely.

 

[ayase]

it seems like they've definitely discarded any notion of Sylia being a boomer by this point. The nature of Stingray's research practically screams that this was the original intention, but they'd have their work cut out now to explain away Sylia's flashback showing her as a child, being consoled by Haynes at the time of her father's death. I suppose fake memories would be a get out but, augh, I don't know. I know it looks like like Crisis was at least contemplating that route, but I've never subscribed to the idea as canon.

Mine will probably have to wait until this evening, but I'm very much looking forward to your thoughts on Episode 3, Prof.

 

[WMD]

Bubblegum Crash episode 3

They really packed this episode! Overall I didnt enjoy it as much as the 2nd episode. And the swapping of Ls and Rs got a little annoying. I really enjoyed the first half with the rise of the machines aspect and the boomers rebelling though GITS or Appleseed have presented similar ideas in more interesting way. Though the Boomer orgy was pretty wild!

Leon and Dalt were a lot of fun this time round as well. They didn't get much to do except be a vehicle was exposition but I do enjoy their banter.
It was also nice to see Priss and Leon have an actual interaction again even if it was right at the end.

 

[Neil.T]

It's a stretch, but that guy appears to be blind and has a cane - maybe this is a Zatoichi joke?

Hmmm, I honestly hadn't considered that.
Doing a bit of fishing, apparently an actor called Shintarou Katsu, who "was best remembered for portraying the blind samurai Zatoichi in more films than any other actor", starred in a 1965 film called Akumyou Muteki.

Stretching things even further?

It's actually Geo City, just my little joke.

Dammit, I actually fell for that.
I thought it'd maybe gone missing in Manga's dub.


Bubblegum Crash episode 3

You know, that opening CG cityscape is really very well done, especially for its time; I like how all the little cars move son convincingly. And then the hand-animated opening titles for this episode now have added sound effects. Shiing!

So, from the top...

It's back:

Who fancies something to drink?

But look! The budget's running out. This was the episode 1 version:


You've got to wonder why they didn't just reuse that rather than drawing another, less detailed, one.

Some more pictures:


(Top left) "Pay attention, everyone: here comes the science part." ⁉


Priss: "Hand on heart, my wrist is double-jointed."

Uhmmm...

Full scrolling text:
"Those who would subtitle animated film will pay the price! The Curse of the Secret Anime Old Ones will be upon you and your race!
"I, the Antichrist will bring vengeance upon you! The curse of of the Evil God Gallagher will also "
[The line below that is blank]

I'm scared now.

This was pretty scary, too:

(From the same shot as in WMD's post)


The whole sequence with the combining Voomers gave me some serious Urotsukidouji vibes.

Speaking of Voomers, Manga aren't even sticking to their own script alterations: that chapter is called "Super Vooma" on the disc menu.

Their dub at least knows what the Big Bad is planning to blow up, though: "The noocular power plant," Leon says.

And as WMD already hinted at, our Big Bad turns out to be none other than Ralgo! That's right: Largo is known as "Ralgo" now in this dub. Just stop.

As ayase pointed out before, the combat sequences in this follow-up OVA are weak: the choreography is lazy, resulting in copycat movements from multiple Knight Sabers. If one gets hit, all of them do.

But not Sylia this time, though, because she's gone solo for the final showdown (hence the need for three Voomers for the others to fight). Unfortunately for the coherence of this dub, Largo's (**** this dub's name for him!) echoing call of "Sylia...! Sylia...! Sylia...!" must have been part of the sound effects track, meaning that it couldn't be removed from the mix. It must be weird for viewers unfamiliar with Japanese to suddenly hear this unidentifiable sound that resembles human speech. (For the record, the pronunciation of Sylia's name in Japanese is like "Sheeria" — Shii-ri-a in Japanese phonetics.)

