Overview

Licensed by Royalty brings us a series centered around two odd-couple special agents, Row Rickenbacker and Jack Hofner, working for the royal family. Hard to buy at first; mostly because everybody is speaking Japanese. If that bothers you, there’s always the dub track which puts our heroes in overdone-trying-too-hard English accents that quickly becomes the greater of two evils. Working around that, there is a very James Bond/Mission Impossible feel to all of the missions our boys take on. Hidden weapons, crazy disguises, and a healthy dose of dry comedy will keep you interested, but a lack of any plot development and continuity may not keep you coming back for more. Each episode of L/R Volume 1 could be viewed as a standalone and it wouldn’t skip a beat. While it’s easy to pick up somewhere in the middle, it has little lasting appeal for someone looking for a new series to invest some hard earned cash in.

DVD Features/Art Design

The colors are vibrant and the characters have a very light-hearted feel to them, but they are extremely generic. The long-haired, care-free one and the short haired, more serious type is something we’ve all seen before. Toss in a hard-nosed, pipe smoking chief, a wacky old inventor, and a motherly but stern female and you’ve got yourself a special ops team, right? They’re all drawn well, not a lot of detail paid to them but it gets the job done. As far as the extras of the DVD go, there’s a section for them, but there’s not much to speak of. You can view the opening and closing sequences with or without credits in the way, and you can look at some previews for other Pioneer anime. I am a firm believer that previews are not a special feature. In fact, people go out of their way to avoid watching previews on their DVDs or VHS tapes. The nice thing about DVDs was the ability to blaze through them and get to the meat-and-potatoes of your purchase. Big negative points for doing a DVD extra section a disservice. This DVD is presented in Anamorphic Widescreen for all of our rich friends out there with luxurious TVs.

Music

The music for L/R feels like some bizarre love-child of Randy Newman and Freddie Mercury(RIP) with schizophrenia. Before you try to visualize what that would look like and perhaps take your own life, let me say that the music just isn’t fitting.

Conclusion

Licensed by Royalty Volume 1 is a very fun and easy to watch anime. You don’t have to dedicate a lot of time to it trying to figure out what’s going on. The downside is that there isn’t a hilarious amount of humor, and explosive amount of action, or an addicting amount of story to come back for seconds. L/R Volume 1 is worth a rental at this point.