Genre – Slice of Life Anime
Series Reviewed Runtime – 3 Hours 12 Minutes*
Spoilers – Yes
*Total series runtime unknown.

A Rightstuf blind box buy, I only own episodes 45-51 and special #6. I have chosen not to hunt down the remainder of the series, because it doesn’t look particularly easy, particularly cheap, or particularly fun. The art style reads “90s Anime” to me. I did violate the “No Research” rule to check the date, and it was mid-late 90s.

I am starting pretty late in the series, so I might have some serious gaps to work around. Anyway, as implied by the title, the main characters are police officers. In this case, two policewomen. The first of our episodes starts with one of our policewomen losing an eating contest to some guy who is implied to teach rescue training. The real plot is how they keep running into the same guy on their time off. It’s framed in more of a “possible romance” than “creepy ulterior motive” plot. It is exceedingly slow. There are only 23 minutes of episode, but it feels longer. The choice of dub casting didn’t help. They are more wooden than the architecture of the rural town the characters were visiting. I can’t understand what the Japanese actors are saying, but at least it sounds like they put in some effort. So I switched to subtitles. Didn’t help that the plot is slower than molasses going uphill in winter.

Maybe episode 45 was just a bad place to start. Let us see if 46 is any better. This one seems to be a plot revolving around kendo and some kids who have not been named as far as I can tell. Our main characters are tangential to the plot and appear to be meter maids rather than beat cops. Okay, not meter maids per se, but traffic enforcement. But for whatever reason they have enough slack time to worry about whether the kid gives up on Kendo or not. How do they manage to make these episodes so slow paced that they feel like an hour passes when it’s only 20 minutes? (24 but subtract some for credits).

47? Rescue dude is going to teach one of the Meter Maids free climbing. I have nothing against slice of life in general, but it has to not be boring. Rescue Dude has the personality of a brick of tofu, and Meter Maid isn’t any better. You can tell a story about day to day lives if the characters are at least interesting. We get an interruption of the boredom because of an accident at a tunnel entrance where our characters… show up to direct traffic. Well, they are traffic enforcement. Fortunately for the pacing, the main two get pressed into helping with rescue efforts, so we get a montage of pulling people from vehicles. I was about to compliment the rescue sequence for at least having something happen. Until we get to get a kid out of the back seat of a car. They make a big show of desperately trying to push another car off the one the kid is in… All the while the rear windshield is completely unobstructed and there is nothing stopping them from just breaking it to get him out through there. I literally facepalmed. All you needed was to draw another vehicle blocking that window and the scene was fixed, but nobody sent it back to the animators. Too expensive to redo, I guess.

I don’t hold out too much hope as 48 rolls around. There is a farewell party for Rescue Dude, so I assume he’s leaving the plot, since he’s headed to the Himalayas. There is a real problem with the character designs – they use the simplified style of the genre, but stick to realistic hair and eye colors, for an all-Japanese cast of characters, meaning there are fewer markers to tell the characters apart. The two main Meter Maids are just two different hair styles and a subtle difference in shading. I keep mixing up which one is having the romance with Rescue Dude. I’m starting to see why there are so few copies of the DVD release on the market – nobody wanted it.

In Episode 49, they finally have a plot centered around their job. They’re looking for a car theft ring. Only there are no spare people, so the inspector rearranges shifts, and assigns braided Meter Maid to running the magic computer to predict the thieves’ moves. I wanted to pick on the POST screen for the workstation, but It’s not that far out of whack. Announcements of 1GHz processors were being given big fanfare in 2000, so a 777MHz machine a few years earlier would be a beast, but not outside the range of possibility. I do find it funny that their ‘vertical’ operating system has gone through only seven versions between 1945 and 1997, or that was even first released in 1945. Though on reflection, all the sevens are probably a result of the “Septium” being a play off the “Pentium”, but two higher! I would have had the copyleft date start in 1977 to stack it on.

Serious inspector takes over patrol with the other Meter Maid, tries to impart some sense of responsibility into the woman. Serious Inspector also demonstrates how to properly use communication to coordinate multiple police assets instead of recklessly chasing a suspect who’s on the far side of a canal from their car. The criminals elude capture because the plot demands it, and we wrap up this episode. Because something happened, it went by faster than the earlier ones.

Episode 50 continues the hunt for the car theft ring by finding the barge used to smuggle the goods out of the area. Braided Meter Maid is a bit in the dumps because of the organizational changes. But the moping time gets interrupted by a car chase. It is astonishing how despite the lack of detail in the character models how overboard in precision the animators make the mechanical bits of the engine and gauges during the chase. This is short-lived as the cops crash, and braided Meter Maid gets desk duty coordinating the ongoing search for the thieves. This results in more moping before she tries to do everything the currently absent other half of the duo used to do. This coping is the focus of the episode rather than the work against the thieves.

Last regular episode, and I think series finale. It starts slow with stakeouts regarding the thieves. I suppose they’re trying to invoke the “sad everything’s ending” feeling before returning to the plot. The thieves start moving to export their haul in the wee hours of the morning, so we get a nighttime mobilization of our cast. Mind you, this is unintentionally hilarious, as the cast is all either on motorcycles or in tiny, smart-car sized cruisers. It is not meant to be so as one of the secondary characters gets shot. But those tiny little traffic patrol units are inherently so. As the pursuit goes on we do find out that the secondary character survived, but the thieves elude everyone save the main duo. Mind you the thieves are armed, and the Meter Maids are not. The thieves decide that throwing their cargo at the tiny ticket patroller is the only remaining option, so the Meter Maids drive their tiny car onto the trailer and almost run over one of the thieves. They then lob tear gas into the cab while moving well above the limit for the expressway they’re on. Somehow this does not result in a fatal crash, but instead the thieves slamming on the brakes and getting arrested.

Roll credits.

Oh, wait, there’s “Special #6” left. Subtitle – “Traffic Control at the Beach”. (-.-)

From that title, I’m going to assume it’s intended as a fanservice episode, and after the revised 1999 opening credits, my initial supposition is supported by the gratuitous beach scenes. Problem for you perverts is that we’re talking 90’s TV Anime art style. That’s maybe three steps above stick figures for the character models. And being television, explicit content is precluded by broadcast rules, and the general vibe of the show itself. The cast is roasting in the heat of a particularly warm day, directing congested traffic on foot. The eventual problem gets telegraphed when someone who can’t swim is pressured into wakeboarding. Shouldn’t you work on swimming before any other waterborne activities? That way when you inevitably splash, you don’t immediately panic and drown? There’s also some thieves and perverts running around. As if on cue, wakeboarder is in trouble, so the Meter Maids rescue her. This scene exists entirely as the excuse to get the main characters out of their formal police uniforms and show them running in the swimsuits they wore underneath. You know – a Baywatch plot. This is extended when the thief decides to flee on jet ski, so they commandeer the wakeboarder’s jet ski for a pursuit, forcing him into the riprap before capture. Thus ends the obligatory excuse plot and we resume our filler, since the plot really is not the reason for this episode to exist.

So, while I only saw eight episodes, that was still enough to form an impression. It was… aggressively mediocre. Not bad enough to shut off as background noise, not good enough to seek out, just… there. If you get attached to the characters early on I suppose it could work, but if you don’t, well, as a slice of life, there’s not a lot else in there for the viewer.

I’ve had over eight hours of media set in Tokyo; I wonder what’s next in the queue. Do I hear Blue Oyster Cult?