 

[WMD]

Another oddity was on the Manga Collection trailers on the DVD. The Bubblegum Crisis ad used a Mad Capsule Markets song. MCM are a great band but why use an electro metal band for Crisis when music is already an important part of the show.

 

[HWR]

Bubblegum Crash episode 3

A decent though somewhat rushed episode but overall Crash just didn’t live up to its predecessor for me. The action sequences especially felt less impactful or fun to watch and the characters also didn’t leave as much impression. It’s not a bad series overall but it pales in comparison to Crisis, though maybe a HD remaster might give it fresh appeal in the future.

 

[ayase]

Bubblegum Crash: Episode 3 -



Remember when I said this about Crisis Episode 8?

it's nice that this episode doesn't fall into the trap some cancelled series' do of trying to tie up all the lose plot threads in too little time. It does seem conscious of letting all the main characters get a look in, but it doesn't feel forced like it could have done.

Yeah, so that's not how Crash went. This episode is... It's just bad. To start with, I don't know if it was the particular storyboard artist for this episode of whether it was horribly rushed, but dear God what did they do to Sonoda's lovely character designs? Everyone's face has been stretched lengthwise so much that I wondered if I was watching in the wrong aspect ratio. And Neil’s already nicely demonstrated the declining art quality elsewhere.


Why the long faces... why the long eyes?

“Everything has been leading up to this” says Priss in a rather on the nose confirmation that this is indeed The End, so let’s go out with a bang. A rather tedious series of bangs in fact which lasts for most of the episode’s run time. And what’s left after all the uninspiring action sequences? Well, we didn’t see a body so sure enough, Largo J. Mason is still alive, sorta. And he’s become some kind of Akira style monstrosity in order to see through his plan of creating Boomer World. How? We’ll never know. But Sylia rejects his homemade instrumentality project, he’s defeated by the power of friendship like in your Shonen fighting animes (or My Little Pony, if you prefer) the world is saved and everyone goes out for burgers. The end.


Leon relaxes as the world ends, failing to notice that Daley is now Lupin III in disguise.

Yes, that’s the inglorious end of the story of the Knight Sabers. I’m tempted to end right there with a Charlie Brooker “Go away” but I’m not done yet. 44 minutes you had to bring this to a satisfying conclusion ARTMIC. Forty-four minutes. How much of that did you waste on meaninglessness action, making sure people remembered previous plot points and ambiguous Largo monologuing? Most of it. In fairness I imagine this episode was rather rushed, and some of the action isn't actually half bad. But the whole episode just feels like so much nothing after all the build up. We'll never know what the deal with Sylia and Largo was and the Boomer issue is far from settled (what even happened with Quincy and GENOM, who just disappeared in Crash?). It's perhaps fitting that the series should end with an after-credits warning from Largo that humanity is still doomed.


Omedetō!

 

[Professor Irony]

Bubblegum Crash Episode 3 - I Would Gladly Pay You Tuesday, For a Hamburger Today

Good grief. I’d glanced at folk’s comments prior to watching the episode, so I had some idea of what to expect, but after episode 2 recaptured a little of the series‘s former glory, I thought surely it couldn’t be that bad? I suppose it’s not terrible. But. Man.

I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed. Apparently too disappointed to screencap anything, this is how bad things have become.

Was this the ending that was planned all along? It certainly feels like it was cobbled together from existing notes on where the plot was supposed to go, but the execution is so thunderingly mediocre. There’s just no sense of tension to any of it. By the time we got into the reactor, I was checking my watch to see how much was left.

Even when I was finally proven wrong and it turned out that Sylia is a boomer (kinda?), it barely seemed to hold any weight any more. If we’d built up to the final reveal, it would probably have meant something to me, as is, it hardly merited a ‘huh’. I was convinced I‘d heard someone comment that Sylia being a boomer was left ambiguous, so it did genuinely surprise me that the show sort of addresses that head on, but I’m still not convinced it all adds up. Was there ever a human Sylia who died, or was she a boomer all along? Professor Stingray creating an android sibling to protect his son seems plausible, but who would swap her body into an adult version? Did Mackie do it? Is he just into her because he knows she’s an android? And what happened to Fargo? This is probably more interesting to me than the actual ending.

