Zone of the Enders: 2167 Idolo

Director: Tetsuya Watanabe
Studio: Sunrise
Release: 2001

After the disputed success of Zone of the Enders, Hideo Kojima decided to give the series its own OVA and let the Sunrise studio tell a prequel story for the game. And at the same time give a chance for the fans to see how the agile and free of gravity technology Orbital Frame came to be.

6 years before the original game, the movie first gives us a glimpse of its protagonist; a reckless soldier named Radium. A man with deep hatred toward Earth and its earthlings whom likes to pick on their martian counterparts mostly because they can, thanks to Earth's stronger gravity. Although Radium may be lighter built physically, his skills as a LEV (Laborious Extra-Orbital Vehicle) are still almost unmatched by anyone.

The animation on the OVA is fluent and although is not anything spectacular it still does justice for the rest of the anime. Everything is done well and with care from animation to the character design and it is very interesting to see a younger version of Viola in the anime whom definitely looks now better than in the original game.

The anime also shows a involving and somewhat drastic love story that runs smoothly parallel with the action without breaking the watching experience at all. It also manages to show new details about the valuable Metatron that was never showed in the games, except possibly as a short glimpse.

As for the music the Idolo 2167 regrasps the main theme of the original ZoE and although it was kinda weird to hear it first in the anime I have to admit that after some time I have truly learned to embrace the tune which may not be too much, but it still definately nevertheless does its job rather well.

In the end it is truly very hard to find anything bad to say about the ZoE OVA movie, but if I really must dig some dirt up it could be mentioned that it doesn’t really add much to the story of ZoE, but does give some nive insight to the developement of some of the characters, namely Viola and manages to tell an interesting story of what brought the drastic nature of hers to fort.

--Review by Caldera