An ultraviolent cyberpunk mecha OVA by AIC from 1993 about two psychic sisters, Genocyber was directed by Koichi Ohata, who also directed MD Geist, Cybernetics Guardian and Burst Angel.
Elaine, who is mute and mentally deficient, and Diana, who is crippled, are part of an illegal experiment in unlocking psionic potential and aimed at creating Super Soldiers. When Elaine escapes from the research lab, Diana is sent to retrieve her, only to kill her in a fit of rage. However, Elaine's mind survives and takes over Diana's cyborg body, transforming into a cyborg mutant creature called the Genocyber.
Much bloodshed ensues.
The OVA was adapted from an unfinished manga by Tony Takezaki, the adaptation being specifically some of the first episode's plot. The plot of the OVA differs significantly from the manga, though reading helps reducing the Mind Screw levels a fair bit.
Provides examples of:
- Abusive Parents: Professor Morgan averts this in the manga but plays this straight in the OVA where he is combined with Professor Reed and becomes the adopted version of this. He took in Elaine and Diana after murdering their parents and turned them into his experiments, even frequently hitting and torturing Diana if she becomes too rebellious for his liking.
- Adaptation Personality Change:
- In the manga, Elaine is a friendly, spirited young girl. In the anime, she's a mute girl with no social skills and a childlike mind.
- Diana in the manga was a sweet but fragile girl. In the anime, she now has a murderous personality.
- Professor Morgan was a kindhearted man in the manga who cared deeply for his two daughters. In the anime, where he takes on the name and characteristics of Kenneth Reed, he is the complete opposite; abusive to his adopted (in the OVA) daughters and a power-hungry madman who is willing to kill innocents just to accomplish his goals.
- Ambiguous Innocence: It's doubtful that Elaine really understands what she's doing whenever she goes on her rampage, but that doesn't make her any less dangerous.
- Amputation Stops Spread: The Genocyber does this in episode 3 to stop the Vajranoid from corrupting it.
- Animation Bump: While the animation, in general, is of very high quality, the moment when the Genocyber tears one of the robots clean in two from the first person is done in noticeable higher quality.
- Apocalypse Wow: The amount of over-the-top violence and destruction wrought by Genocyber is just nothing short of morbidly impressive.
- Asshole Victim: Pretty much everyone other then a handful of characters deserved their bloody deaths.
- Ax-Crazy: A lot of characters. From Dr. Reed’s disturbed Slasher Smile as he and his goons slaughter a hospital, to even Elaine herself butchering millions.
- Barbie Doll Anatomy: Diana in her cyber-body, Elaine after she takes Diana's body whether or not she's in the form of Genocyber, the two cyborgs in the first episode.
- Bittersweet Ending: The final episode, and the OVA as a whole, ends on a somewhat bleak and ambiguous but still hopeful variation of this. The Earth is still a post-apocalyptic ruin as a result of the Genocyber's actions, and although Mayor Grimson Rockwell and his lackeys are dead, countless innocent people are killed when the City of Grand Ark is destroyed during the reawakened Genocyber's rampage. However, despite all of the hardships, horror and misery the two have gone through, Mel and Ryu survive, the former regaining her eyesight, and their unborn child even survives, born alongside what is implied to be Diane and Elaine having been reborn as a single child.
- Blind Seer: Mel, from the fourth and fifth episodes, tries to obtain money by fortune-telling with her amazing psychic powers.
- Body Horror: A lot of it shows up, but the freaky way in which the two cyborg guns-for-hire re-morph their bodies to take on the Genocyber has to get top billings. The third episode features an entire goddamn aircraft carrier and its crew being fused into a giant fleshy abomination.
- Cain and Abel: Diana hates Elaine because their "father" loves Elaine more and regards Diana as just a tool to control her. This leads to her killing Elaine... only to have her own body stolen by Elaine afterwards.
- Cluster F-Bomb: The dub of the first 3 episodes. Due to the dark, gritty Cyberpunk atmosphere they create, it works extremely well.
- Composite Character: The OVA has Professor Morgan take on the name and personality of Kenneth Reed, becoming a cruel madman bent on accomplishing his goals even if it causes death and suffering.
- Cool Plane: The F-40 fighters (whose name and weapons are briefly flashed during the Vajranoid's assimilation of the Alexandria) carried by the Alexandria that frequently appear in the backgrounds of the second and third episodes, as well as the Su-47-esque F-30 used by the Vajranoid during its test run.
- Cool Ship: The Alexandria, an absolutely massive American supercarrier that is more of a militarized floating city. Forms the backdrop and setting for episodes two and three complete with highly detailed interiors even when it gets torn apart by Genocyber-related chaos.
