There are a host of not quite short films but not quite feature-length anime films made throughout the 1980s, and into the 1990s, and exploring a bunch has been surprisingly fun. I think very few of them are genuinely great, but very few of them are terrible. Cybernetics Guardian is probably one of the worst I've seen, but when it's only 3/4s of an hour long and contains very few - if any - pretensions about what it is, it's difficult to get too angry in it.
It's about people going to great lengths to combat crime in a dystopian future world (of 2019!), and those plans involve machines with weapons and high-powered suits that can be combatted. It's got enough elements to work with to be fun, but it throws them all together with reckless abandon; not in a good way, either. Even if you're on board to just see some mindless sci-fi violence, I don't feel like Cybernetics Guardian sets up its world well, has any real stakes/characters, or does anything crazy impressive when it comes to the actual action.
But still, props may have to be given for the ideas at play; it's not bad on paper. The animation could've been worse, too, and as I mentioned before, it's not long enough to feel like it wastes a good deal of time. There are plenty of superior Japanese OVA films out there, but at least Cybernetics Guardian doesn't break ground in my eyes for being the first genuinely terrible film of this kind I've witnessed.
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