1989’s Megazone 23 Part 3 is directed by Shinji Aramaki and Kenichi Yatagai. Aramaki has worked on other such titles as Metal Skin Panic MADOX-01 and the upcoming Space Pirate Captain Harlock film in 2013. Yatagai’s other works include Super Dimension Fortress Macross II: Lovers, and the 1994 Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki OVA. Character designs are by Hiroyuki Kitazume, known for Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack and Urotsukidōji: Legend of the Overfiend.
Megazone 23 Part 3 takes place in Eden, the last remaining city on Earth and follows a young hacker named Eiji Takanaka. He is a proficient player of the futuristic virtual reality game “_HARD ON¯” and plays with the majority of his friends; notably Bud who is almost as good as Takanaka is both in hacking and the game. Sporting a high level of hacking ability Takanaka is brought on at E=X.
All of Eden is connected to “The System”, an integrated information network woven throughout the cities electronics. E=X is run by Bishop Won Dai, an overseer of all production who claims to be the sole survivor of the Megazone crash years ago. Yacob is second in command and gives the new recruits an inspiring speech about their work and what they do at E=X with his assistant Miura.
Megazone 23 Part 3 suffers from animation consistency where scenes will range from sparingly good, to average, and then just bad at certain points. The well drawn scenes are close ups of several characters, including Yacob, having exceptional detail to his design. But later certain shots badly drawn and animated scenes, for example when Takanaka and Bud try to escape from being caught hacking The local net police show up on their hover bikes and chase them down, and I could tell that the bikes skipped frames and saw them jump positions on screen. The rest of the quality can be summed up to just being average.
While watching Megazone 23 part 3, constantly I found myself becoming confused with the story and not really understanding what was going on at all. The flow of the story is interrupted with needless scenes, such as a celebration at a bar, or instances at character’s apartments just laying around or fixing a bike.; all of which can be taken out entirely. Megazone 23 Part 3 fails at telling a complete story, you are dropped into the second act and then just head straight for the third without even having a first act to explain (Editor’s Note: So we all wrote these based on the parts we were assigned, so Alex’s stance comes not viewing the previous two parts). For this reason I feel that Megazone 23 Part 3 was rushed or just lazily put together.
Pros: Parts of Megazone 23 Part 3 actually look nice and you can see where they took the time to animate and draw certain scenes.
Cons: As stated previously, the animation quality jumps all over the place. There are frame skips and characters are drawn poorly here and there. Another issue I is with the pacing of the story. I feel that some scenes are needless, such as the celebration at the bar, and can really just be taken out of entirely. Adding on to that is the characters, aside from only a few, such as EVE or the director of E=X Yacob that are interesting; the rest of the cast is pretty much flat and uninteresting.
For Megazone 23 Part 3, over all, it is very forgettable; with inconsistent quality in animation and incoherent story telling being the main regard. Just these two things alone made me disinterred disinterested and took me out of the entire experience. There are some scenes that can just be easily take out, it muddles the pacing of the story. Megazone 23 Part 3 can be summed up as simply bland; there is not much here and the bad outweighs the good, just avoid it all together.
Children of The Blazing Fist 
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