- Cute Mute: Elaine is mute, although she does occasionally communicate using her Psychic Powers and body language. In the manga, neither sister was mute.
- Cyberpunk: While most so-called "cyberpunk" anime is closer to Post-Cyberpunk, this show is an example of the genre at its bleakest. Downplayed in the manga which was closer to a Post-Cyberpunk in that there were far more clearly decent people who had a chance at taking down the corrupt systems in place.
- Darker and Edgier: While the (sadly unfinished) manga still had the trademark gore, violence and bodily horror, it was still hopeful and had a lot of decent people trying to do the right thing. The OVA opts for an extremely cynical, nearly-nihilistic atmosphere where human greed and ambition cause all of the chaos and violence that shapes the world for the worse. Very few decent people are shown and are forced to suffer through it all, left with physical and mental trauma even if they somehow survive.
- Death of a Child:
- In the first episode, Elaine's friend gets murdered as an incentive for her to come back and form the Genocyber.
- The second episode begins with children being disintegrated by a helicopter minigun. The death of Myra's child during Elaine's battle in the first episode also influences most of her interactions with Elaine.
- Countless children die when the La Résistance gets massacred. Inverted by the end where it's implied that Ryu and Mel's then-unborn child survives.
- Disabled in the Adaptation:
- In the manga, Elaine was a normal girl and had a normal adult mind and was able to speak, unlike in the anime, where she not only has the mind of an animal but is also mute.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Elaine's unstable and animalistic psyche and her vast Vajra makes for a very dangerous combination that has her lashing out against an opponent with overwhelming force regardless of the collateral damage. In the first episode alone, She unwittingly kills her only friend by causing an explosion due to her anger at the cyborgs taking him hostage, killing one of the cyborgs by ramming him into a flying plane filled with innocent civilians and her grief-filled sorrow towards her friend's death makes her generate a vast explosion that wipes out Hong Kong without a trace.
- Dumb Muscle: Elaine is a rare Psychic Powers version, officially having the brain of an animal but tremendous Vajra reserves. This is precisely why she's so dangerous, as she has all that power and little higher reasoning to hold her back when she lashes out.
- Dystopia: While already dystopic due to most of the story being set in a cyberpunk society, come episode 4 of the the OVA that switches to a full blown dystopia created as a result of Elaine's self-proclaimed war against humanity.
- Eye Scream: One of various examples of the Gorn in the manga. In fact, it actually happens twice- once to a random Red Shirt in the first chapter, and once to Diana in the third chapter. It also happens a few times in the anime, most noticeably in the first episode where the title mecha uses one cyborg mook's eye sockets as a hand-hold to tear its spine out.
- Faceless Mecha-Mooks:
- Faceless and mecha, yes, but the mook part is played with. In the manga, they're very talkative and other than one beating the living crap out of Diana, their badassery is something of an Informed Ability. However, in the anime, we're given a close-up view of the handiwork of about 20: a hospital hallway absolutely covered in horribly mutilated corpses and body parts, followed by them horribly torturing the only witness. The most recognizable corpse is a nurse, whose head slowly detaches itself and falls off to the right, tendons visibly and audibly just snapping as it does so.
- Double-subverted when the two cyborg gangsters slaughter most of them, including a rear lobotomy by way of drill hands. We only see about three get killed, but they're pretty much effortlessly slain.
- Fan Disservice: Any nudity shown in the manga or OVA is undercut by the characters being in immense peril or they themselves being highly-unpleasant people.
- For the Evulz: The Faceless Goons slaughter a bunch of hospital workers and mutilate a detective for no apparent reason in the first episode. There's also the whole, you know, torturing two innocent girls to make them go nuts and form a large green demon-robot-thing for no reason bit.
- The Future: The third story—which comprises the fourth and fifth episodes—is set in the year 2400.
- Gorn: The OVA contains such delightful sights as the hospital scene, where dozens of people are torn limb from limb, and a scene of children being shredded by helicopter miniguns.
- Grand Theft Me: Elaine becomes the Genocyber by taking over Diana's body and apparently casting out or destroying Diana's psyche in the process.
- Groin Attack: While Elaine is getting groped by one of the teenagers, the other two strip the boy down and get their hands on his genitalia. In the original, his small moans imply they are only groping him, but in the dub, he keeps screaming horrifically in pain, indicating they are squeezing it.
- Harmful to Minors: The entire manga is essentially Elaine and Diana getting tortured.
- High-Pressure Blood: Surprisingly, only one usage is noticed. In the first episode, a mook is given visions of bugs crawling in his head by an unconscious Elaine, which prompts him to tear open his scalp, causing blood to spray all over the surroundings. The rest of the gore is rather realistic, especially in the second episode; the gunshot wounds aside from a head-explosion are disturbingly life-like, and they actually took care to draw the tibia and fibula snapping along with the muscle tearing on an ankle shot.
