Summary: >

On the way home from school, Aya encounters two women fighting in the street. The fight breaks up, and she is introduced to one of the girls named Miko. Miko explains that she's fighting in a tournament called the Martial Hearts that will grant the overall victor one wish. Not long after, Miko disappears and Aya is determined to figure out what happened, and ends up in the tournament herself. Is this tournament for real? How can anyone really be granted a wish?

Thoughts: >

As it starts, Master of Martial Hearts feels like fan service overload drowning in its own stupidity. By the end of the opening credits I got the impression the animation was trying hard, but not doing very well. Despite having a plot written on the level of a 1st grader, the characters go in depth explaining things which only manages to induce severe boredom. Think of a 30 minute lecture on how to tie your shoes. These scenes are supplemented by Aya lamenting over the whole tournament thing, and broken up by the fight scenes. The fights are unfortunately badly rendered, horribly choreographed and just dumb. Each of the combatants other than Aya has a job, the point of which is to serve up uniform/outfit fetish material. As the punches and kicks land, clothing tends to explode. At the end, the loser always has her boobs exposed as a consequence. Another cheesy factor is that occasionally characters get hit and "cough" up blood, but it's like it shoots out of their mouths in one big hack, and they're no worse for wear. One of the most stupid things I've ever seen in anime involved a guy tied to a telephone pole with a rope strung with plastic explosives, and Aya kicks the rope off into the air before it explodes.

The relationships between the characters feels very weak; friendships, unrequited love interest, the whole 9 yards - although this is explained in the last episode. Worse still, the music feels like it is trying to force emotions and atmospheres that simply aren't there. So this is what you endure for 4 out of 5 episodes.

Now then, I'm going to take a breather here, and try to explain this as best I can. It's going to be tough though, because giving away a surprise ending would be like crushing a kid's Christmas morning. Master of Martial Hearts looks dumb enough to be based on one of those fighting games (although it's not), and I was dreading the inevitable stupid end of the entire ordeal. It's like the animation studio also realized the whole thing was dumb, but only after having animated 4 of the episodes. Their fix was to turn the script for the final episode over to the biggest conspiracy theory, tin foil hat wearing paranoid person in all of Japan. He is also a total freaking genius. In car terms, the story of Master of Martial Hearts goes from zero to awesome in under one episode. I have never seen so many plot twists in one episode of anything. And it's seriously messed up!

Now I won't say the last episode was great, but I liked it because it was crazy and totally unexpected. And it's probably the most EVIL final episode in all of anime, which is why the story scores a 5 instead of a 1 like most of this title deserves. For an OVA series that had managed to suck so bad, I give Master of Martial Hearts credit for at least trying. Unfortunately the rest of the show is so bad (and yes you would have to watch the rest) that I couldn't justify recommending watching this just to see a wacky ending. I'd recommend avoiding this one..

If you're seriously planning on watching this, don't look up any spoilers.