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. GIFs in this article appear courtesy of Sakugabooru.
It starts with a “once upon a time” and ends on a moonlit stretch of highway. In-between? Pleas for human connection scrawled on pianos, mask-wearing monsters that take the shape of apes and giant insects, switched-off jukeboxes that populate lonely diners, and the Great American West stretching into an endless horizon. Welcome to a world without music and the story of those trying to bring it back. This is takt op.Destiny.
Can I level with you, readers? I don’t get to write things like that paragraph up there often enough. In pop cultural criticism you’re generally expected to get to the point. I have no problem with getting to the point, but it’s a truly rare treat to be able to put the long and short of it in the title. You need to watch takt. op Destiny if you have even the slightest interest in following seasonal anime. The End.
But of course you probably want to hear why, and that’s fair enough. But it’s hard to know where to start when everything about a series’ first episode clicks into place this well. Do we start with the impactful, engaging animation? It defines not only the episode’s two bone-crackingly excellent fight scenes but also numerous little fun character moments too plentiful to count. The visuals in general are just gorgeous.
Shot through the heart, and you’re to blame.
Maybe the worldbuilding? The tantalizing glimpses of the backstory we get here are intriguing; built on the backs of typical tropes but presented with enough style that they feel fresh. One night long ago mystical stones rained from the sky and brought the humanoid weapons known as Musicarts to the world. Another night, long after that, another shower of stones brought a great evil. Somewhere in here there are the music-hating D2s, monsters that hunt down and snuff out music wherever they hear it. This world’s silence is the presumable wake of their actions.
In the sky, with diamonds.
What about the character writing? What initially seems like it might be the bud of a tedious harem setup quickly proves itself to be a fun dynamic I might compare to a trio of siblings who don’t quite get along. Takt, our eponymous lead, is no mere audience stand-in, he’s a music-obsessed weirdo. He’s mother-fucking funny.
I wish you would step back from that ledge my friend.
Cossette, his Musicart companion, is a wonderful little gremlinoid who treats the humans she’s supposed to protect (including Takt) with a vague disdain and cares more about stuffing her mouth with food and killing as many D2s as possible than she does anything else.
Sugar sugar, oh honey honey.
And finally there’s Anna, the put-upon responsible “oldest sister” of the three, in at least a figurative sense. She spends most of the episode either chest-puffingly exasperated with the other two’s antics, or driving her car to and fro to get them out of trouble.
The three just work together to a rare degree. On their own, any one of these would be an alright character. In concert, they’re a riot. It’s a wonderful thing to watch all this unfold.
Takt’s first action in the episode is to park himself at an abandoned piano. An object evidently so unfamiliar to the general populace of the town he’s in that the younger kids present don’t actually know what it is. As he begins playing, conjuring a wonderful, warm cloud of ivory tones, a D2 is summoned by the sound and comes running. We meet Cossette seconds later, who enters the series by drop-kicking the masked gorilla demon dead in the face. Takt then explodes his arm into rose petals, in one of the most wonderfully camp touches I’ve ever seen in anything, which somehow allows Cossette to assume a more powerful, magical girl-esque form. She tosses Takt a baton. He “conducts”, which, through whatever means, allows Cossette to produce a sword that also has a laser cannon in it, which she uses to shoot the D2 dead.
This is all, it should go without further saying, ridiculous, awesome, campy, silly, and wonderful. The entire sequence is the platonic ideal of action anime as a genre boiled down to sixty seconds of perfection.
I will avoid recapping the remainder of the episode in detail. The specifics we get are pretty minimal; our characters are headed to New York, there’s interesting little bits of backstory speckled throughout.
You say New York, New York is dangerous.
But the main focus remains on the spectacle, because as pure spectacle, it doesn’t get much better than this.
Will it ever transcend pure spectacle? That’s the natural question that some may pose as a follow-up. And I do think it’s a valid one, but, at the risk of sounding reductionist, when there is this much sheer, obvious joy in the art, I am not sure there is much to transcend. Beyond even that argument, though, there really is something to the presented idea of art as a necessary salve in a world that has lost its appreciation for it. Whether takt op.Destiny will ever explore that is another question, but I certainly hope it does. Perhaps I’m over-optimistic, but this feels like the start of something big.
Grade: A+
The Takeaway: If you have any interest in following action anime as a genre or seasonal anime as a format, you should be watching this.
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