- How We Got Here: The first chapter of the manga is set at the end of the story.
- Humongous Mecha: The titular Genocyber, also the two agents' monstrous mech form.
- Jerkass: Like you wouldn’t believe due to the nihilistic setting, and these are just two most prominent examples:
- Dr. Reed is a vicious and abusive man to his two adopted daughters.
- The bullies are a group of violent men who are no problem beating and sexually assaulting a young boy and his friend.
- Mayor Grimson Rockwell is the corrupt mayor of the City of Grand Ark, willing to imprison and kill dissidents just to maintain his and the wealthy's grip on the city and its people.
- Laughing Mad: Myra in the third episode.
- Meat Moss: The aftermath of the Alexandria aircraft carrier and its crew, fused together and consciousnesses assimilated by the Vajranoid.
- Mind Screw: There is almost no exposition whatsoever aside from a Mad Scientist explaining how the Psychic Powers work in the beginning of the first episode. This makes the totally unexplained Time Skip between the first two episodes even more bizarre.
- Nice Girl: Myra is quite possibly the only decent person in the entire work, and even then her kindness towards Elaine is only because she deluded herself into believing she was her deceased daughter.
- Painful Transformation: The creation of the Genocyber, supposedly. We see it from within her psyche, and get glimpses of Diana's head on a fully robotic body afterwards, while her screams for the Energy Being Elaine to get out of her head play in the background.
- Person of Mass Destruction:
- Once the two sisters come together to form Genocyber, nothing is left standing. A relatively minor scuffle between it and two cyborg mobsters completely obliterates the entirety of Hong Kong.
- She does the same thing to Karain and then she declares war on the entire world.
- Pink Mist: In a fairly accurate depiction of what a weapon designed to take on military vehicles would do to the human body, a child is shot to pieces by an attack helicopter's autocannon in the series' absolute most infamous scene. It essentially vaporizes everything above his upper lip, with an additional shot showing it blowing his lower leg in half just above the ankle, showing every shard of broken bone, flap of torn skin and strings of shredded tendons.
- Psychic Powers: Called "Vajra", but the idea is the same. It's more akin to the "vectors" from Elfen Lied, in function if not in form.
- Qurac: The Kingdom of Karain in the second and third episodes of the OVA. Their belligerence towards neighbouring countries, after leaving the UN in protest of the organization bolstering its own armed forces, prompts America to send in a carrier strike group (assisted by the Kuryu Group due to the Genocyber's presence in the country). By the end of the third episode, Elaine razes down the whole country in an instant at the beginning of her declaring war on the entire human race.
- Sanity Slippage: Myra, unfortunately, undergoes this in the third episode, being driven to madness from all of the horrible events she has witnessed.
- Shapeshifter Baggage: Genocyber is much bigger than Elaine's human form. Also the two cyborgs in the first episode transform into mecha several times larger than their human bodies and produce weapons that could not have possibly been hidden inside their bodies either.
- Shout-Out: A very weird one. The first episode, in both languages, starts with a scientist asking "What's the frequency, Kenneth?".
- Slasher Smile: Dr. Reed has an absolutely chilling one while slaughtering the hospital with his goons.
- Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: The very bleak views regarding the future of humans and society puts this anime so far down the cynicism side of the scale it's pretty near to being nihilistic.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: An odd case where the series main theme is this, the upbeat "Fairy Dreaming".
- Super-Soldier: The purpose behind Elaine and Diana's existence.
- Throwaway Country: Hong Kong gets vaporized at the end of the OVA's first episode. And near the end of the series, most of the American west coast also gets wiped out.
- Time Skip: The time between the first and second arcs is unspecified, but the time between the second and third arc is about 400 years.
- Transformation Trauma: The OVA practically runs on this and Gorn.
- Unskilled, but Strong: Elaine has tremendous power, but her ability to control it with finesse is hindered by her limited mindset. She simply reacts on instinct, unwittingly causing all of the chaos as a consequence.
- Unrelated in the Adaptation: Professor Morgan, having taken on the name and personality of Kenneth Reed, is the adoptive, horrifically abusive father of Diane and Elaine in the OVA.
- Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Elaine. Her unstable psyche and tremendous power make her a danger to everyone in the world including the very few people who care for her. The first episode has her attempting to escape the twisted role that Professor Kenneth Reed forced on her only to fail due to circumstances that force her to become Genocyber.
- Would Hit a Girl: Doctor Reed has no problem slapping around his adoptive daughters, and the gang have no trouble sexually assaulting Elaine.
- Would Hurt a Child: Like you wouldn’t believe, special mentions go to the helicopters turning children into bloody chunks in the second arc.
