Arc the Lad: the very first RPG released in Japan for the Playstation, and also seemingly the very last Playstation release Working Designs will complete. I haven’t played the game myself, yet, but apparently it was popular enough to inspire its own anime series. But then again, that’s not always a good thing, as the OAVs for Himikoden and Sakura Taisen have illustrated in the past.

As far as first volumes go, though, “Hunters and Monsters” doesn’t disappoint. After a brief bit of narration which provides a nebulous background for spirits and covenants, we get right into the action, and the mystery, of the series. The story revolves around a young man named Elk (not Arc, though the two names only differ by a single kana) and a young woman named Lieza, who have a fateful meeting on a hijacked airship and are both entangled knee-deep in a conspiracy. Both of the two of them have special powers derived from the protection of the spirits, and both were apparently lab subjects who have escaped from a place known as the White House. The White House has been tampering with humans for some time now, creating a specialized army of Chimeras - humans who transform into monsters under drug stimuli. And, the organization which created the White House doesn’t take kindly to having its lab subjects escape….

Anyhow, the mix of action and suspense does a good job of keeping the plot moving along. The narrative of conspiracy is interspersed with questions about fate and the spirits raised in the introductory narration at the beginning of each episode. The downside is that the characters seem a bit clichéd, but in many ways they are part of the territory of the genre. As long as the character development keeps pace with the plot, they shouldn’t stand as a detriment to the series.

In spite of the series' name, the main character is a young bounty hunter named Elk, who wields a hidden power...	Elk's fateful encounter with Lieza, a mysterious young woman locked up in an airship, brings him face to face with the demons from his past.

Video quality for this DVD is a fairly low par. One of my biggest complaints is the annoying graininess to the transfer which plagues many of the less detailed backdrops and then disappears for the cel art and high-detail stills. Rainbowing is present, but rare and not that obnoxious. At the same time, the animation itself is extremely minimal: just enough to convey the plot, with no extra frames spared. Conversations often involve extreme zooms on the faces of talking characters and a minimal range of facial expressions and lip movements. The animators take full advantage of a number of dark, silhouette scenes, but there are a reasonable number of high detail background stills to round things out. Some CG effects are employed, but only sparingly: for instance, a reddish glow appears around Elk when he is preparing to unleash his fire for the first time, but no special enhancements or extra details at all are used to highlight his actual attack with said flame. Indeed, the action scenes in general seem very low budget - hinting at, more than showing, the action. All told, the animation has a very low-budget TV show feel which is only exacerbated by the graininess of the transfer.

The audio track, on the other hand, is definitely well-orchestrated. The sound itself is standard stereo, not one of the higher quality 5.1 track mixes, but this is counteracted by the theatrical style use of the music to underscore the various scenes. The background music draws on a wide variety of classical music to match the scenes, from drum rolls to cascading trumpet fanfare to mysterious, wordless vocalizations, and is generally well-coordinated with the animation. The mixing balance between the orchestra and the voice acting was appropriate, at least for the Japanese track I listened to. The primary flaw to the soundtrack is the ending song, which involves a good deal of incomprehensible whining and warbling in English in a failed rock’n’roll song. It really stands out like a sore thumb against the well-sung jazz piece in the third episode, the nonvocal, brass-heavy introduction theme, and the general classical feel to the background music.

In terms of presentation, you don’t get all that much bang for your buck with this DVD volume. There aren’t any packaging insert extras aside from the standard, not-so-informative chapter stop listings, and there aren’t any extras on the DVD itself. Now, calculate in the fact that this is a three-episode disc, and you’ve got to start wondering where all that extra space was spent… Indeed, there aren’t even the requite previews at the end of each episode. On the plus side, those of you who, like me, prefer the subtitled version, no longer have to step through two menu selections to get the Japanese with subtitles option. And, breaking the trend with all other ADV DVDs I have, Arc the Lad has full-color art on the disc itself, a nice plus for those of us who keep all our DVDs in plastic sleeves, separate from the cases.

All in all, it’s still too soon to see how Arc the Lad will fare as a series. On one hand, the plot has a lot of potential, and the excellent musical score really helps underscore the drama. But on the other hand, the characters aren’t really all that new, and the poor animation doesn’t help endear the series to the general viewer. If you’re into fantasy or conspiracies, though, it’s probably a good new series to take a look at.

Distributor: ADV
Creator: Bee Train
Released: 1999

Video Quality: C
Audio Quality: A-
Presentation: C
Content: B
Overall: B