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.
You who lament this barbarous age; rejoice! Sengoku Youko is pretty good, the work of cult mangaka Satoshi Mizukami will not all be turned into anime sludge in the vein of the previous project to bear his name, the absolutely tragic anime adaptation of The Lucifer & Biscuit Hammer.
To be realistic for a moment, after that debacle, the bar is basically on the floor. Sengoku Youko is playing with a stacked deck, with both the greatly hedged expectations coming off of the last Mizukami adaptation and the fact that Sengoku Youko the manga is probably the least-read of Mizukami’s major works. (It’s the only one that I haven’t read, in fact.) As with Biscuit Hammer, it’s also on the old side to be getting an anime adaptation now, having started back in 2007 and wrapped up almost a decade later, but historical fantasy is a timeless genre on this medium, so this is not really any kind of issue. Given all this, it has a much better chance at making a favorable first impression than its ill-fated sibling. Still, even that in mind, Sengoku Youko’s premiere is just a solid slice of historical fantasy, featuring a great dynamic between its three leads, a couple funky monster designs, and some really nice action animation.
As for what it’s actually about, our setup here is pretty simple. Set in the mid-1500s, during the massively unstable sengoku period (hence the name), Sengoku Youko follows a pair of spirits, the short fox girl Tama Youko [Yuuki Takada] and her ‘little brother’ Jinka Yamato [Souma Saitou], as they fight evil.
Tama is the one with the adorable fox ears.
No, literally, that’s their whole thing, per Tama’s instruction. (Jinka, who is bigoted against the humans they often end up saving, only seems to go along with it with great reluctance.) They’re also joined by a cowardly ronin, Shinsuke Hyoudou [Ryouhei Kimura], who is transfixed by the vast strength that Tama and Jinka display, and hopes to somehow get stronger by going along with them.
The first episode sees Tama break up a bandit ring that turns out to be led by….ah, this.
This leads to some of the episode’s best visuals, in particular a very striking sequence where Tama and Jinka combine their powers, turning Jinka into a white-haired fox warrior that trounces his opposition fairly easily.
A later confrontation with a strange monster menacing some Buddhist monks ends on a cliffhanger, providing a nice hook to get folks coming back next week. That said, I have a suspicion that all is not as it appears in Sengoku Youko. Even if it stays episodic like this, it will probably be a fun time. However, given Mizukami’s usual M.O.—a desire to take genres apart and then stitch them back together in a different shape, exhibited with battle shonen in the Biscuit Hammer manga, reincarnation fantasy in Spirit Circle, and mecha anime in Planet With—I really doubt that it’ll be content to stick to any kind of formula. Time will tell, but I’m interested in finding out, and I can give this first episode no better endorsement than that.
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