Ready? Time to dive into a small number of Girls with Guns once again! Back into Dirty Pair So yeah, this was originally meant to be posted during the weekends of Urobuchi December because a twitter event with Dirty Pair and December goes on every year. I was apart of it last year as I watched one episode the show through out the month and I wanted to do the ovas and other parts of the show in 2021. But yeah, it simply couldn’t happen for one reason or another. December was too busy of a month. But either way, Dirty Pair January is here even if people didn’t expect it to happen. I honestly think this small franchise with two hot girls going on adventures and destroying everything they touch is important.
Dirty Pair: Affair on Nolandia is a special ova that came out days before the last episode of the original TV came out on December 20th, 1985. An hour long special that compresses a lot of the ideas that the tv show by creating a somewhat original story away from the tv show itself. Something which feels a little too heavy for one one-hour thing to do considering that a lot of things happened in 24 episodes of the television show. In that case, this I would easily call it an hour long made for tv movie or just a double sized episode which I don’t think anyone would really complain about because these are fun girls to hang out with. Full of personality and spunk while pushing and creating a genre of science fiction that wasn’t around yet.
In general, the plot is very much some usual dirty pair ideas. With the Lovely Angels landing on the planet called Ookbar, they are in search of a girl named Missinie that went missing. With their telekinesis (which wasn’t in the tv series but allows the plot to happen) Yuri and Kei know that the girl is hidden in a magical forest called Nolandia. A forest where unexplainable creatures live. There are also the obvious bad guys in the form of the government and chief of security that doesn’t help Kei and Yuri at all and wants the girl for their own reasons. So yeah, the beginning of the Nolandia and the end of Nolandia are pretty typical set up and then action sequences after Missinie has been found and brought to the city. Everything in the middle of the special is very mesmerizing in a psychological way.
The middle features the Kei and Yuri searching for the girl in the forest of Nolandia. There are the typical bad guys that try to chase after the two, but they are quickly destroyed from the forest creatures or killed by Kei and Yuri themselves because they know what is going on. Gaining the trust of Missinie results in some of the strangest things like Kei and Yuri actually randomly more playful then usual when hanging out in the forest, doing some very kid like things, and such. Its pretty strange but in a very fascinating way because it involves still doing their job. Missinie and the animals in the forest turn out to be very docile and Missinie herself is an incredibly special person that everyone wants for one reason or another.
On a visual level, the action scenes and every other moment are just as good at the television show itself. In which I can say that the television show itself is pretty great for a television show from the 1980’s. The chase through the city was that well put together, but it doesn’t feel like movie or ova quality to me. Very much like some of the many cities that were in the show proper. I really did like the interesting and almost Alice in Wonderland want to like with how creative everything was. The environments were very lavish and colorful and the designs of the animals in it were highly creative. I think that is the part of this ova that I enjoyed the most considering how original it was.
So in general with all the things going on in it, I think Affair on Nolandia is somewhere between ok and good. For rounding up purposes, I am going to go with well. I think there is a lot of cool Dirty Pair things that happen in the story, and I think the story in the forest and Missinie are good. I just wish they could be expanded on a bit more. Or the production values of the OVA could be upped a big to make it a bit more of an action epic or something to stand out a bit more from the television show. It’s a very enjoyable experience regardless of those faults of it with Kei and Yuri just being as cool and intelligent as they ever could be. Not an ova that feels like it has to be watched because its not a stand out of the franchise, but it’s not going to upset anyone either.
Mechanical Anime Reviews 