I wish it was easier to condemn this series...

Because it would make it less heart-breaking to see what happened to it in it's third season. I just recently made a post on the Tokyo board that even Tokyo is better than the identity confused, jumbled OAV. It would have been a lot easier if the entire thing had just been crap, from start to finish. But today I began rewatching the OAV and sadly, I remembered why I liked it so much. The first episode was great, and Ryoko was so cute when she first appeared. I can't deny that the OAV Ryoko was my favorite incarnation of Ryoko. As much as I like Universe's Ryoko and as much as Tokyo's Ryoko was interesting...the OAV Ryoko has a certain mix of toughness and naiveness that makes her dynamic. Which makes it even sadder that these traits were lost later on in the series, eventually coming to the point where all Ryoko offered was slapstick comic relief. I feel like she lost something critical to her character in the 3rd OAV. Ayeka and Sasami changed a lot too. Sasami, while a bit childish, always had a mischievous streak. In the 3rd OAV, she acts like a giggly five year old. I guess it's hard to preserve any subtility to existing characters while you're busy beating your audience over the head with new characters. It just makes me so angry that a series with so much potential went downhill like this.