he first segment of Megazone 23 ended with self-assured biker Shogo Yahagi in a bad way: Battered, bleeding and burdened by more knowledge about his supposedly ideal society than he wanted, Shogo seemed to have lost everything, including his trusty experimental robot armor/prototype bike, Garland. But as Megazone 23: Part 2 begins, Shogo's got his feet back under him. Wanted for murder and pursued by the authorities, he nonetheless has the backing of an energetic, highly colorful, nihilistic motorcycle gang, which happily confronts the police on his behalf and helps him regain his beloved stolen bike.
Meanwhile, far more meaningful skirmishes are going on in outer space around the Megazone complex, which seems, on the inside, like a peaceful city, but is actually a generational spaceship. An unknown force is interfering bloodily with these battles, and the cause seems to have something to do with the mysterious CGI idol and renegade computer program Eve. Shogo had thought that Eve was destroyed, but she abruptly resurfaces, calling for "the operator of 7G"—Shogo, the pilot of the prototype Garland vehicle—to contact her. Once the message gets through, Shogo and his beer-swilling, bike-riding buddies set off on an Eve-quest, with cataclysmic results.
Megazone 23: Part 3 takes place 1,000 years later in a place called Eden, supposedly the last city on Earth. Cocky video-game whiz Eiji Takanaka has gotten so good at the popular virtual-reality space-battle game Hard On (!!!) that he's been asked to join the elite organization E=X, which maintains and guards Eden in the fact of increasingly accomplished attacks by the net-jackers of Orange. Amid a mildly complex conflict between Orange, championed by the hacker Sion, and E=X, championed by the fanatical Director Yacob on behalf of the mysterious recluse Bishop Won Dai, Eiji is made aware of another incarnation of Eve resting below the city. Piloting his own new-generation Garland, now an anti-net-jacker roving terminal, Eiji awakens Eve, who alerts him to the threat of a program called Heaven, which may change everything for the citizens of Eden.
New boss same as the old boss
Taken as a whole, Megazone 23 is a pretty pessimistic series; in any age, apparently, no matter what steps are taken and what lessons are learned, most members of society will be hapless, ignorant sheep, ripe for both manipulation and massacre. History, it seems, is destined to repeat itself. But as insightful as that theme seems, it doesn't make the later parts of Megazone any more involving. The first segment of the trilogy had its own problems with cliched concepts and cluttered plot, but it won through with a singularly direct and dark vision and some relatively interesting characters. As the series concludes, the vision gets progressively cloudier and more confused, and the characters start to look like cardboard cutouts.
Well, not literally. The visuals in Part 2 in particular are more sophisticated than what's come before: They're no less stiff and simply colored (typical enough for 1986, when Part 2 came out), but an effort has been made to show Shogo's newfound maturity by giving him a solider, more shadowed design. The series' three segments all look like '80s productions, but they all have different designs, and the differences can be telling.
The plots, on the other hand, get more rococo in Part 2 and head downhill from there. A great deal of the story seems dashed off and disconnected, though ADV's detailed DVD inserts fill in some of the blanks about the various characters and their intentions and affiliations. But navigating through their twisted personal pathways can be difficult, and the fact that so little of it matters—both these installments tend to come down to relatively meaningless action in which Shogo/Eiji and friends chainsaw through all comers—makes the rest of Megazone feel both tedious and empty. Megazone is still a seminal series, notable for its inclusion of detailed sex, grotesquely graphic violence and casual though constant alcohol abuse, as well as for its immensely complex and serious science-fiction plotting. But it suffers from diminishing returns as it repeats its twists and its lessons several times over.
It's kind of amusing to note that while the first two Megazone installments preceded Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira and seem to have inspired some aspects of the film version, the third Megazone came a year after Akira—and it contains a character named "Akira," who is not only designed to look like an Otomo character (unlike anyone else in the series), but is clearly the picked-on, nerdy, eager-to-please follower of Eiji and his little group. That's quite the backhanded editorial comment.
— Tasha
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