The year is 1863 as the tumultuous samurai era is coming to an end, Japan is split between the pro-shogunate and anti-shogunate factions. The fate of the world is threatened as an army of historical revisionists are sent from the future to alter the course of history. In order to bring these forces down and protect the real history, two sword warriors, spirits who are swords brought to life by Saniwa (sage), rush to Edo. The polite and thoughtful Horikawa Kunihiro and the short tempered yet skillful Izuminokami Kanesada, who served the same master, confront the invading army along with a lively gang of other warriors including Mutsunokami Yoshiyuki, Yagen Toushirou, Tombokiri, and Tsurumaru Kuninaga. As the fate of history lies in these hero’s hands, what meets the blade is yet to be uncovered… ANN
Streaming at: Amazon Anime Strike, Crunchyroll
Number of Episodes: 13
Source: Game
Summary of Episode 1: Kanesada and Kunihiro are two warriors who exist outside of time and outside of the bounds of normal humanity. Both men are warrior spirits summoned from powerful blades by the sage Saniwa, and who have been sent backwards in time into historical Japan to prevent the malevolent Retrograde Army from meddling in and altering Japan’s history. The problem is that they are but two individuals, and the Retrograde Army continues to send more and more demonic soldiers to murder important people. It’s becoming more difficult to accurately predict where these creatures will appear and what effects they might have. It’s during a particularly dire battle that Saniwa makes his appearance in person, and he comes bearing gifts – three more weapon-based warriors to aid in the good fight. This may just tip the scales in the right direction, but only if Kanesada and the gun-wielding Yoshiyuki can get over their rivalry and work together.
Impressions: It’s easy to go into an anime viewing with prejudices, especially when the type of source material on which it’s based tends to have its own set of tropes. The Touken Ranbu game is described as a gender-swapped version of the game Kantai Collection, which anthropomorphizes historical military warships as sexy young women, for the consumption of a mostly male audience. Touken Ranbu does the same for famous swords, turning them into various flavors of attractive men for an interested female audience. Turnabout is fair play and all, but in past cases this sort of thing has resulted in anime that’s almost always kind of goofy and based around a one-joke concept that has to be manipulated all over the place to provide enough basis for an actual story. It’s not meant to provide a pithy plot, it’s meant to show attractive characters doing a thing and to justify merchandising. Which is great and all, but I don’t buy a lot of merch so that doesn’t really resonate with me.
Touken Ranbu is an interesting case in that it’s received two different types of adaptations. There was a more light, comedic adaptation (that I didn’t watch) a couple of seasons ago called Touken Ranbu Hanamaru that seemed to exist in order to get the sillies out of its system, and now there’s this adaptation, which appears to be taking things more seriously and concentrating on the supernatural action elements of the plot. It’s kind of an unorthodox approach to adapting a property to animation, but I think I kind of like it; there will always be people who just aren’t interested in doom-and-gloom seriousness and who wouldn’t watch something where characters are legitimately getting hurt and drawing blood from their enemies, while others just aren’t down with goofy humor and mostly plotless shenanigans. Now that some game companies are using their zillions of dollars to commission and oversee adaptations of their own material (see: Rage of Bahamut), maybe it’s something we’ll be seeing more often.
All that stuff is just background, though. The question is, how does the first episode of this show hold up? I was surprised that, when all was said and done, I was pretty impressed by what this episode has to offer. Anime in general, especially when the background plot points are sort of complicated, has a tendency to info-dump via expository dialog. Even really good series like ACCA:13, for example, can trip themselves up by awkwardly inserting minutes upon minutes of plot setup into character conversations (any time I hear or read “As you know…” in a show, I get a little embarrassed for the writers for being so obvious with what they’re trying to do). There’s a little bit of that here, but it feels more natural than in many cases. Since Kunihiro is a noob sword-guy on his first mission, the guidance he receives from old veteran Kane-san serves to fill us in on a lot of what their general mission is and the workings of the time travel element as it relates to what’s happening. A lot of what we learn comes in the characters reacting to the realities of their situation – the Retrograde Army is going to kill some important dudes in a general location that’s been narrowed-down as much as possible (though not enough – just the realities of trying to predict these things from a couple hundred years in the “future”), and they have to get rid of the enemy without intervening in the normal day-to-day stuff that’s going on. Since they’re from the future, they also have some notes regarding things that historically happened every day so they can cross-check that history hasn’t been altered. It’s a good system, doesn’t try to nail down the time-travel stuff in too much detail (because if you try to “logic” that all out it stops making any sense), and allows us to concentrate on the things that are really important – namely the cool action scenes and other exciting things.
Since adapting the Fate series over several different anime incarnations in the recent past, Ufotable has gotten a reputation for its high-quality cinematic anime productions that present cool, well-animated action sequences with a lot of excitement and polish. Try as I might I’ve never really been able to get into any adaptation of the Fate series, which is unfortunate since I like watching cool action choreography and animation as much as the next person. At least judging by this episode, Ufotable has given us something that retains and shores up their reputation in this area, but without the added baggage of people trying to convince me that Saber is a feminist character (please stop doing this; I will not agree with you). While it’s not quite Sword of the Stranger quality action (seriously – if you love amazing animation, you can definitely watch around the middling samurai-movie plot for the sublime sword fight choreography in this film from BONES), the glistening swords and characters racing across the rooftops is exciting and fun to watch. A lot of care has gone into making this episode look good; if the job of an opening episode of anime is to put the show’s best foot forward and get viewers hooked on its best qualities, this definitely accomplished that.
The other side of this is that there’s a lot of reliance on computer generated components (creatures and settings) to help make many of the shots possible. Anime cinematography has gotten so much better over the past couple of years that this is really almost a non-issue; the hand-drawn characters and the 3D backdrops mesh together really well thanks to judicious use of visual filters and what is probably very conscientious storyboarding and layout construction. In short, it looks great! But similar to a lot of modern live-action films (especially superhero or disaster films that, by their nature, require a lot of effects work) there’s always that subconscious sense that the two pieces don’t exist in the same world, and that can be ever-so-slightly distracting (at least for me). But don’t let that dissuade you – I think this is one of the better examples of what can be done in the modern era when the two animation techniques work together.
I was incorrect in thinking that this show was an Anime Strike exclusive; I learned that Aniplex USA has got it playing on several different streaming outlets, so while you won’t be able to afford to buy it when it’s released on disc, at the very least you’ll be able to scrape together enough pennies to watch it on your favorite streaming service (I added it to my queue on both Crunchyroll and Anime Strike, so we’ll see what service I default to in future weeks).
While I’m usually more interested in quieter, more thoughtful, or “iyashi-kei” or “healing” entertainment, it’s definitely fun to branch out and watch something that does nothing more than get my heart pumping. A well-constructed action series with attractive anime dudes is really the very definition of what gets my kokoro going doki-doki, so there you have it. Even if bishounen aren’t exactly your thing, though, I think if you enjoy swordplay, historical fantasy, or just really cool hand-drawn animation, Katsugeki! Touken Ranbu might have something worthwhile for you.
Pros: The visual presentation is slick and high-quality, the fantasy and time-travel elements don’t bog things down too much, and the characters are attractive.
Cons: There’s a sense that the characters and backgrounds are not of the same world.
Grade: B