Given the abject lack of Quincy, Genom and all those fun people, I slightly wonder if ARTMIC wanted to keep their options open for further Bubblegum Crisis adventures once things picked up. According to a citationless paragraph on wiki, however, Youmex sued them for their troubles, which may have hastened the premature end of Crash and lead to the sorry conclusion we’ve just witnessed.

Wiki mentions Toshimichi Suzuki having produced a comic book (sic) called Soldier Blue as a kind of prequel to Crash, so I might look into that. There is also Adam Warren’s graphic novel Grand Mal, a kind of officially sanctioned (?) OEL spinoff, which I own, but I remember it being pretty unmemorable. At least we’ll always have the delightful Scramble Wars as a kind of last hurrah for the OG Knight Sabers in anime form.

The whole sequence with the combining Voomers gave me some serious Urotsukidouji vibes.

This, I think is very much Takezaki's bag - the same motif appears in his art for the AD Police manga and I believe his own Genocyber is a bit like that too.

Another oddity was on the Manga Collection trailers on the DVD. The Bubblegum Crisis ad used a Mad Capsule Markets song. MCM are a great band but why use an electro metal band for Crisis when music is already an important part of the show.

Manga seemed to go through a phase around this point where they were sticking music like that on top of their trailers. I think they were struggling financially at the time, so it could be that they were desperately trying to broaden their appeal.

 

[ayase]

I was convinced I‘d heard someone comment that Sylia being a boomer was left ambiguous, so it did genuinely surprise me that the show sort of addresses that head on, but I’m still not convinced it all adds up. Was there ever a human Sylia who died, or was she a boomer all along? Professor Stingray creating an android sibling to protect his son seems plausible, but who would swap her body into an adult version? Did Mackie do it? Is he just into her because he knows she’s an android?

I think I mentioned off-hand it’s something that never really goes anywhere, and I still think despite this episode’s “revelations” (if you can call them that) it really doesn’t, for all the reasons you’ve mentioned and more.

If Sylia (and logically, Mason/Largo as well) is some kind of advanced more-human-than-human Boomer, wasn’t that exactly what her dad and later, Dr. Haynes were trying to achieve? Isn’t the whole idea that his death cut that advancement short? Even in this very episode Mackie talks about wanting to continue his work, you’d think if he knew about Sylia he’d know it had already been achieved. And how pissed off is Dr. Haynes right now from the afterlife? He spent twelve sodding years trying to build on Dr. Stingray’s work and got killed for the trouble - A quick scan of Sylia and he’d have had everything he needed. And this is before we even factor in Sylvie, Anri and the rest of Boomer Gall Force who already appear to have been exactly that.

It’s like Crash forgets the series’ own lore, even stuff that was only established one episode prior. It does seem like Sylia was set up to be a boomer from the start - Her machine-like downloading of her dad’s data from the computer even as a child and her telepathic link with Mason/Largo certainly point to it, but the way it’s explained (or isn’t) doesn’t seem to make any sense.

 

[Professor Irony]

After rewatching it all, it wasn't nearly as guilty of it as I remembered, but I had it in mind that BGC had been inconsistent with its own sense of continuity all the way along, which I'd taken as a side effect of it being produced in fits and starts, but even if there were some truth in that, it doesn't explain Crash's apparent disregard for so much of what came before. It makes you wonder if this incarnation of 'Arii' was a script doctor of no previous involvement with the production, brought in after Crisis was concluded, to try and piece together the presumably scant notes on how the series was intended to end.

