Four young ladies in mechanized battle suits fight against bio-androids that run amok.

This anime feels like a much more serious version of Tenchi OVA. In fact the were both done by the same director and the original concept for Tenchi was “a less serious/sillier” version of Bubblegum Crises.

The four central characters are: Shilvia, who is leader of the Knight Sabers (that’s what they called themselves), she’s generally intelligent and quite put can have violent mood swings. Priss, who is a hard rocker and just does the whole Knight Saber thing for the thrill. Lena, a country girl that comes to Tokyo with the hopes of joining the Knight Sabers and fighting for justice. And Nene (who is my personal favorite) is a cute computer hacker with a day job at the police. All the characters grow a lot during the show and are very interesting. Action scenes are great. One of my favorite series.

All original sound effects really engross the viewer into the world of BGC2040. The soundtrack is rock and roll music that gives the series a action packed feel.

Objectionable Material:
Very little. Some light sexual content. Like where one of the supporting characters accidentally walks on on Nene changing, the viewer doesn’t seen anything, but afterwards the character talks about the color of Nene’s panties, some stuff like that.

Recommended Age Group:
Early teens and up.

Second Opinion:

I just finished watching this series, so I’ve decided to review it. This series is a remake of the original 8-episode “Bubblegum Crisis” OAV series. It’s 26 episodes long and spans six DVDs. The first four DVDs contain four episodes each, and the fifth and sixth DVDs contain five episodes each. There are some nice extras, such as character profiles and voice actor credits. However, there is no credits list for the English Sylia voice actor. Credits for the Spanish voice actors would have been nice, too. The DVDs are trilingual, containing Japanese, English, and Spanish audio tracks. The opening and closing songs are in Japanese on all three tracks, and the in-episode songs are dubbed into English only. The Spanish track contains the Japanese audio of the songs. The English dub isn’t quite as accurate as for the original “Bubblegum Crisis”. My advice is to watch it in Japanese with English subtitles first and then in English. Sometimes, I like to watch DVDs in English with English subtitles. It allows me to easily see the changes in dialogue. With only two songs for the opening and closing credits, it would have been nice to dub them into English, but this wasn’t done. As for the series itself, I won’t say that it’s better than the original series. It isn’t, but it isn’t worse either. Some things are the same, and some things are different. All of the character designs and voice actors (Japanese and English) are different. My one complaint about the character designs is that some characters, most notably Priss, have pale skin with no explanation, though Priss does sometimes appear darker. The series takes place in another universe than the original series. There is plenty of character development. The series doesn’t focus on music as much as the original does, and the 2040 techno remix of “Konya wa Hurricane” doesn’t appear in the series. The music that does appear is more techno and punk than the original music. Unfortunately, the final episode suffers from the same problem as the final episode of “Street Fighter II V”. Too much time is devoted to fighting and visual effects. While the ending of this series is more satisfying (all of the characters return to Earth alive and well) than that of SF2V, they could have cut a lot of the visual effects and shown the Knight Sabers reuniting. Instead, the series ends with Sylia, Mackie, and Nigel at Sylia’s old house; Leon apparently in a bar somewhere else; Nene and Linna on a tropical island; and Priss in the desert, singing. While we can assume that Sylia will go out looking for the others and find them, we aren’t shown this. All of the hard suits except for Sylia’s are trashed. Will she make new ones? Unlike SF2V, this series doesn’t waste time with redundancies or episode recaps. Also, each episode is longer than episodes of SF2V. So, while this series is three episodes shorter than SF2V, it’s actually longer. Overall, this is an enjoyable series, but the ending could have been better.

Notes:
BGC2040 is a remake of the original BGC. The original was good but I liked 2040 better. There are also two spin off series “Bubblegum Crash” and “AD Police”, which I have not yet seen.