Has it really been two years since I last picked up a volume of ‘Air Gear’???

The Story 

In the next four episodes of ‘Air Gear’, Ikki and his friends are still looking for a fifth member of their team and going to some pretty extreme lengths in the process. While searching, Ringo alerts them to an A class AT battle going on so everyone heads there. Ikki has been gaining quite a reputation for himself lately but while he’s there, he will once again run into Agito and see just how evil this rider is.

When the battle goes badly, Ikki and his group will have to make a quick escape… though they will be leaving the battle with one more than they arrived with. That new person will make five for Ikki though and finally get him started on forming his own team of Storm Riders.

Good and the Bad

So, two years since the last time I picked up this series. You would think that this would cause me to completely forget about where I was in the story but you’d be wrong. Perhaps it’s the comedy, perhaps it’s the characters but I found it amazingly easy to jump right back into this series and enjoy myself almost right away. Of course, it could just be that no matter how much you praise this series it’s still an incredibly simple story.

Closing out the first half, ‘Air Gear’ has managed to do many things right along the way. Ikki continues to be a likeable character for viewers to cheer along as he continues to chase after his goals. While Ikki is undoubtedly self centered and fairly two dimensional but his good natured charisma has gone a long way towards making up for that. This is especially true since you can say similar things for all of the characters; Ringo makes for a very sweet heroine though she’s also ridiculously transparent, Kazu is a cool and loyal sidekick for Ikki though he’s also kind of dumb in his own way.

So with an entertaining story and likeable characters, why does ‘Air Gear’ still manage to fail so badly when compared to its potential? With the first half coming to a close, Ikki is just now reaching the point where he can have his first team battle. ‘Air Gear’ has done an absolutely amazing job of making this primary story arc last as long as they possibly could. In the process however they have stretched their characters and story to the limit; everything is now so thin you could poke a pencil through it.

The writing and dialogue within ‘Air Gear’ is never really bad as the series uses a lot of simple plot elements to get its point across, it’s just ironic that their primary plot hook is the weakest. Ikki’s journey to form his own AT team has been the primary motivation for ‘Air Gear’ moving forward since near the beginning. Unfortunately for the audience (and the staff), the reason why he wants to do it so badly has yet to be made even remotely clear, a point that is even pointed out by the characters late in this volume. It’s obvious that he loves riding on his ATs but besides wanting to get closer to Simca and becoming the “best”, the motivation for Ikki (and consequently the audience) to form a team and drag his friends into the AT world really has yet to be established giving no one a real reason for continuing forward.

A thin story is only one of the problems that ‘Air Gear’ has yet to figure out though. Characters and character jokes continue to be a major problem for ‘Air Gear’ with the writing staff constantly making things too obvious for its audience. All throughout this volume there are examples of wasted dialogue disguised as character jokes. None of these jokes are particularly funny and instead just completely vocalizes a scene’s subtext. Does Ringo really need her short speech about loving Ikki in episode 10 or Ton’s parking lot speech in episode 11? Probably not but they killed time and helped extend the episodes out a little longer to get us to the next small arc.

What ‘Air Gear’ lacks in story, it does its best to make up for with not entirely clever visual jokes. So what do fans do while they are waiting for real reasons why they should care about this particular story moving forward? Laugh at poop jokes obviously. Admittedly there is only one poop joke on the volume tells you that the humor in ‘Air Gear’ is not going to be changing gears anytime soon.

Despite all of this, ‘Air Gear’ remains a very pretty series to look at. From character designs to the aerial shots of characters, the animation in ‘Air Gear’ always looks amazing and that goes a long way towards making up for a story that has taken its time with going anywhere. There are certainly examples of poor animation moments (see picture at left!) but fortunately these moments are few and far between.

Music

Filled with techno and hard jazz themes for background noise, the electronic sound to the music continues to be a solid addition to the series. One of the few things that ‘Air Gear’ constantly gets right, the score composed by skankfunk does a great job of keeping the atmosphere of the series right for most moments. The music from ‘Air Gear’ never plays well out of context but within the series the AT battles always have a driving bass beat that moves right along with Ikki and his friends especially during the first team battle.              

Dub vs. Sub

Moving from the dub cast to the original Japanese, the one thing that has always struck me as interesting is how much ‘dirtier’ the English script is as opposed to the Japanese. The Japanese script uses plenty of cursing and jokes that could be considered dirty but the English script throws out curse words left and right for largely no reason. With a series aimed towards teenagers or younger adults, it makes one wonder if the series could’ve been a bit more accessible with just a bit less casual cursing but the complaint is really a small one.

That being said, the dub cast on this volume do well with their dialogue to create occasionally entertaining moments. Most surprising in these episodes is the complete transformation that Blake Shepard puts on Akito/Agito. Always a very violent two dimensional character, the dual sided character has never had a real chance to play any sort of real role during the first half of the series. With just a bit of a push though, suddenly we have a character that is easily one of the most hilarious of the volume. If a character joke really works during these episodes, you can almost be certain that it was this character who said it.

Extras

Clean animations.

Overall 

Now I remember why it’s been two years since I last picked up a volume of ‘Air Gear’. While this series has never been really bad, it’s failure to live up to its real potential is largely disappointing. For a series that is so obsessed with speed and taking things to the limit, it’s amazing that it has taken thirteen episodes to even give Ikki enough practice on his ATs to build a reputation and then have his first real team battle. The time spent on developing Ikki as ‘the next big thing’ easily could have been cut in half with ‘Air Gear’ suffering little damage. ‘Air Gear’ never crosses the line into being a bad series but even before starting the second half it seems obvious that it’s never going to cross into good either.

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