On September 24, 2001, Sentai Filmworks released this latest release in the ever-expansive Girls und Panzer anime series. Touted as the beginning of the end, how does it measure up? Let’s find out!

The Plot: Momo Kawashima has failed her University entrance exams and is worried about having to repeat a year. To help her get into a university, she’s immediately promoted to Commander of her school’s tankery team in the hopes of getting a sports scholarship. The first hurdle to overcome is BC Freedom High School, a ridiculously French school with its own problems.

The Opinion: To be perfectly honest, my experience with Girls und Panzer is spotty at best. As such some of the character references flew by me without a lot of context. Despite that, Finale Part 1 offers a fun and exciting time with these enthusiastic girls, and while it’s no masterpiece of anime, it’s bound to entertain especially for long time fans of the series. In particular the CGI work here is actually quite good with reasonably high production values and a nice cel-shaded art style for the tanks that largely avoids many of the more clunky, ugly CGI machines that get shoehorned into anime these days. Really the biggest downside to this release is there in the title. It’s just Part 1 and ends on a cliffhanger. I don’t imagine that will deter fans of this series though.

The Extras: The extras here are the pretty standard clean opening/ending themes along with a couple of trailers. Pretty slim but to be expected.

The Verdict: With I believe five more parts promised (two of which have already been released in Japan), I feel like this would’ve benefitted from Sentai just waiting and putting out the whole Finale series as one set (of course with part 1-3 taking 5 years to come out, who knows how long it’ll take to get the last three parts). Still, it’s new Girls und Panzer and fans should be pleased with what’s offered regardless.