The show is about a ten-year-old boy who has a genius aptitude for solving crimes in a turn of the last century setting much like London. The boy, Narutaki, carries a powerful handgun but relies more on his wits and skills to survive various villains who seek to end his career. He is helped by a remote controlled robot, Goriki, that resembles a large mech-robot in a number of other series and is powered by steam, much like the robots in Sakura Wars, except no one need pilot Goriki internally. The style of the anime is much more retro than most current releases on DVD and some people will like that more than I did. To me, this style often looks cheap and made on a low budget but it had a few bright moments in the included five episodes on this DVD.

The only power source of the time is coal and thus the city is powered by steam derived from the fossil fuel. Most technology is based on steam power and there are cars and such but nothing very advanced otherwise. The young boy, his butler, nurse, and robot fight a number of super powered bad guys and their own robots in a number of situations. It has its own style and I think it's worth checking out but it seemed like an acquired taste. Here's a breakdown of the episodes:

Episode Fifteen: The Target Is Onigawara:
Detective Onigawara has a secret admirer at the same time he's put in charge of security for a museum exhibit featuring some priceless jewelry. Is it a coincidence or is a foul scheme afoot to compromise the stalwart detective and subvert him for ill-gotten gain? When the Crimson Scorpion makes her move, even she's not sure if her greed and her heart are on the same level. Only Narutaki and Goriki can save the day when push comes to shove.

Episode Sixteen: Tears Of A Black Angel:
Ling Ling's sister, Lang Lang, is in town and wanting to help a young child fulfill her last wish before passing away. She doesn't understand that doing so will kill her so she kidnaps the child against the wishes of everyone else. By giving the child hope to see a beach before dying, Lang will ultimately doom her but let her die on her own terms. That's not good enough for the team, each of whom tries to rescue her from the well-meaning Lang.

Episode Seventeen: Go After Submarine X!:
The Knight Phantom steals a steam-powered submarine and the authorities are clueless as to where it is. Using a set of maps to the city's canal system, they try to reclaim it from the villain with the help of Narutaki and Goriki, even though the federal government wants to sweep the incident under the rug (and will stop at nothing to do so). Narutaki's own submarine proves less than helpful when the advanced submarine wins round one.

Episode Eighteen: 36 Pages In A Detective's Pocketbook:
This was an episode that basically brings the viewer up to speed on a bunch of what has gone on previously. It touched bases on all the major events of the previous seventeen volumes and used clips from them to explore what has taken place.

I'm going to rate this one as a Rent It since the technical limitations, combined with the spotty nature of the content were somewhat limited. The animation style seemed a bit cut rate to me with limited movement and backgrounds, not to mention detail in the main characters too, and while the audio was very solid, especially the music, I got the feeling that a lot of budget issues came up when this was being made. A cursory search of events in Japan at the time confirms this belief but I still liked the show enough to keep watching. Perhaps the Manga series was better but this had some charm of its own too.

Picture: The picture was presented in the original 1.33:1 ratio full frame that it was shot in. It had a lot of static shots with limited movement going on and much of the actual movement of the characters was done by using stationary pictures and moving the camera. In all, not the best style of anime to interest me although the colors were muted to fit the story setting and the picture mostly devoid of artifacts.

Sound: The audio was presented with a choice of a 5.1 Dolby Digital English track or the original 2.0 stereo Japanese track with optional English subtitles. I thought the English track was better this time and displayed more separation between the channels. The music was well done here and I think it warrants a bit of attention by fans.

Extras: There were some trailers, a Japanese opening, part two of the short text interviews with some Japanese voice actors, some sketches and a paper insert with an interview of Kia Asamiya (the creative force behind Steam Detectives) that included a timeline for the series from its inception in Monthly Shonen Jump over ten years ago to the end of the series in Japan in 1999. This isn't a lot but at least there were four episodes here.

Final Thoughts: With three "real" episodes, considering that one was a recap of previous events, but some good extras to offset the value quotient, I think a lot of you may actually like this one more than I did but the limitations were such that a full MSRP price tag made it something to hope will be released in the future in a value priced boxed set.