With the success of Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Digimon, and other cartoons tightly linked to collectable card games, it is natural to expect that a lot of cheap imitators would crop up.  One such copy is Dragon Drive, yet another anime show where young children battle monsters whose attributes and powers are inscribed on trading cards.

Reiji Ozora is a junior high slacker who gets horrible grades, is only interested in sleeping, and is perpetually late for school.  One day his childhood friend, Maiko, invites Reiji to join her in a new sport, Dragon Drive.  In this game, a player's DNA is read and used to match the player with a dragon that appears in a virtual reality world.  Reiji's registers, but his dragon, Chibi, in not the massive five story tall fearsome creature the other players have.  He is a small cute dragon with an attack strength of zero.  Not having bothered to learn the rules of the game, Reiji and Chibi enter their first battle and miraculously win at the last moment when a cornered Chibi lets loose an incredibly powerful attack.  The programmers who run the VR world are astonished that Reiji won.  His dragon displayed powers that it wasn't programmed for, and Reiji's control of Chibi was phenomenal.  It was as if they shared a mental link.  The shadowy characters running the game vow to keep a close eye on this new talent.

While one expects children's programming to involve formulistic plots, this show takes it to the extreme.  Every show had the exact same plot:  Reiji brags about how good he is, and then gets embarrassed when he doesn't know some fundamental rule of the game.  (This is a good chance to let the viewers learn the rules.)  Then he is challenged by a vastly superior player, gets thoroughly thrashed, but at the last minute Chibi lets lose a powerful blast vanquishing the opponent.  This happens every single episode.  Even Pokemon has more variety.  I was expecting the sub-plot involving the creators of the game to go somewhere, but they don't advance that plot at all in the four episodes on this disc.

If that wasn't enough, each episode has a lesson to impart to the viewers:  friends are important, don't give up, and hard work pays off, among others.  These educational messages are not very subtle so that even the youngest viewers will catch them.  I remember seeing shows that told me to share and be nice to my classmates when I was a kid, but they never changed my behavior.  I wonder if anyone has every studied if these insipid messages ever really work?

The animation in this show is rather crude and primitive too.  There aren't a lot of details, and all the characters feel flat and two-dimensional.  The movements are stiff and very repetitive, with the animators using actions over and over to save money.  When you notice the same scenes with different dialog popping up over the course of four shows, you know they are stretching their budget to the limit.

While my elementary school age sons did enjoy the show, it wasn't one of their favorites.  By the end of the DVD they had the show's formula down pat and were able to predict the major plot points.  I have a feeling that their interest in the show will quickly wane if the show doesn't change its formula soon.
 

Audio:

Surprisingly enough, this DVD includes the original Japanese language audio track.  Many anime shows aimed at children forgo this and only provide an English dub.  I was happy that this show had both.  The two-channel sound for both tracks, while lacking a bit of punch, is still very good, and the English dub wasn't annoying like many of them can be.  This is a nice sounding disc.

Video:

Although the quality of the animation leaves something to be desired, the picture quality is very good.  There were only a few instances of aliasing, a digital artifact that usually plagues animation, but no other major defects.  The full frame image was bright with tight lines.

The Extras:

There isn't much in the way of extras on this DVD.  There is a very short image gallery with less than 10 character sketches of the main characters and dragons.  Aside from that, they included trailers for Kikaider, Cyber Formula and Galaxy Angel.  I would have liked a clean opening and/or closing included, and hopefully they'll include that on a future volume.

Final Thoughts:

This wasn't the greatest show ever.  The plots were virtually identical from show to show and the program was cheaply animated.  The characters were all two-dimensional and the sub-plots were not developed.  While my children enjoyed the show, it wasn't one that they really got into.  Most anime fans should just skip this, since it is aimed at juveniles, but people with younger viewers in their household may want to rent it.