Agent Aika: Naked Missions

Original Title: AIKa
Romanized: AIKa
Literal: N/A

Plot Synopsis

It's Waterworld if Kevin Costner was a beautiful woman with superpowered underwear and all the other dirty people were replaced with attractive young girls in short skirts! Well, sorta...

In the not so distant future, a mysterious catastrophe wreaks untold destruction, covering 90% of Earth's land area with water. 20 years later, a new profession has developed: Salvagers, who make their living by taking submarines into the sunken remains of once-great cities and retrieving the technological and informational riches lost there. Among these is Aika, a beautiful woman who now works for a reputable but unsuccessful family operation with the boss' daughter, Rion. But even if she's fighting for scraps with the hotshots in the business (like the showoff Gusto), Aika is more than she seems; she's one of the best, even if she's working above board now.

Until a job too good to pass up comes along, that is.

Quick Review

Rating: 1.5 / 5
Reviewer: Marc
Review Date: 2008-01-22

Composed of roughly equal parts James Bond, Victoria's Secret catalog, and sophomoric anime comedy, Agent AIKa it is unparalleled in its combination of half-decent dumb action flick and unrelentingly pervy underwear fetish video. It actually has a lot of potential--appealing characters, impressively "messy" action and plot progression, nice art, lots of action--but it blows it by being tremendously inconsistent. It swings between interesting and awful constantly, and even when it's good it's busy earning its reputation as the absolute pinnacle of panty peeping anime in every, single scene.

It's so far overboard the "parody" excuse is just that, and it's too relentless to ignore if you wanted to watch the rest of the movie with a straight face. Whether the constant bombardment adds up to an endlessly tasteless ordeal, a funny romp, or just guilty pleasure aplenty will depend entirely on your personal taste and sleaze-tolerance. I can't say it worked for me--just lots of wasted potential.

US DVD Review

USM's DVD (now out of print, and surprisingly hard to find) includes all four episodes, a lengthy music video and a short "meet the cast" section, plus USM's standard battalion of DVD-ROM features (cast, scripts, and an art gallery).

Content Guide

Easily qualifies for a 16-up rating; the first episode is almost exclusively underwear (which would be enough), but the rest features more than enough nudity to go with it and there's plenty of sexual content, explicit and implied.

Violence: 2 - Not overly graphic, but violent enough.

Nudity: 4 - If it's not clear already, plenty.

Sex/Mature Themes: 3 - Some rather crude visual jokes and plenty of more overt adult content, including the villian's unsavory relationship with his sister.

Language: 2 - Not noteworthy.

Notes and Trivia

By Katsuhiko Nishijima, the creator of Project A-ko. In addition to the OAVs, there is also a single manga prequel book, Trial 0, that hasn't been translated into English as of this writing, by Ayumi Konomichi. It's funny to note that the manga, in addition to being drawn by a woman, is more or less what Aika would have been without all the nudity and underwear--it actually notes in the introduction that it doesn't have all the famous panties. There are a total of maybe a dozen upskirt shots in the entire 200 page length (well below par for a normal book), and no nudity at all.

The original Agent AIKa 4-epsiode series was followed almost immediately by a 3-episode sequel (3.5, really--there's a short promo episode that's included as an extra on the US DVD). More recently (2007), there was a prequel OAV series made, AIKa R-16. It takes place a decade before the first series, following a 16-year-old Aika.

Also, a quick name note: The series title is AIKa (funky capitalization included) in both Japan and the US, but the main character's name is Aika Sumeragi--Aika is a normal Japanese given name. The cheeseball Gust(o)'s name is inconsistent. It's not clear whether the final "o" is intentional based on the phonetic "Gasuto" in Japanese, although the correct answer, "Gust," is revealed by the Romanized version on the official AIKa website. USM clearly couldn't make up its mind, either--in the English dub they went with the more logical-sounding Gusto, while the subtitles switch back and forth, dropping the "o" in episode 2.

Availability

Currently available in the US from Bandai on a 3-disc complete "Anime Legends" set of all 7 OAVs.

Formerly available in the US from US Manga Corps on two bilingual DVD volumes, three dubbed VHS volumes, or two subtitled VHS volumes (the third VHS volume was never released in subtitled form). All are out of print and relatively hard to find as of this writing; you might try eBay, but there are a lot of bootlegs there so buyer beware.

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