Skelter Heaven

From the genius that brought you "Mars of Destruction" comes..."Skelter Heaven"! Yoshiteru Satao...That is a name that sends a cold shiver up the spine of any anime critic. This guy isn't just a bad anime director, he is THE bad anime director. Everyone has a director they personally hate. The famous anime reviewer Bennett the Sage has stated that Masami Oobari is the worst director of all time. Oobari is BAD, he is REALLY bad, but he doesn't even compare to Satao. Even the second worst anime director: Iko Suzuki with his 1,2,3, punch combo to the testicles ( Sleeping with Hinako, DearS, and Dark Cat)isn't able to touch Satao. You will know a Yoshiteru Satao anime the moment it starts. It is never ambiguous on whether or not it may have a redeeming quality. It is just eye melting horrible the entire time. As mentioned above, Skelter Heaven is the 2nd MASTERPIECE released by Satao after his much acclaimed anime "Mars of Destruction". I would have taken a 1 million dollar bet that NO ONE could make a worse anime than Mars of Destruction, but Skelter Heaven does exactly that! Once again we have characters so bland that their hair colors are their only distinguishing personality trait. We have eye raping GOD AWFUL use of CGI. Finally of course we have a twist ending so stupid that M Night Shamylan would laugh at it! I can't emphasize enough that absolutely NOTHING in this anime works! There isn't a single nice thing I can say about it! Giant Squid aliens attack Tokyo, so teens in giant mechs must combat the evil squids...which simply stay in one spot and don't move. It is like someone cut out a google image jpg of a squid, slapped it on the screen, and just left it there stationary with zero animation. Like Mars of Destruction, Satao is blatantly trying to ripoff NGE again, but he clearly has ZERO concept of what actually made NGE work as an anime. Instead we are just left with another absolutely mystifyingly bad abortion of an anime. Don't watch this anime! Don't even think about watching this anime! You could spend those 30 minutes masturbating. You could spend them bashing your head against a wall! You could spend them doing basically ANYTHING, and it would be a better use of your time than watching Skelter Heaven!

From Idea Factory, the creative minds that gave us Mars of Destruction, comes Tenkuu Danzato Skelter Heaven. I use the term creative minds loosely when it comes to anything from this studio. About the best I can say about this anime is, well its better than Mars of Destruction. The info page says this anime is based on a game. I have never heard of it but I will take their word for it. Perhaps playing the game would have made the story make more sense. From what I can gather, five cute and huge breasted girls who also happen tobe artificial beings are part of a military team of mech pilots. Seriously if you’re going to go through the trouble of making artificial beings you might as well make them big breasted cute high school girls’ right!? Their job is basically to do clichéd school activities and train in bouncing chairs that shake their tits. A crisis situation hits Tokyo when a gigantic mechanical squid monster appears over the city. Apparently this is only a crisis when it starts moving and is immediately deemed an enemy. I guess if a giant floating squid appeared over Stockholm my country's military would react. But I kind of think someone would attempt communication with it first. I mean at least check and see if they have a killer recipe for miso soup first. Our heroines are so enthusiastic about being called to an emergency situation that they rush to their mechs. And by rush I mean they take the time to shower before leaving. There is a gigantic squid floating over Tokyo and they are completely oblivious to this as they horse around and practice archery. Sounds like an exciting story huh? At least its only 18 minutes long, and 4 minutes are OP/EN songs. It will be over soon, mercifully. The characters are just as pointless as the story. The only way you might remember any of their names is that they are displayed in the OP animation. They are flat and uninteresting and completely clichéd stereotypes. There is also way too many of them. There are almost as many characters as there is minutes of animation. They exist and their boring, that’s about all you can say about them. Looking at when this was produced I am actually surprised this came out a year before Mars of Destruction. The animation quality and overall production values is light years ahead of the before mentioned classic turd. Though let’s not get carried away, the art and animation still suck pretty bad. Skelter Heaven uses a lot of CG effects. I am not a fan of CG but for the most part these are pretty decent. They aren’t bad so much as silly looking. (in particular the giant floating squid monster) Where it really fails is the integration of the characters into the backgrounds and mech units. It’s hard to describe, but they almost look like cardboard cutouts placed on top of the CG effects. There isn’t much detail to any of the characters and besides their hair styles and colors there is basically no difference in any of them. The sound and music is the best aspect of this show. Some of the acting performances are pretty horrible though and several characters including the male lead seem to have voices that are horrible matched to their characters. The songs at the OP and EN are ok and are probably the only thing that feels like it was done by anyone with any talent. Perhaps if you played the game and REALLY liked it you might want to check this out. However, my guess is the game probably sucked really badly too. Its mercifully short so it has that going for it. But it’s also too short to develop any kind of story or interest in it. The ending is also open and unresolved as is the fates of several characters. Not that you will care.

My friend told me a story. Let begins My father smoked his whole life. I was about 10 years old when my mother said to him, "If you ever want to see your children graduate, you have to stop immediately.". Tears welled up in his eyes when he realised exactly what was at stake. He gave it up immediately. Three years later he died of lung cancer. It was really sad and destroyed me. My mother said to me- "Don't ever smoke. Please don't put your family through what your father put us through.". I agreed. At 28, I have never touched a cigarette. I must say,I feel a very slight sense of regret for never having done it because this OVA gave me cancer anyway.