[GoldenXtreme]

I finished with Cutie Honey The Live! I think I saw someone on this forum recently call this Inoue's masterpiece due to its balance of farce and drama. I don't know if I would go quite that far, but it is definitely a show that felt like some sort of trick shot by Inoue that combined all his techniques into one absurd package.

Where do I even start with this thing? It's like the staff combined The Three Stooges, softcore pornography, and Garo (a show it actually shares a lot of staff with). It does that classic Inoue thing where it flips between being completely ridiculous and super dark at the drop of a hat, and sometimes just does both at once for good measure. A bunch of uncomfortable fetish stuff involving high-schooler characters! Kohei Murakami has 4 split personalities and one of them is gay! A fishmonger lady who can shoot missiles out of her flab! Miscommunications! The action is stupidly good? Honestly, by the end of the show I couldn't help but be impressed by the fact Inoue was even more of a freak than I was giving him credit for. There are lots of sub-par elements with the story though, you get the impression 25 episodes wasn't enough to fully explore all their ideas. The plot tends to introduce important elements in a weird order just to sustain a sense of mystery and some characters just don't really make sense. Yuki in particular stood out to me. I think the idea with her is she was driven to extremes by her desire to survive, but the change is extremely abrupt and by the end she's ranting about wanting to rule the world for no reason. What an experience, absolutely unquantifiable.