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Title:
Jinki: Extend vol 1 (of 3)

UK distributor: ADV Films

BBFC Certificate: 12

Suggested Retail Price (SRP):
£14.99

Episodes: 1-5

Audio Options: English 5.1; Japanese 2.0

Subtitles: English

Reviewer:  Tom (Webmaster)

 

Aoba Tsuzaki is your fairly typical young teen, if she were a boy that is.  Obsessed with building models of robots and mechs, Aoba is a tomboy living life happily with her grandmother and then everything suddenly changes when her grandmother dies.  Soon after the death Aoba is kidnapped and finds herself in Venezuela, the base of an elite fighting force known as Angel.  She soon discovers that she was born with a natural ability to pilot robots known as Jinki, which Angel use to fight with.  And then the action begins...
 

To start with, Jinki: Extend is your fairly atypical mech show.  Young teen is drafter into a fighting force they know nothing about, discover they have a natural ability to pilot mechs, find out that they are a 'chosen one', blah blah blah.  Jinki contains these cliches (and more) and for the first couple of episodes I found myself easily predicting what was going to happen next.  The storyline was simplistic enough that anyone who hadn't seen a mech show before would still be able to guess what would happen next.  It was slow and dull.   



 


But then my take on the series began to change the more I watched.  By episode three I realised that I had been looking at it wrong and this is not your atypical mech show at all.  Jinki plays more like a soap opera with estranged family ties, relationships and a sense of community all covered.  Because of this Jinki is aimed towards the more uninitiated anime fan and could find an audience with teens here in the UK. 
 

The soap opera approach does carry all the usual negatives of the genre though, namely bad dialogue, shallow characters and dragging of story.  The fourth episode illustrates this best as it is essentially a two minute training montage fleshed out into an entire episode, which is lazy writing at best.  I never found myself caring greatly for any of the characters either, finding them lacking in personality.  Due to the slow-moving nature of the show though I'm sure they will develop more in the next volume. 
 

Despite the negative points though Jinki is still pretty entertaining and good fun though, but only because it is so easy to watch as it is nothing challenging.  In a twist though, this valuation only really applies to the first four episodes as the final episode on this volume suggests that something darker is coming in volume 2.  Indeed, the episode suggests that things are going to get a lot better. 

Starting of as just a fun okayish anime, vol 1 of Jinki does find its feet eventually to develop it's own style but it does take a while to get there.  A mixed bag then but vol 2 should be a whole let better. 

Extras

An impressive line-up of extras include an interview with Fumiko Orikasa (Japanese voice actress for Aoba), Takuma Takewaka (Japanese voice actor for Ryohei) and the sound director Kazuhiro Wakabayashi, location notes for Venezuela, clean opening and closing sequences, a useful glossary of terms and a selection of ADV previews. 

The inlay of the DVD cover contains transcripts of interviews with Fumiko Orikasa and also the character designer for the show, Nato Hosoda.  A spoiler-free relationship chart is also contained as well a copy of ADV's Anime News which gives information on other releases.

Ratings

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Extras  
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