Wow. This series turned out to be a little more intriguing than I had imagined.
Basically, the story takes place on Mars, where people have colonized the planet and built city-domes. The cities seem to have battles between designated fighters to determine some sort of dominance, and Serena City has a super-powerful fighter named Layla(sp?) who is winning battles for them. But she doesn't seem to have much interest in what she's doing. The people in these cities are served by "dolls", intelligent, programmable, humanoid robots who seem to be pretty common, often ending up in dumps, where people like Speedy the "doll breeder" find them and repair/do other things with them. In fact, Layla seems very contemptful of the dolls, destroying three of them for being too noisy, and being in the middle of destroying another three when Speedy happens to see them...
So into this city walks another fighter, come to challenge Layla. He happens upon a doll named Nei, with one green eye and one pink eye. Nei is pretty self-minded for a doll, and when Speedy sees her he actually thinks she's a "broken doll" at first. After some events roll through, Layla ends up easily defeating the fighter who reveals that he's her father, and then leaving the city with Nei, with the calls of the city politicians demanding that she stay fading in the background... So as Layla ends up wandering off into the backcountry of Mars with Nei, for reasons totally unexplained, we also get to see some sort of visionary foreseeing a storm approaching, just as Layla said earlier in the episode.
I'll have to admit that this first episode did pique my curiosity a bit. Another reason that it's interesting is that Ali Project appears to be doing the music, in addition to the OP/ED songs. The credits list Ali Project for music, and Ishikawa Yoshimoto as music producer. It makes for some pretty nice BGM in my opinion, and seemed to fit well with the whole tone of the story. |
