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Big Eyes, Small Mouth, the fan favourite generic anime game at a mere 96 pages. What more can be said. Designed to emulate the fun, fast paced nature of most anime, it succeeded accept for two tiny flaws. The one page mecha creation rules of the original book were virutally insulting, but this was corrected admirably in Big Robots and Cool Starships and Cool (which was 16 pages larger). The other was the game was more geared towards creating the cast of Ranma 1/2 than Your Under Arrest, making it hard to make interesting low power characters. Hot Rods and Gun Bunnies (at 128 pages, larger than the rule book) fixes that handily.

While the book is geared towards the super cars and gun toting babes genre, virtually all of it is usefull for normal BESM games too. Some new Attributes and Defects, from Significant Other (the cliched sick grandmother) to Gun Bunny which at various levels allows the character to do such things as draw and shoot in the same round, rattle off vast amounts of firearm knowledge at will or pull Chow Yu Fat's "I always leave the last bullet" trick from 'The Killer' The BESM Skill System (first printed in Dominion Tank Police) also appears, giving more interest to low level characters while not making BESM that much more complex.

Guns and cars are covered Chapter 3, using generic templates instead of massive lists real world guns and cars, with various ammo and add-on features available for customizing. Next comes expanded rules on genre style combat and vehicle combat rules. Chapter 4 deals with campaign suggestions and game seeds, from fluffy police comedys to gritty, sex filled HK heroic blood shed style games. Like Big Robots, Cool Starships, the book also features a sample adventure 'Dangerous Toys' dealing gun running between Detroit USA and Windsor Canada. Of interest it also has a section on gun and car ownership laws for the gun mad US, normal Canada and ultra-restrictive Japan.

Compared to earlier BESM releases it doesn't seem so much a fan-produced game, looking much slicker and with more art from fans almost breaking into the industry or who've just broken in. Though there are still clues to it's a small company production such as having it by Guadians Of Order on the spine.

A great little book that does BESM and Guardians of Order proud.

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)