Before this review goes on a few relevant points. 1) This review is a guest review done by Tenjobito, who you may remember from the joint reviews from last year; Antispiral is a bit behind on reviews and asked me to help catch things up. 2) Despite the Saber Marionette series all tying together nominally, each part will be getting a seperate review. This is thanks to each part largely standing alone in some ways, not to mention each featuring completely different voice actors, animators, and companies involved. So reviewing them together really works poorly.
With that out of the way, on with Saber Marionette R!
- Published: 97 (JP), 98 (US)
- Episodes: 3
Junior, the heir of Romana, and his battle sabers Cherry and Lime, are enjoying their peaceful life in Romana. Lime and Cherry are special battle sabers with Girl Circuits, special mechanisms that let them think and feel the same way humans can. Suddenly, the evil Star-Face and his sexadolls attack Romana in order to take over so Star-Face can become the next High Official. In order to truly become the next High Official and ruler of Romana, he must first eliminate Junior. This begins a battle for, not only Junior’s life, but for all of Romana.
Supposedly taking place 200 years after the events of Saber Marionette J to X, there is really nothing to suggest this runty predecessor to the Saber Marionette series is tied into the rest in any meaningful way besides a few shared concepts; The Mesopotamia is never mentioned, the other nations aren’t mentioned… Even the fact that there must be females around now thanks to the rescuing of Lorelei in J never comes up, as we’re back to exclusively men that are clones. The similarities themselves use different terminology too: girl circuit instead of maiden circuit, battle saber instead of marionette.
So ultimately, with the fact that R was witten before any of the J series were, we’re left with what feels kind of like a pilot episode or beta to the much more popular predecessors.
How does the pilot hold up then? Decent, I suppose. It’s definitely more serious than the J series, with Star-Face and his sexadolls being truly cruel and humor being mostly absent. The art is certainly closer to a more manga type style as well, with simpler rounder characters and more chibiness. The story is simple to a fault to fit into three episodes, but even then there’s not much to say about it above the blurb from the start of the review; One interesting twist that really isn’t all that interesting, but otherwise it’s just three episodes of Star-Face hunting Junior until Junior fights back.
Ultimately my impression of Saber Marionette R is forgettable. The Saber Marionette setting is half about the unique setting, and R barely touches on that. The other half was the core plots about the Mesopotamia and reprecusdions of the crash that reverberate throughout the J series. And without those things, all we’re left with is a three episode assassination plot with an uninteresting main character, still irritating Lime and Cherry (even if they’re different), a cornilly evil villian (even if he’s more edgy), and none of the humor (even if it was flat).
So you take out the good from the Saber Marionette series and replace it with a pinch of drama and violence… Frankly, it doesn’t work for me. Still, it could be interesting to some as a stand alone movie of sorts, if you liked late 80’s/early 90’s low budget psuedo-scifi movies like Vampire Hunter D or Armitage Ill, though it’s definitely a step down from those too.