Video Girl Ai Review
Den’ei Shōjo
Cyber Girl Ai
電影少女 VIDEO GIRL AI

Since the Community Anime Reviews site is all but dead, I’m republishing some of my OG reviews from there. I have corrected obvious spelling errors though and added some formatting. I will add new notes in parenthesis, labeled “ANB  note.”  😅 I won’t count these as part of the “Back to the Vaults” series as I have not rewatched them.

–> Buy Video Girl AI DVD Collection on Amazon.com!

Community Anime Review of Video Girl Ai

(ANB note: This series was originally reviewed on 09-Mar-2003.)

Intro

I’ve been on a romantic-comedy kick in my anime viewing of late, so a 1991-1992 series floated to the top as one I should check out. As might be expected, Video Girl Ai is based off the manga of the same title. At six OAV episodes, very little of the manga can be crammed into this series and as such, the anime suffers a tad (though not as bad as Oh My Goddess did).

The Story Start (SPOILERS)

Video Girl Ai (Ai is Japanese for “love”) is another anime series dealing with that painful and joyful thing called love. Our main character is Yota (or Youta). He is in high school and in love with his best female friend Moemi. Moemi only sees Yota as a friend (the curse of the nice guy) and is in love with Yota’s friend Takashi — a guy who is adored by ALL the girls. Moemi confesses to Yota her love for Takashi without knowing that he’s standing behind her. He tells her he’s flat out not interested and she’s not his type. She tries to play it off like it doesn’t matter, and fails to get Yota to tell confess whom he loves.

Because Yota is a terminal nice guy, he sacrifices his own feelings for Moemi in order to help her and encourage her in her attempts to win the heart of Takashi. Depressed by this turn of events in his life, Yota stumbles on a video store he’d never seen. Only those with “pure” hearts can see this store. In the porn section, he finds a video with a girl on the cover named Ai.

He takes the VHS tape home (and fortunately for him, he has no parents at home for the entire series). Putting the tape into the player, the girl Ai shows up on screen and talks (in general terms) to her single-male audience about unrequited love and how she’s take care of him and make him feel better. She then emerges from the TV, and soon reveals that providing nothing happens to the tape, she will be there for him for the next 30 days.

The Stories Progression

Thus begins Yota’s and Ai’s life together. At first, she aggressively comes onto him, sometimes teasing him with sexual talk and saying she’s joking, then later removing ALL of her clothes and trying to remove his so she can help him bathe and wash his back. That tends to be the nature of their relationship throughout the series.

She’s nude (descriptive topless mostly) in three of the episodes because she’s there to be the perfect woman for Yota — careing only for his pleasure. This doesn’t seem to mean just sex because she and Yota never get it on (and not just because he only has eyes for Moemi) though as I stated, she gets naked for him twice (the third time she had no choice) for the purposes of sexually exciting him and taking his mind off his troubles.

As the series progresses, Ai suddenly finds herself liking Yota more and more, but as a video girl, she can not fall in love with him as that would violate her programming directive. Around Yota’s friends, she poses as his sister (huh? I guess his friends are pretty stupid since he didn’t used to have a sister) and in private, she attempts to be a friend and more. Will Ai fall for Yota? Will Moemi realize that Takashi will never love her and go for Yota? Also, will Takashi and Yota remain friends?

Thoughts/Review

Due to the age of this anime, the artwork isn’t as visually appealing to me (if you’ve seen Yu Yu Hakusho, you know what I mean). Ai wasn’t that cute to me but that’s OK. I didn’t like the nudity or other excessive fan-service in this OAV, but then what did I expect? OAV’s are almost always full of fan-service. Those of you who are nice guys will be painfully reminded of all the girls you were “in love” with but who only saw you as a friend and confident. I think at least some nice girls will be reminded of those guys they fell for but who treated them poorly. That’s where this series works — characters. The complicated relationships between all four of the main characters strike a strong chord of realism.

The failure of this series is in the final episode. I doubt many will find the ending satisfying. Make sure to watch the end credits though. I suppose you can then decide for yourself as to what happened.