Miami Guns, this is a fairly recent anime police story. The background, which didn’t seem to have any influence on the first few shows, is that humanity on earth was wiped out in some sort of catastrophe; some escaped into space and when they returned they found a few survivors on the surface. Humanity then restablished themselves on earth and rebuilt. Miami is the name of the primary city but it doesn’t seem to have any relationship to any Miami you may have heard of. As I said, none of this background seems relevant to the series.

The primary characters are Yao and Lu. Yao is the spoiled rich girl that thinks the world revolves around her and that police work is exciting work because you get to blow up buildings. (There aren’t many complaints about this because Yao has her father buy the building before it gets blown up.) Yao is one wild and crazy girl who never plans ahead. Lu is the calm, level-headed one. She is also the Police Chief’s daughter, which is probably why she naturally went into police work.

As a buddy show, Lu doesn’t react against Yao enough. Lu goes with the flow and in the end, after Yao creates a catastrophe, Lu gets them out safely. The only time this went the other way was when Yao and Lu first met (flashback) and Yao saved the day, and Lu. What makes the “Lethal Weapon” movies work is that Glover’s character has emotional responses to Gibson’s character’s antics. Glover’s character is just restrained by his background from totally clocking Gibson’s character.

The Police force is a private contracting outfit? but everyone seems to treat it as a public service organization. All the male officers seem to be trigger-happy lechers. The only non trigger-happy officer on the whole force seems to be Lu, and maybe her father.

So this show is basicly a shoot’em-up with a jiggle factor. The story lines seems to be old and retreaded. The characters are standard and predictable. The artwork, for the most part, is pretty good. They are using a certain effect where the angry character is drawn in a juvenile style (I’m sure there is a name for it. I have seen it in other shows occasionally) and they use it a lot. I don’t care for that effect.

The one redeeming feature on this disk is that in the extras is an explanation for some of the cultural background of the dialogue and situations. They even try to explain the puns. Each episode seems to be a pastiche of previous anime series, and you might not realize the signficance of a Tofu delivery boy named Takumi in episode 4 unless you are familiar with “Initial D“. Personally, driving animes never really thrilled me.

Recap/Synopsis:

Episode 1: Bank Robber walks into bank with machine gun, all customers draw their own weapons, BR use explosive vest to take baby hostage, and escapes to upper floors of bank. Yao offers hostage swap, BR gets Yao to strip to bikini, keeps both hostages. Yao starts firefight with police below. Lu rescues BR and baby with tank, Yao accidently blows up the building but they all escape safely in tank.

Episode 2: A recap of all the previous episodes (a joke) that shows how Yao and Lu first met and how Yao decided to join the force.

Episode 3: Yao and Lu go under cover in a Girl’s School. Strange things are happpening.

Episode 4: A deranged driver is running street racers off the road and leaving blocks of tofu at the scene. Yao retrofits a car with the latest car gear, then, Yao and Lu go after the culprit.

I give this a 6 out of 10, so far. I think there are 3 more disks in the series but I won’t push them to the top of my queue for a while.