Real Drive Episode 1 - Urashima Drive

For those that care, the Urashima of the title refers to Tarou Urashima, a Japanese folktale character who skips 300 years whilst dallying in a palace beneath the sea. The relevance should, I hope, be obvious once you’ve seen this episode.

Fifty years ago, Masamichi Haru was involved in a diving accident whilst doing test runs for a new digital infrastructure known as the Material Network (or Metal) pioneered by his friend Kushima; strange red bubbles beneath the sea explode and generally cause weird stuff to happen.

Haru spends the next fifty years in a coma, awakening to discover his legs are paralysed and he is an old man with a cybernetic brain, the mechanics of which are completely unexplored for the moment. Wanting nothing more to do with anything, he spends his days idly fishing and sending out his buxom android Holon (ah, philosophy, how much we have to blame you for…) to scout underwater, until he gets a visit from two members of the Aoi family. Combat expert Souta is there to bring him to work in diving into the Metal, but high school student Minamo is just there to care for an old man.

However, freaky-deaky things start happening in the network as the strange red bubbles appear on the sea once more, powering off huge chunks of the Metal and causing chaos in the hospital that Haru lives in. Lo and behold, something causes Haru to “dive” into the Metal, where he appears as his bishounen self once more, and he sets off to find out what’s causing the problems.

I’m not quite sure what I think about Real Drive. I can tell you straight out that Minamo feels totally out of place and I cannot imagine how she is going to be the female lead in this show; she seems to have some kind of connection to whatever it is that’s bubbling away in the oceans, but her ridiculous moe-moe voice and sappy personality doesn’t really fit with anything else that’s happened so far. Otherwise, I’m slightly undecided about the merits of the show - while it looks good and has some decent animation, I don’t find the premise particularly exciting beyond the diving metaphor and its possible uses. It doesn’t help that nothing much really happens apart from a lot of talking to establish the technobabble-tastic background to the show, something which I and probably every other viewer out there will ignore for the rest of the show, but I suppose that’s what first episodes are generally for.

Anyway, I’ll probably give the next couple of episodes a go, but Real Drive hasn’t managed to impress me massively so far.

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