Iczer Girl Iczelion is a two-episode 1994 OVA in the Iczer franchise, although it occurs in an alternate timeline from Iczer-One, with which it shared direction from Toshihiro Hirano. This OVA is a self-contained story that does not require any knowledge of the other Iczer series. Streaming on the OceanVeil platform as of this writing, Iczer Girl Iczelion follows a high school girl, Nagisa Kai, whose goal is to be a pro wrestler. When a robot named Iczel syncs with Nagisa to fight a menace of alien forces led by a brother-sister team of Chaos and Cross. Nagisa is not up to the challenge and snaps the sync with Iczel.

The first two-thirds of the story can be very grating as Nagisa, voiced by Yuri Shiratori in Japanese, does little but run away and scream for much of the main action. That said, this presents one of the most realistic, if you will, looks at a regular high school girl suddenly called upon to fight an enemy she cannot comprehend. Yes, her crying and shouting is irksome, I doubt you or I would fare better if we were suddenly told, “Be an intergalactic soldier, here’s a robot to sync with.”

In episode two, after a musical interlude in which we are serenaded by pop idol Kiiro (who we instantly recognize as another Iczelion, or why is she in the story at all), we meet several other Iczelions. One of the Iczelions seeks Nagisa out to try to convince her to fight. The other two save their arguments for after saving Nagisa from Cross. But, even after the other Iczelions ask her to join them, it will take Nagisa seeing her classmates injured by Cross to find her inner strength. Of course, we do not doubt that once she finds that strength, Nagisa will be the strongest Iczelion of all, and they will manage to defeat Cross, Chaos, and their Voids. This is not a very original script.

I had hoped that Nagisa’s wrestling interest would carry over from the real world into her fighting style, which it does briefly at the beginning, but is ultimately lost to beams of light-style weapons that dispose of enemies without any cleanup needed. I would have enjoyed seeing Nagisa suplex Cross—in case anyone decides to do a reboot, this would be cool.

Like the earlier entries in the Iczer franchise, transformation sequences here are animated with full, but neutered nudity, with lingering close-ups of breasts and featureless crotches, but have the same dress-up quality as Sailor Moon and other series whose transformations have become iconic. The Iczelions will don armor that at least actually covers the soft, squishy bits most likely to be vulnerable in a fight. I approve of that. Unlike earlier Iczer entries, this story lacks any hint of intimacy between female characters, but the only male character is Chaos, who seems interested only in his sister, not in that way. I didn’t mind that there was no implication or threat of sexual violence in this anime at all.

OceanVeil‘s stream of this anime appears to be the original master converted to digital. Even with that, there is no extreme fuzziness in the visuals, and the sound was fine. No songs or credits are translated, which made Kiiro’s (Iczelion Gold’s) moment of finding her power through song a bit less impactful if you do not understand Japanese. There were no options for other languages, different-sized subtitles, or any other feature on the platform controls. What you see is what you get. The whole seemed like a straight rip of an old VHS tape.

I would not say that Iczer Girl Iczelion is a must-watch anime, but it is very much a crystallized relic of Japanese animation in 1994. The faces, the animation techniques, the script, and even the way characters are voiced are notably different than today. From the overblown epi, opening music that the plot doesn’t quite live up to, to the 1990’s pop music, even the soundtrack is dated. This makes watching this a bona fide time-travel experience. We’ve come a long way, even in our slightly tired nudie anime. As a historical document on 1990’s low-budget OVAs, it is very much a trip.