Burn Up Scramble

Summary: >

The girls from team warrior are back in action. The year is 2023. Whenever there is a disturbance the police can't handle, team warrior is called in to take care of business. But can the city handle the bill of the aftermath?

The team consists of Rio, the blond girl who's all action from fist to foot. Her hand to hand capabilities make her a weapon to be dealt with. Maya is the girl with the guns. While she cute and quiet on the outside, she's always looking for an excuse to shoot a gun; the bigger the better. Lilica is the newest member of the team and invaluable with her psychic abilities.

While skilled at what they do, could they be replaced by something less human?

Thoughts: >

Having seen every incarnation of Burn Up, I'm hoping this franchise will finally be put to rest. Burn Up was an early 90's anime filled with "babes and guns", taking itself too seriously. Then came Burn Up W in the mid 90s injecting more fun into the concept along with more fan service. There isn't much holding the Burn Up concept together, so I'm not sure why they feel the need to keep making more. That brings us to Burn Up Scramble: Burn Up for the 21st century.

Still shots may look good, but they do not look anywhere near as appealing in the show. The animation is bad, with effects like fire looking terrible. Music is a strange thing to mess up in such a title. For an action anime, cheap techno would be fine, but for some reason Burn Up Scramble backed by dull elevator music.

Burn Up Scramble takes franchise characters and reshuffles them. The "theme" is left intact, but changes to them go bad. Rio is still the big boobed blond having bad luck with men. There wasn't much to like about her in previous series either, but she kick enough ass to overlook some of that. Now she's just annoying. Maya was an especially fun character with her crazy beer drinking gun toting maniac concept. In Scramble she's now a cute emotionless girl with no personality. The franchise never knew what to do with computer hacker Lilica, but she is more interesting in Scramble as a psychic. Yugi was a total loser before, and now is a lecherous police chief (who's still a loser). Mashing these characters together is obviously bad news. But wait. It gets worse.

The story is completely boring. That's trouble for any action series, but Scramble is particularly bad because it's so predictable you can skip episodes after 5 minutes and not miss anything. Maybe Lilica isn't psychic so much as the only one with a brain to see how predictable Burn Up Scramble is. Even the minor "twist" at the end wasn't very good, and attempts at comedy are just sad.

Burn Up Scramble is like an anime written by robots. They see the formula, then execute it in a way with no meaning. The comedy is not funny. The action is not exciting. The music does not add emotion. The plot goes nowhere worth your attention. Scramble is based off the fun Burn Up concept, but forgot the fun. As a show with no soul, I find I'm indifferent about it, but perhaps Burn Up Scramble paralyzed my brain with a new form of boredom.

Screen Caps: >