Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
What happened to this season?! Several days of premieres of shows that were outright bad, questionable on a premise level, or mixed experiences at best might’ve lead anyone to conclude we were in for a weak season. But between takt op.Destiny, the still-airing The Heike Story, now, Sakugan, it may be lining up as the year’s strongest.
That’s a big call, and it’s not one I’m willing to make with total confidence. There are definitely ways Sakugan could “go wrong”, as we’ll get to, but it’s off to a hell of a start. The two are hard to compare, but while it’s less of a well-oiled machine than takt op, it’s looser and lets itself sprawl a bit more in its opening episode. That’s neither a strength nor a weakness, merely a difference, and time alone will tell which approach is more effective in the long term.
So what’s it about? Well, the very short version is we’ve got your sort of underground post-apocalypse-y setting here. It will garner comparisons to Made in Abyss and last year’s surprise near-masterpiece DECA-DENCE on setting alone and they’re not entirely inaccurate ones. Our protagonists live in an underground colony called Pinyin, connected to a network of others via a tunnel system, and with vast areas of uncharted land in-between. Those who explore those areas, and confront the dangers within them, namely the monstrous kaiju that infest them, are mech-piloting adventurers called Markers.
And about those Markers; our lead here is nine-year-old Memenpuu.
She is a child genius, has apparently graduated college(!) and has her own job(!!). She wants nothing more than to be a Marker. She is opposed here by her father, our other lead, Gagumber.
The two’s opposed but charming dynamic carries the bulk of the episode, and there’s some really great character animation sprinkled in here. Things get more serious as the episode marches on, with Memenpuu receiving a mysterious package in the mail that contains a photograph of an equally-mysterious white tower stretching into the sky that she’s had recurring dreams about. Even stranger, the package is signed as being from the mythical Marker Urorop, and contains what appears to be a map. Gagumber and Memenpuu’s relationship takes on more serious, strained shapes here, but things remain largely lighthearted for most of the episode.
Indeed, this all seems to be setting up a charming, fun-filled adventure. And Sakugan hammers that idea home enough times over the course of this episode that the astute might start to get suspicious. So it’s here that we have to talk about the elephant in the room, because as it turns out, those suspicions are very well-founded.
In the episode’s final third or so, Pinyin is attacked. A kaiju somehow breaks into the city and wreaks havoc, the local militia try futilely to fend it off. There’s a pretty excellently-animated sequence wherein Gagumber, Memenpuu, and secondary character Lynda all flee from the kaiju’s wrath. Any levity this might imply is immediately dashed when Lynda and her own father, Walsh, hop in a mecha to attempt to fend the creature off, and are almost immediately killed.
On paper this doesn’t sound so bad, but Lynda and Walsh serve as a secondary duo throughout the entire episode, so it’s clearly intended to be a shot across the heart. It works, too. Even setting aside my own reaction, one can easily find folks all across social media already mourning the characters.
This ties back into Sakugan‘s already-evident main theme; what can the older generation do for their children? When they want to strike out on their own, as Memenpuu does here, even after seeing her friend and that friend’s father incinerated before her very eyes, what can their parents do to support them? Sakugan offers no simple answers, at least not yet, but it is worth knowing what kind of anime this is going to be. Because the answer seems to involve fewer fun-filled adventures and more painful coming-of-age than one might initially assume.
Which, to be clear, is fine! Sakugan does all of this quite well. It’s legitimately a very good first episode. But speaking only for myself, I know I tend to fall off of these sorts of anime rather quickly. Something about the darkness that tends to shade these sort of tales just bounces off my sensibilities. So how likely I, personally, am to stay on board will depend on what we get aside from the trauma and crushed dreams. The first episode is willing to display a lot of character, but the question of how much of that is a feint remains an open one until the second premieres.
All this said; what I think is not always what people in general will think. So while my own opinion of Sakugan has yet to fully take shape, this is absolutely going to be one to look out for in a more general sense. Keep digging, genius girl. You might just find gold.
Grade: A-
The Takeaway: If you’re not innately put off by the prospect of seeing a very young character put through the emotional wringer, this is worth following. If you highly value that kind of story, you should definitely be following it.
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