On a related note, I had a good poke around online to see what I could rake up about Soldier Blue, but I can't find anything relating to the manga version, beyond a mention that it originally ran in B-Club magazine. It seems possible that it was never collected into a book, but given the intense fan interest in anything BGC-related, it surprises me that no scans or artwork from it seem to have turned up subsequently. It was later released as an audio drama CD (along with a couple of other stories in the same format) and, as wiki notes, there is an English language transcript available online, apparently printed in one of the RPG source books, but at a glance, it doesn't read all that well and the fan sites that mention it are rather critical of the story.



Nevertheless, it was written by Suzuki and ostensibly takes places between the two series, so it seems reasonable to assume it contains ideas he was at least considering for the anime (Priss finally returns some degree of Leon's feelings for her, Mackie has a brief relationship with Nene), but notably, the main thrust of the storyline seems to involve Sylia's consciousness being infected by Largo, causing her to develop an evil 'other self' called Leishi (or Reishi) who she must then try to overcome. It doesn't quite tie in to the instrumentality-lite scenario in Crash, but it does sound similar enough that it seems like something that might have been intended to flesh out that particular plot thread, had the series concluded as intended.

There was also a piece of art for Leishi, presumably from the CD booklet showing her being very much like Sylia with Largo's eyes. Unfortunately this appears to be cropped from a larger scan which I couldn't find.

 

[ayase]

there is an English language transcript available online, apparently printed in one of the RPG source books

Well if anyone wants to have a look: crisis:bubblegum_crisis [AnimEigo Wiki]

Our Kickstarter money at work. All the RPG books plus Grand Mal on there.

 

[WMD]

AD Police episode 1

The stream I was going to watch seems to have gone down so had to find another. Hope I've watched the correct episode!

Wow, well this was a massive step up from Crash. The dark, gritty, violent world worked really well for this more noir-ish type detective story. The first 10 mins really left an impression as things went from bad to worse! Seeing a rookie Leon whose inexperience leads to a colleagues death was pretty heavy although the whole life insurance case seemed forgotten by the end!

Also having more world building about how boomers actually work was really nice and the way recycling parts can compound issues was a nice touch. Again the better elements of this franchise remind me of Ghost in the Shell.

 

[HWR]

AD Police Episode 1

“Take this, b*tch!” Man the dub can be unintentionally funny at times. This was a solid introduction to the series, with an investigation to avenge a colleague that slowly uncovers more about the boomers going rogue. I liked the overall gritty aesthetic also and it melded noir with cyberpunk pretty well.

 

[Professor Irony]

AD Police - Episode 1 The Phantom Menace



And suddenly everything changes! The AD Police OVA could hardly be further from the Saturday morning cartoon hijinks Crash tended to indulge in if it tried. We’re immediately thrown into a bleaker, harder, desperate Mega Tokyo, where life is cheap, boomer crime is rampant and the AD Police is more like a drunken posse than an organised crime fighting force.

It’s hard to believe this takes place only six years before mainline BGC. Is such a transformation in that space of time even possible? I suppose maybe there‘s some parallel with the transformation of urban New York in the 80s and 90s, but it’s hard to believe that this clutch of lurid shockers takes place in the same universe as Scoop Chase, for example. Bubblegum Crisis had jokes and brightly coloured heroes. AD Police all but asks us to imagine a naked female android stamping on a human face, forever. Interestingly, this is almost entirely a construct of the anime.

This OVA is based on AD Police 25:00, a manga (allegedly) started as a fan project by Tony Takezaki, before his absorption into the official production team, but somewhat lighter in tone than anything we see here. It's gory and violent, but in that kind of dark, jokey Robocop fashion. It also takes place in the same time period as the main show, with Leon and Daley in their detective roles and the Knight Sabers making an appearance in the background. I have a lot of time for Takezaki's artwork, he shows real flair with technical detail, but I'm already getting sidetracked.



