I saw the first volume of Dragon Drive well over a year ago.  Through some snafu, Bandai didn't send volumes 2-4 to DVD Talk for review.  Don Houston did a good job with volumes 5 and 6, and then passed the baton back to me for the next couple of volumes.  Having missed much of the story, and having had a lot of time pass since the first disc came out, it was a little hard getting back into this program.  There were a lot of characters I was not familiar with and some of the subplots were a little confusing, but overall the gist of the show hasn't changed much from the first season: young kids fighting with dragons.

This show is about Reiji Ozora, 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, is not the massive five story tall fearsome creature the other players have.  He is a small cute dragon with an attack strength of zero.   Of course, like Pikachu in Pokemon, Chibi is destined for bigger things and is much more powerful than he first appears.

Apparently the group has now been transported to another world, as these episodes don't take place in the same world that the show started in.

As this volume starts, Reiji and Hikaru are in the mountains looking for a powerful dragon named Sinnsaber.  Apparently they've been searching for this dragon for a while, and both of them want to defeat it in order to obtain its power.  When the dragon shows up though, they decide to team up and fight him together.  He's too powerful though, and easily dispatches the pair.  When it's time for a rematch, Hikaru can't stand the heat, and Chibi goes on to defeat the legendary dragon.  (Which happened surprisingly quickly.  I thought they'd drag the fight out over a few episodes at least.)

This isn't such a great thing though.  Chibi gets more power, but he can't handle it and becomes very sick.  He can only be cured by a certain mineral, which leads to a mini-quest.

Meanwhile, some of the other characters are looking at some old documents and decide that it's time for a new major quest.  They need to find the Shrine of the Four Sacred Dragons!  So in true cartoon fashion, they split up into groups to search for this hidden temple.  No sooner have they split up when Chibi gets captured by a lady who collects dragons.

Maybe it is because I've missed a lot of episodes, but this isn't a very good show if you are much older than six.  While the dragon designs are cool, and some of the fight moves are impressive looking, there just isn't much to the series.  The whole "go on a quest to gain more power so we can defeat the villains" story has been done many time before, and often better.  Like many of this type of show, the program quickly becomes very repetitive and doesn't seem to go anywhere.

Like Pokemon or Shaman King, the main section of each show is a battle.  That's really what the show boils down to.  There is the illusion of advancing the plot (finding a cure for Chibi, looking for the Shrine of the Four Sacred Dragons etc.) but these are just meaningless quests.  They really don't solve anything when all is said and done.

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.

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.

Extras:

There isn't much in the way of extras on this DVD.  There is a short image gallery and a few trailer.  I would have liked a clean opening and/or closing included, and hopefully they'll include that on a future volume.

Final Thoughts:

I had a real hard time getting into this show.  It was repetitive, the animation was mediocre, and the plots weren't engaging at all.  If you've seen the show up to this point you might like this volume, but I didn't.  Skip it.