Anime: Licensed by Royal

If James Bond was silly instead of classy, he would probably be a main character in this series.

For some reason US companies sometimes license series when they haven't even aired yet. Usually those are pretty stupid anime. They did that with Gun x Sword too and that one was really nothing interesting. I don't know why they always license series which are hardly worth watching, but they must have some reason for it.
Licensed by Royal is one of those titles which is both not interesting and also hadn't aired when it got licensed.

Animation: Sloppy animation.

I usually don't rant about animation besides sloppy CG, since all anime have at least some positive points in the animation and I like to balance things out. But this series does not have anything positive to point out.
The faces are undetailed, so all emotions are all tried on faces with the least effort. One could discuss about how it is the specific style, but even with such a style the faces are devoid of emotions (and noses) when it is not a close-up. The same goes for the backgrounds; those are often bland, blurry and don't seem to have been getting any attention when it came to the quality control. At first I thought it was due to the encoding of AonE, but after looking closely, I realized that they could not screw it up that bad.
At one point in episode 7 they have a couple of secretaries typing on their typewriters (not even PC's?). They do not even have a screen where they can see what they write! Nor is there any paper coming out, like in old typewriters, which could have explained something (but why would a 2002 anime have … typewriters?).

Sound: Plenty of BGM.

The music is extraordinary. There are always some songs floating around in the series, of which most are vocal songs in English. I have to say that the music is enjoyable, even though the music isn't really great - actually, the music is rather silly. Although I do have to agree that it gets on your nerves not much after the first half, it is still pretty good for them to actually have vocal songs throughout the entire show.

Voices
The voices seem pretty much okay for most of the characters. There is a lot of English, not only in the songs, but also in dialogues. Sometimes this is perfectly understandable, but most of the times the speech is hardly decipherable. I always end up rewinding to see if the subs really matched the voices and most of the time I'm like 'Oh, so that is what he was trying to say' when I can match the subs to the rubbish the voice suddenly started to shout.
There are also a couple of annoying characters which are mainly annoying because of the extremely annoying voice they have. I know they're being used as comedy relief, but still … sometimes you just don't want to hear such voices.

OP/ED
The OP is in English and sounds a bit like a bad openingtune for Cheers. It's a song sung by Billy Preston (written by Scott Matthew it seems, also known from the GitS:SAC ED), but it sounds like a mix of jazz/country song which only indicates that this series is a silly show. The same goes for the rest of the music as well, so while it is a good thing they did so much vocal songs, I'm not entirely happy with the songs they used.

Story: Is it a parody or is it just a bad copy?

It is obviously a sort of parody on the James Bond-type of movie, seeing the characters, their names and the entire setting. Mr. Penny-Lane is quite a good example of Ms. Moneypenny, for instance. But other than the parody-aspects throughout the entire series, the series is literally going nowhere. Which makes me wonder whether this is a parody by itself and nothing more than a parody, or did this series try to be something on its own as well. I think that it failed in both cases, leaving not much more than a bad parody.
Halfway through the series there is some plot concerning Angel, and while it gets explained later on in the series after it had struck a few episodes, I can't really say that it was anything interesting. As if they just needed something to hold the series together with, because otherwise it would have been single episodes without a connection. And when every single episode ends the same with Rou and Jack both putting up a disguise, then things get boring really fast.
I do have to admit that I was curious about how the last episode would end, simply because they managed to make things a little more serious and interesting. But I also have to add that, at the end of the series, they actually kind of leave the ending open as well.

Characters: The characters were as mysterious to the watcher as they should be to their enemies.

Which actually means that you hardly get to know the main characters Rou and Jack. Of course, you know who they are and how they act, but you hardly know anything about their past, about their own feelings and how they feel about each other and the rest of the team of Cloud7.
In the end, the characters were as mysterious to me (the watcher) as they were for the characters who they were supposed to fight. And really, they weren't funny enough to make this a comedy, they weren't serious enough to make the series a mysterious actionseries either, so in the end they failed to be anything much but filler-characters themselves. You don't get attached to them, you don't even care much about them, much less about the supporting characters.

Value & Enjoyment: I have no clue why I even watched this - or what I watched.

I think this series really has next to nothing to offer. The characters are not appealing, the story is pretty much non-existent and the comedy is too sloppy to be funny as well. In all aspects this series could have appealed, it failed in all possible ways.
It is a nice thing to sit through if you need to kill some time, but don't expect to get anything of enjoyment out there. Just like I said, I watched it, but I have no clue what I watched. I had to rewind to see what the highlights were and as you can see from my review - there were very few of those, so forgettable they are.

Licensed by Royal is the story of two secret agents solving various cases for Her Majesty.

Animation:
I found the animation very lacking. Very little face expressions, many stills and a non-typical style compared to other animes.

Sound:
While the background music itself wasn't that bad, it was way too loud, which made it pretty hard for me to hear the dialogues and too distracting for my taste. The music wasn't the "typical" anime background music either, but more western oriented. I liked the OP, although it's not in Japanese but in English. Thank god it's performed by an American and not a Japanese singer ;-)

Story:
Plain boring. You thought the could come up with some nice James-Bond style story, but they miserably failed. Basically all cases are solved by using various disguises so they can get close to the bad guys and arrest them. There was a bigger story arc which went through the later eps, but I didn't found it interesting as well and not too coherent either.

Character:
Nothing special. There's no noticeable character development of the heroes. Can't really say much about this aspect.

Value:
Well, I found it boring, so I deleted the eps right after watching them. I guess one time is enough...

Enjoyment:
I found this series mediocre at best. Looks like Pioneer wanted to create a series aimed at the american/european market, but failed. I can't really recommend it. If you have nothing else to watch and are a fan of the super agent genre, it might be worth a try.

This review is based on the fansubs by AonE.

CU,
lamer_de