Summary: >

Sawa is a pretty young girl attending college. She plays the innocent school girl part pretty well, which comes in handy when covering up the fact that she deals out vigilante justice with exploding bullets. For years she's worked with a detective who was like a guardian to her. But then something happened which changed Sawa: she made a friend. And her friend also happens to be under the guardianship of the detective. Things all start to take a strange twist when Sawa has to choose between her friend and her guardian. But one thing is for sure; whoever she doesn't side with won't live for long.

Thoughts: >

Kite involves some explaining. Heck, this is the third time I've written this review. In its time, Kite received much praise. As an action title, I agree Kite is impressive with over the top violent eye candy. The designs also have a distinct look to them. The story is another thing entirely however. I found Kite to come off cold and heartless. The plot isn't that good, and the ending is.. bad. That's what I first thought of Kite, however Kite comes in two versions.

My first viewing was the cut version. So the uncut version features a bunch of sex right? Correct. However Kite is a unique title in that plot and character development happen during the scenes. There are conversations and flashbacks that happen that are critical to the show. Kite was originally two 30 minute OVAs, and this was cut to 45 minutes. Being short to begin with, removing 25% of the show which provides much needed supplementary material makes the "cut" version a mess. After watching the uncut version I was surprised that Sawa made sense as a character. She's consistent with someone who's been traumatized by what's happened to her. Note that while she makes sense, this doesn't exactly make her likable.

In a nutshell, Kite is pretty much the perfect merging of sex and violence. It's like an extremely violent action show interlaced with a porno - but with an actual story. And yeah the sex is pretty graphic. I'm not kidding when I mention the term porno. Is that necessary? I donno... I mean with peoples heads exploding left and right, why stop there ya know?

This leaves Kite in a weird spot for recommendations. I wouldn't recommend seeing the cut version because everything is so disjointed. The uncut version offers a passable story, but you're watching an action hentai show at that point. Either way the ending is a disaster, so keep that in mind too. After everything that has happened to Sawa, she finally gets her vengeance and this title builds up her story with a sense of hope. Then it completely fucks this up with the ending. Like getting through a pretty bad meal, thinking that desert might be ok, then getting served a steaming pile of shit by some guy with a big smile on his face (Thanks Umetsu). Cut or uncut, I was left with a sense of disgust over that.

Anyway, few titles rival Kite in how extreme it is while maintaining a high level of quality, so there's some merit to that. Personally, I don't think "extreme" is enough to justify a show, but back in the day this was a target demographic for anime. Kite was probably at the end of that evolutionary chain.