A couple of decades ago, back when I was still a baby otaku attempting to ingest as much anime into my system as I could possibly find, I stumbled across a series called Battle Athletes Victory. AIC animated this 26-episode futuristic sci-fi TV series about young girls competing on the Universe Satellite floating above the Earth in order to be named the Cosmo Beauty or the greatest athlete in the world. In order to do this, they must compete in dangerous sports and events against athletes that are more powerful than any locomotive. What none of these athletes realize is that once the Cosmo Beauty is selected, that’s when the actual story begins.
Even back then, as I was gorging myself on anime, I knew this series was special and that I needed to file it away in my long-term anime storage center. Battle Athletes Victory hasn’t aged well in every aspect (there is one Chinese character who is portrayed not so kindly in both the Japanese and English language tracks), however, the main story beats remain a highlight of the late 90s.
In the story, the main character is a girl named Akari Kanzaki from Earth who is competing against girls from all over to become the next Cosmo Beauty. After spending the first few episodes finding her self-confidence with the help of her best friend, Akari heads into space to compete in the main tournament. Along the way, she’ll become friends and rivals with a variety of unique characters from all over the planet, including the indomitable Jessie Gurtland, who will stop at nothing to see her dreams come true.
Battle Athletes Victory was a fun (and often funny) sports series that thrived thanks to its memorable characters such as Akari’s trainer Mister Miracle, the school’s principal Grant Oldman, and so many others which paved the way for the series to tell a complete story that included one of the most memorable endings in anime history!
Fast forward to 2021 and all those fond memories from watching Battle Athletes Victory have come flooding back to me thanks to the sequel that we’ve waited over two decades for. Quite frankly, Battle Athletes Victory: ReSTART is a love letter to its former self. In many ways, you could say that this is what the series should have been from the beginning.
Animated by studio Seven, the story of ReSTART has been a roller coaster of thrills ever since the first episode. Taking place after the events of the original series, the solar system still sends girls regularly to the Universe Satellite to compete to be the next Cosmo Beauty. One girl we meet from Earth, Kanata Akehoshi, doesn’t actually have any plans to compete for the title until one night when she witnesses a spacecraft crash. Rushing to the site of the accident, Kanata sees a young girl who hands her a ribbon and tells her to become a Cosmo Beauty. Fast forward a few years and Kanata has qualified to go to the satellite and do just that.
When she gets there, Kanata meets various girls from around the solar system who all have the same goal as her, though they all have their own reasons for wanting it. What the girls don’t realize, however, is that a secret organization known as the Solar System Control Committee has already decided who will win the Divine Grand Games. And it’s not any of them.
What’s fantastic about this new series is that sports are not the primary focus. Yes, it is a sports series, but the real stories are the side quests along the way between the various girls. The best story of the entire series, for instance, is the side-story between Lydia Gurtland from Mars and Yana Christopher from the Moon. Lydia is the daughter of a company president; unfortunately, that company sells guns and ammo to the civil war ravaged Moon, which sets Yana off.
Over the course of the first half, we learn more about the war-torn world that Yana comes from and her personal internal struggle about doing something drastic to call attention to the plight of her people and take revenge against the company that has profited off the pain of her friends and family back home.
Yana and Lydia teaming up and struggling to co-exist throughout the first half of the series is one of the best things this series has offered, simply by letting it play out naturally. The struggle that Yana displays throughout episodes four through seven is just heartbreaking all the way until you get to the rainy race scene, which is the big moment of truth for her.
That’s not even the biggest story that drives Battle Athletes Victory: ReSTART forward. While this is playing out in the background, the foreground is kept plenty busy with the girls slowly learning the truth about the mysterious Eva Gallenstein and why she says she doesn’t remember Kanata, despite obviously being the girl that she met in the spaceship crash.
Dripped out slowly, this is a series that no one should sleep on this season, and yet it feels like everyone made their decision on this one way too early and gave up before it could really show what it’s all about. Even if you’re not a fan of sports series, Battle Athletes Victory: ReSTART is a heartfelt drama with just enough comedy to keep things refreshing.
While I have absolutely no idea how this series is going to end, I know that when it comes time to name off the best series that no one watched later this year, this is going to be right near the top of the list!
