Hi-Speed Jecy (original) (raw)

On the surface, “Hi-Speed Jecy” has a lot going for it. The series’ space action-adventure premise sounds exciting, and the character designs are pleasing to the eye. Moreover, “Jecy” has a full 12 episodes to flesh out its story and characters, so it doesn’t suffer from the short runtime handicap that most OVAs coming out at the time seemed to have.

All of this potential was wasted, however, and the end result is incredibly disappointing.

The plot, the characters and the direction all jump around and go nowhere. The first episode gives a taste of what is to come: the main character, Jecy, meets Falk, a priest... with a twisted sense of justice, and prevents him from killing some villains. Then Falk tries to kill Jecy, but they’re both asked by a mysterious woman to take on a bodyguard job, and they and Tiana, Jecy’s “sister,” hop in a taxi with her and go to her house, where Tiana proceeds to take a shower after telling the woman that they will not take the job. They end up working together anyway, and Falk, who wanted to kill Jecy at first, is now suddenly his friend.

Characters’ personalities change at the drop of a hat, and they do and say things that make no sense. The villains have a different goal almost every episode — it’s like they give up on one objective after facing the slightest bit of resistance, and move on to the next.

The protagonists are also lackluster. We have the titular Jecy, who is indifferent to just about everything that happens to him, and all of the women who show feelings for him. As the title indicates, he is supposed to be “hi-speed,” but what this really means is that he can… run kind of fast sometimes. That’s it. And it’s not explained how he has this “power,” or the extent of it — can he run faster than a speeding bullet? Is he more powerful than a locomotive? There are no comparisons here to illustrate how superhuman his ability is. He always somehow manages to thwart the villains’ plans, but that is mostly due to his sentient butler spaceship, which just happened to pick him up one day when he was a kid drifting in space, and has stuck with him ever since. The spaceship, Paolon, is the most powerful being in this universe, and is basically the concept of deus ex machina personified. It gets our heroes out of just about every pinch they find themselves in, and is the MVP of the series.

Then we have Tiana, who was created by Paolon to be Jecy’s “companion,” and who looks like a girl that Jecy kind of liked who was killed at one point. Oh, and she breathes carbon dioxide, like a plant. She has a habit of crying and running into men’s arms. The voice acting for her is terrible — the person voicing her, interestingly enough, is the granddaughter of Eiji Tsuburaya, of “Godzilla” and “Ultraman” fame. This was her voice acting debut, and she only got maybe one or two roles afterwards. She also sang the bland opening and ending themes for this OVA.

Rounding out the cast of protagonists is Falk (or Fork?), a priest who kills people with a stun gun. He becomes Jecy’s friend suddenly and for reasons unknown. When he’s not busy killing, he’s either fooling around with a woman or waxing pseudo-religious nonsense.

There are some side characters, mostly there to serve as potential romantic partners for Jecy, but none of these relationships go anywhere.

The villains are the Bismark family, headed by an old bald guy named Lou who transfers his consciousness into a variety of objects, including a spaceship and a building. His three children do most of the dirty work: Jera, the oldest, who has a thing for Falk; Telaine, the middle sister, who has doubts that being evil is the right thing and starts developing a soft spot for Jecy; and Cross, a punk rocker delinquent who is obsessed with trying to kill Jecy for reasons unknown.

The story is disjointed, but it is at least marginally watchable up until around the halfway point of the series, when things start going downhill fast (or should I say “hi-speed”?). This culminates in the nonsensical ending. Calling the ending an “open ending” would be an understatement; it feels like the staff were pressed for time and just decided to throw a bunch of unrelated scenes together and call it an ending. There is no closure to anything and nothing is explained; heck, there’s not even any dialogue in the last part of the episode so we can’t tell what’s going on.

As for technical aspects, the character designs and background music are good, but everything else is subpar bordering on poor. The animation is bad. The voice acting is bad, especially for Tiana, but even the other main characters, who are voiced by pros, sound like they’re just reading off of a script. Voices for some of the side characters, like Latina, are okay. As mentioned above, the opening and ending themes are bland. The direction is absolutely terrible — lots of lingering and unnecessary shots, particularly of characters just staring at something in the distance. Also, half the time it’s hard to tell if the characters are in space or on a planet. Dialogue is redundant and all of the “jokes” fall flat.

There is a lot of objectionable content which becomes more prominent around halfway through the series. There are a couple of sex scenes, and attempted rape scene, and about a dozen scenes with nudity. There’s some cringingly sexist dialogue as well. Being an action series, there is a fair amount of violence and death, but it’s not that graphic.

Don’t be fooled by its intriguing premise — “Hi-Speed Jecy” does not deliver. It could have been the next “Crusher Joe” or even a prototypical “Outlaw Star,” but it fails in nearly every aspect. Avoid this one.