The younger Leon seems beliveably out of his depth in this first episode, ‘promoted’ from the regular police (surely a more realistic path into the ADP than the idea of someone willingly signing up), but very much the little boy lost in a game for adults. Despite being the obvious self-insert point for the male viewer, and the only definite link back to BGC, Leon‘s a bit of a marginal figure in this series. I hope everyone likes Jeena; she is going to be the one doing all the heavy lifting.



Extreme Wife City

Despite coming across like a psychotic Ellen Ripley look-a-like (marry me), Jeena genuinely seems to care about her unit and their wellbeing in a very practical fashion. After Ales is killed, for example, she doesn't stop to mourn a lost lover; she's straight out there to see that the dead man's wife and family are looked after. There is what seems to be an oblique reference to her in Grand Mal (I forget who, but one of the characters definitely has a flashback to a fight with the boomers in which a female copper loses an arm), but it disappoints me that she never got any kind of cameo in the main canon.

My only other serious complaint about the OVA in general is just its general lack of budget. It's got bags of atmosphere, just sadly it's reduced to the level of a slideshow at times. Perhaps this was the right choice, given that Crash clearly struggled to stay on model, but it's hard to see the show as more than a side project - kind of like a doujinshi in anime form. There's even a music video for the track Heartbreaker featured in this episode that contains absolutely no footage from it! It's all from Bubblegum Crisis. Still a good tune though.

Seeing a rookie Leon whose inexperience leads to a colleagues death was pretty heavy although the whole life insurance case seemed forgotten by the end!

Not sure if it was an intentional detail or not, but it amuses me that no-one ever really tries to prove that Ales wasn't trying to pull an insurance scam. As if the show wasn't grim enough already, it seems that he really did want to kill himself and let his family collect the money. Join the AD Police, kids.

 

[WMD]

AD Police episode 2

Forgot to mention the instrumental intro song yesterday. Is it the same in Japanese with the sound effects over the top? Reminded me of Dominion.

I actually quite liked the random pastel painted frames. Do you think they were budgetary or an artistic choice?

Story wise I enjoyed the episode. A few convenient coincidences but I like the exploration of the blurring line between boomer and human. It was also an interesting commentary on how hard it is for women to succeed and have a career and a life.

Although I am enjoying these episodes I do find it a shame they weren't 45mins long. I feel a bit of extra time couldve really fleshed these stories out.

The bit where she asked what's the difference between 70 and 69? I couldnt help but think the answer is an immature snigger.

 

[HWR]

AD Police Episode 2

The beginning had an eerie feel to it. It was interesting to see the differing opinion on replacing body parts with cybernetics-the nature of just being able to go and replace parts on a...limb doesn’t seem too far-fetched for the future. The leads here were likeable enough and had decent chemistry.

 

[Neil.T]

A quick catch-up on something from earlier posts:

I wonder if AnimEigo will ever attempt to do a Kickstarter for Crash?
. . .
Perhaps a kind of double set with AD Police would be the way to go, assuming the materials can be secured.

Don't know how realistic it would be in terms of rights to allow them to be packaged together

Perhaps AnimEigo could try to argue that the two series are intrinsically linked by showing that Manga used Crash artwork on their outer slip cover for AD Police?

I actually quite liked the random pastel painted frames. Do you think they were budgetary or an artistic choice?

That was going to be my observation for this episode as well, actually. I reckon it's got to be budget saving; it seemed a bit out of place for the tone of the scene for me.

Not a story spoiler, but we'll be seeing some more still frames in the final episode as well. It's more budget saving, but this integrates much better into the story, for my money. I think it does, anyway, but let's see what you reckon.

Anyone else notice the change in character designs for episode 2? They look rather low-budget compared to episode 1, Gina in particular. (Not sure what the approved spelling is; that's what MAL uses, but Manga's end credits use "Geena".)

How are dub watchers enjoying "Leon Higachi", by the way? I'm not sure that's even a real Japanese family name. Higuchi is, sure, but...


Anyway, surely the biggest news in all of this simulwatch chat is that, hands down, Professor Irony now has the best rank title of anyone on AUKN.

