Anime that you're currently watching?, For those anime fans. Options

[Oyasumi]

Yeah, just like the topic said,
what are you currently interested in?

Mine has to be:
Bleach
Suzuka
Shuffle
Black Cat

but Right now im watching Hajime no Ippo, even though its pretty old.

[P.P.A.]

 I watched the four Megazone 23 OVAs yesterday and today, which are split up into I & II, and IIIa & IIIb. Part III was made in the nineties, and it shows—“datanets”; “nethackers”; virtual reality video games; floppy disks everywhere; giant, unwieldy interfaces. Its plot—set a few centuries after that of Part I & II, is a bit weak, and while it would be harsh to call Part III bad, it's nowhere as visionary or outstanding as the first two parts.

 These, however, shine. Part I is a little awkward; the characters are somewhat bland and typically anime-like (or they are today at least; back in the eighties when the OVA was made, they were probably forerunners of what has since degenerated into clichés), and the plot progression jerky. This might be a result of it originally having been planned as a 26-episode TV series, which then had to be compressed into an hour and a half.
 Nonetheless, it introduces us to the setting and its feeling… only to then deconstruct it as it unfolds the plot, revealing twists, and seeing the characters and their world undergo great changes. But only in symbiosis with part II—for which it lays the groundwork—does it become truly exceptional.

 Part II picks up six months after the first OVA's bitter cliffhanger, and sees the plot to its (shocking) conclusion. Its art style is radically different; the animation quality ranges from hilariously bad to overwhelmingly awesome, and it includes overly graphic scenes of violence and sex. Despite this, however, it's outstanding, and a greatly influential work not only in anime but film history. The different conflicts foreshadowed or introduced in part I escalate, we gain a deeper insight into the characters' motivations and the workings of the setting, and ultimately it concludes in a finale you are unlikely ever to forget.


 As for the plot: in a big Japanese city of the late 1980's lives Shogo Yahagi. A careless adolescent, who works at McDonalds, rides motorcycles with a passion, and hits, in the first few scenes, on Yui, a pretty but quite independent girl he almost runs over during a chase.
 One day he meets an old friend, who reveals to him Bahamut 6, an extremely advanced motorbike he stole from the military, where he was test-driving it. He was followed by suspicious suited men, who shoot him dead, while Shogo flees on the bike—finding it to be extremely hardy (it smashes a BMW) and fast.
 
 With the military on his heels and his friend's murder covered up, he tries to get on the live show “Only You” of the pop idol Eve Tokimatsuri, who has been dominating the charts for quite some time. However, as he presents Bahamut 6, the intermission is disrupted, and while he is still talking to Eve on the video phone, some pre-recorded clip of her plays on TV.

 He plays hide-and-seek with the military for some time still (and discovers, in the meantime, that his bike can transform into a mecha), until he and a friend of his stumble into a secret tunnel, where, after an elevator ride, they discover…

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…a giant deserted city underground beneath their own, the view dominated by a giant thing in the distance. Shogo sends his friend back to the surface to explore the bizarre landscape. It gets colder and colder, the gravity acts strange, and eventually he has to switch into mecha-mode. The military is revealed to have a base down there, and they send out units to capture the intruder: hoverbikes, and other mechas. Shogo manages to shake off most of his pursuers, but gets involved in a fight with one mecha, in the course of which they break through the hull and find themselves outside… in space.

 After Shogo rescues the pilot of the other mecha (which he had demobilised), the man, a low-ranking officer called B.D., explains to him what he has stumbled upon. The entire city is contained within a giant spaceship, and it is the 29th century. The illusion that everyone is living on Earth in the eighties is one maintained by the giant super computer Bahamut—the huge thing in the background of the underground city—which also implants false memories in people who “travel abroad”, and generally administers and controls the megazone. Eve, or rather EVE, is a program of this, and not real.
 Bahamut is also strictly pacifist (revealed later to be the consequence of humanity having turned Earth into a nuclear wasteland centuries ago, which led to these spaceships being built and launched); as the military has been observing a large object nearing the spaceship for some time, it wants to disable Bahamut so it may mobilise all resources to fight off the impending extraterrestrial invasion. Shogo's bike, along with its predecessors, functions also as a terminal to access Bahamut's sixth layer of defence, which the military has cracked already—leaving only the seventh.

 Shogo returns to the surface, confused and disillusioned. He infiltrates the TV studio where Eve's music clips are filmed, and discovers that she really is just a virtual figure, her clips animated on computers, and her songs written and sung by a special program people discovered. (A virtual idol/popstar twenty years before Hatsune Miku!)

 Meanwhile, B.D. along with an accomplice launches a military coup d'etat, disposing of the previous military leadership for not really caring about the megazone's future, and seizing control of the country. The first alien (though these aliens are descended from humans as well, living on their own megazone) scouts are, with a lot of effort, shot down—their technology is more advanced than that of Megazone 23.
 As thus becomes urgent now, the military finally manages to crack the seventh layer of Bahamut, and subsequently uses EVE for military propaganda, after she sent out a last (futile) distress signal to Shogo, begging for his help before she is overwritten, and explaining to him the history of the megazone and humanity.

 What happens from there on you will have to see for yourself…

 Also the music is awesome, Eve's songs in particular.