RBHS is like a car starting out in Coolsville, taking
a few trips to Crapsville and back, and finally ends up driving off a friggin'
cliff.
Daimon high school is a rather special high
school where conflicts are decided through K-Fights, complete with audience and
play-by-play commentary. Ryoko is the current champion and gets challenged all
the time by silly school clubs like the Fake Ninja Club and the Flower Arranging
Club. The battles are fun, and her fight with rival-in-love Azumi is particularly
well-done. Old champion and loudmouth Shizuma Kusanagi returns to offer more fights
and some amusing arguing with Ryoko. RBHS looks like a winner with good
character designs (by Keiji Gotoh of Nadesico fame), good animation,
humor, panty shots, and good fights featuring a mix of fisticuffs, swordplay,
and magic.
Unfortunately things start to go horribly
wrong when both the art and animation quality fluctuate repeatedly. There'd be
a nicely drawn closeup with pretty background in one scene, and a rather poor
and listless effort in the next. Not only that, but the story starts to go everywhere
and nowhere at the same time. There's Ryoko's romantic interest in Tatsuya, a
school play, some mysterious muscleman named Nagumo, a band of hoodlums led by
some woman, a trio of fighters, shrouded priests summoning the Demon Lord, another
muscleman named Willard Gates, a mysterious pendant occasionally transporting
our heroes to a mysterious world named Solvania, a war priestess named Reiha,
a shy shrine maiden named Miyuki, and it might as well have a partridge in a messy
pear tree. They're all somewhat connected to each other, but none of them is elaborated
upon properly. There's even a recap episode of sorts in this 13-episode series.
Not that it gives us a better clue of what's going on. The final ep even has both
Ryoko and Kusanagi separately exclaim that they don't have the faintest idea about
what's going on.
It's not all bad though. Other
than the first two episodes, there's also some fun in the lunchbox episode where
Ryoko and Azumi compete in a cooking contest to decide who can give Tatsuya a
lunchbox, and the Magical Waitress Oyster Lulu episode is a riot as well. The
rest unfortunately stinks.
(2.5)