 

[Professor Irony]

AD Police Episode 2 - Mornington Crescent.



Wakey wakey, rise and shine, you've reached the end of the Northern Line!

There’s an aura of b-picture pulp horror that always clings to AD Police, and I think that really comes through strongest in this episode, where, surprisingly, Leon and Jeena take a back seat to the meek but perceptive Iris, a character who really doesn’t seem to fit in their world at all. We've kinda picked up a degree of fantasy here too, in the Paradise Loop itself.

Like so much of the setting in general, the Paradise Loop, seems to owe everything to pre-clean up New York, but the idea of this unused transit system that just keeps going, even though no-one quite knows why, feels like pure urban legend. In this age when our technology becomes more and more like magic, at least for as much as the typical person understands how it works, maybe the idea of something that no-one knows how to turn off, isn't quite so far fetched, but if anyone had to foot the bill for electricity to keep that thing running, you can bet they'd find a way.

There’s also a definite streak of voyeurism about the series, even misogyny, as it frequently confronts us with lingering shots of violence against women, but while you could never accuse it of being particularly sophisticated or enlightened about its female characters, I think it is interesting to note how much the show is dominated by them. Leon played second fiddle to Jeena and the boomer lady last time around, and this time too, the ladies are always centre stage. It’s equally notable that the story has obvious sympathy for Caroline, apparently driven mad by her quest to merely stand on the same footing as the men, as much a victim of circumstance as anyone else.

One thing I particularly like about this series though, is its subtle little observations about the ridiculousness of life in this urban hellscape. In the previous episode, the supervising officer had to stop and get the restaurant owner to sign a waiver allowing them to kill his boomer while the others were in the middle of fighting it. This time around, the ADP are only allowed to go after the Ripper because, as 70% of her body is cybernetic, she can be legally declared non-human. This kind of awareness that, even in the future, people will still suffer in stupid ways because of over complicated bureaucracy is something I’ve really never seen outwith Phillip K. Dick novels, or maybe even Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy.

Despite having previously criticised the show for a lack of movement and an obvious reliance on panning over stills or the pastel freeze frames WMD mentioned (although I do quite like those, bit of a Dezaki-ism), I think the producers probably made the right choices on where the money was spent. The characters are nearly always on model, or close enough to it, and the backgrounds are really nice - check out the detail on the graffiti in the subway or the harsh cityscapes softly lit by the setting sun.



This is especially noticeable after watching Crash, where they seem to have skimped a bit on that

Forgot to mention the instrumental intro song yesterday. Is it the same in Japanese with the sound effects over the top? Reminded me of Dominion.

Yeah, I don‘t think there was ever a vocal version, in this case. I like the track though.

Although I am enjoying these episodes I do find it a shame they weren't 45mins long. I feel a bit of extra time couldve really fleshed these stories out.

I’ve seen other folk comment on this too; despite the manga chapters each story is based on being only a few pages long, they do feel quite compressed here.

Anyone else notice the change in character designs for episode 2? They look rather low-budget compared to episode 1, Gina in particular.

Yeah, according to ANN (who have it as Jeena, Gina and Geena, take your pick), there was a change in character designer after ep1. Without checking the dates, it's possible that this was to bring the look of the characters more in-line with Dead End City, the tie-in manga that ran concurrent to the series, but that's just speculation. It’s not a great win for continuity in any case - Jeena seems to have a darker skin tone than before and nobody comments on how she now has a completely lifelike prosthetic arm, instead of the more obviously fake model.

 

[WMD]

How are dub watchers enjoying "Leon Higachi", by the way? I'm not sure that's even a real Japanese family name. Higuchi is, sure, but...

Haha I hadn't even noticed to be honest. I'm so bad with Japanese names. I'm fine while watching a show. Context helps in that sense but almost immediately after watching I forget which name belongs to which character. This is especially true of the less used name.