Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko is a typical sci-fi anime series, flawed both in technical and story aspects. The story takes place in the future where war has become a non-violent affair. Battles are waged by cute girls in space battleships that get transported to safety should their ship get destroyed. The competitions are for mining rights or even planetary systems.

Unfortunately, the Earth system has been on the losing end of several competitions with its rival, Ness. The Earth has been using three girls from the past to pilot its spacecraft, but a full team is four members. Therefore, they recruit Yamamoto Yohko from present day Japan. With her addition, Earth never loses.

The problem for the viewer is that Yohko isn't very likable. She will always win, and she knows it. She also sees very little value in her teammates, except as cheerleaders for her. In fact, in the opening sequences you often see Yohko positioned against her own teammates, defeating them. In anime, characters are often unbeatable, which is why we like to watch them. However, they don't have to be arrogant SOBs.

In this series, war has become a nonviolent game waged by cute girls in starships who are never in mortal peril.	Unfortunately, the utter arrogance of the main character drives the audience's sympathy towards the more personable girls of the Red Snapper, led by Rouge.

In fact, the rival team, the Red Snappers, gathers far more sympathy from the viewer. In an early episode, you find their mother was killed and that the leader of the team raised all her sisters. They became warriors to better their life and to pull themselves out of poverty. Yohko does it for fun - because she's bored. Having the focus of the story be on anyone other than Yohko makes the series more bearable.

Yohko doesn't fail until the very last episode, where her romantic intentions for the team's engineer are shot down by a far more deserving woman. However, the character development necessary for this to really have an impact does not occur. More likely than not, this was covered in the novels from which the series was adapted. Fans of the books may have gotten much more out of the anime.

Worse than the story, however, is the video quality. There are several cases of artifacting, and one case of macro-blocking that was so bad I thought I had a Hong Kong bootleg in my DVD player. When the image isn't breaking up, it still seems fuzzy and has a distinct lack of clarity. The use of black and dark tones is admirable in style, but this effect is destroyed by the terrible visual quality.

The audio is not as bad as the video, but there is very little to brag about. The sound is not particularly distinct and seems more in line with a VHS release as compared to a DVD.

There are no real extras to the disc, but you do get the entire 6 episode run (a total of two 3-episode OAV series). There isn't even an insert for the DVD. Even worse, the chapter breaks allow you to only go to the beginning of episodes. To give you an idea of the quality of the presentation, the name of the production company is misspelled on the DVD jacket.

While I usually have a real penchant for this genre, I was significantly disappointed by Yamamoto Yohko. Two episodes had good character development (one for the Red Snappers, one for Yohko), and one episode was legitimately laugh-out-loud funny. Still, that is not enough to carry a 6-episode DVD with a number of major technical flaws. Worth the rent on a rainy evening or worth buying if you can find it at close-out, otherwise there are way better sci-fi/cute girl series (try both Battle Athletes series).

Distributor: Right Stuf
Creator: Kadokawa Shoten
Released: 2001

Video Quality: D
Audio Quality: B
Presentation: C
Content: C+
Overall: C-