The Winter 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Sengoku Youko

The world is divided into two factions: humans and monsters called katawara. Despite being a katawara, Tama loves humans and vows to protect them from evil, even if it means fighting her own kind. Her stepbrother Jinka, however, hates humans, despite mostly being one. The siblings are joined by a cowardly swordsman named Shinsuke, who wants to learn how to become strong.

Sengoku Youko is based on a manga of the same name by Satoshi Mizukami. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.

You see? Do you see, Anime Gods? This is what can happen when you give a Satoshi Mizukami adaptation the grace and compassion that it deserves instead of forsaking it to the wastelands of Embarrassingly Ugly Anime Failures. Maybe next time you should listen to all of the desperate prayers that we meek and neglected believers have been sending you…unless, of course, you're just too busy concocting more heinous, soul-sucking isekai wraiths for us to do battle with?

Actually, you know what? It probably isn't wise to go smack talking the Anime Gods when they have seen fit to bestow upon us a show as wild and wonderful as Sengoku Youko, so nevermind! Back to a lifetime of endless groveling, it is. To be honest, it might even all be worth it, even if it only means we get an amazing Satoshi Mizukami anime once every half-decade or so. That simply gives me more time to spread the Gospel of Planet With…

Now, to be fair, it might be a little presumptuous to declare Sengoku Youko “amazing” after just one episode, because it does have some potential flaws to reckon with. The pacing is wicked fast, for one thing, and it might not suit folks who are looking for an adventure that moves at less than breakneck speed. Also, for as much as I loved the world, the characters, and the overall vibes of Sengoku Youko's story, I feel like our ostensible protagonist, Shinsuke, doesn't measure up to the personality of his new companions. That's partially a matter of necessity—he is supposed to be our perspective character, after all—but I'd be lying if I said I didn't wonder whether he added enough to the overall ensemble.

All of that, though, amounts to the smallest of potatoes compared to the fact that this premiere accomplishes its number one goal of kicking an unholy amount of ass and being a generally fun-as-hell-time. The action is kinetic, the visuals are crisp and dynamic, and the pair of Jinka and, especially, Tama are just so goddamned infectiously likeable that you'd swear that a show about the two of them simply flipping through the yellow pages and reading through the entries in alphabetical order would be just as fun. Whenever I sit down to write up and score a preview, the first and last question I ask is, “How much do I want to watch the next episode of this series, based on its first?” In this case, the answer is, “So freaking much, you guys, holy crap. Can it be next Wednesday already? Please?”

Each season there are bound to be a few anime that bore me—anime that are just so by the numbers that I feel no connection to any of the characters and no interest in the story or setting. Then there are those rare few that I actively dislike—that have some aspect that just rubs me the wrong way to the point I want to stop watching. Impressively, Sengoku Youko manages to be both at once.

On the boring side of things, we have… well, pretty much everything. The world is your typical Sengoku Era fantasy fair with samurai and monks hunting monsters. It's nothing that we haven't seen before a million times. This holds true for the characters as well. We have Tama, an idealist girl, and Jinka, her predictably jaded partner. Together, they travel around Japan and lecture the evil humans and monsters they find about lofty ideals—and then often kill them when they inevitably don't listen. This episode has no excitement, no mystery. Just a predictable pattern.

Then comes the part I can't stand: Shinsuke. Shinsuke is our audience proxy—i.e., the person who asks all the questions that the viewers are wondering about. Characters with this role are a dime-a-dozen in fiction. However, few are as annoying as Shinsuke. Shinsuke is a kid filled with delusions of grandeur blundering into a world he doesn't understand. Nothing he does in this episode helps the situation. He is just constantly in the way, adding nothing to the story.

All that said, I don't think this first episode was completely terrible. The action is well-animated and the monster designs are creative—especially the one that appears near the end of the episode. But that's nowhere near enough to even have a chance of getting me invested. In the end, this anime had 22 minutes to make me care about anything in its story. It failed and I am out.

On paper, I should love this. It's got a historical setting, features folkloric elements, and has some of the cutest ears I've seen on a character recently, even if it follows that up with my pet peeve of people having both human and animal ears. But something about Sengoku Youko, in both anime and manga forms, left me a little cold. In the manga, it's a bit harder to pin down, but fortunately, we're talking about the anime adaptation here, and in this first episode, it comes across as trying to do too much too quickly.

That's very likely in service of getting the plot off the ground, and it does look like a relatively complicated one. Set in 1564, the story features what appears to be three main characters: sibling duo Jinka and Tama and wandering samurai Shinsuke. Although not related, Tama and Jinka have an obvious sibling relationship, which I do like – they look out for each other and work together nicely. They also aren't sure they want to let Shinsuke into their charmed circle; Jinka is actively opposed to it based on his actions, while Tama tries to warn him off somewhat gently. Shinsuke, however, has that patented shōnen hero blind spot of not realizing when it might be better for him to bow out. When you pair that with what I assume will be dreams of glory, there's no way he will stop following them. (Even though he's terrible at it.)

Amidst all this, they also have to explain the show's mythology and the sibling duo's goals. That's where things start to unravel a bit because it frankly sounds like Tama is just Amelia from Slayers with fox ears. She has the same tendency to declaim her thoughts to the bad guys and sermonize her belief that she's saving the world one bandit gang at a time, which gets old before the episode ends. Presumably, there's more to this than her simply "liking humans," but nothing here makes me want to find out what that might be. Add in some hideous creature designs and the baffling fact that Jinka's tails are all coming out of the middle of his back rather than his tailbone, and this just isn't grabbing me. It has potential, but with how many of Shinsuke's lines are yelled rather than spoken, I'd rather check out more of the manga than watch further episodes.

Tama's twitching ears sure are cute, though!

After the soul-crushing disappointment of the Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer anime, I had been bracing myself for the worst, if only to avoid the same severe letdown that series embedded into my soul. Thankfully, while the production of this episode isn't perfect, it's far more equipped to capture the charm and energy of Satoshi Mizukami's work and is up to the task of introducing this world of magic, spirits, and lovable dumbasses.

Like anything by Mizukami, this episode moves at a breakneck pace, for good and ill. Where most premieres would save Jinka's transformation for the end, here it's introduced and done with by the midway point, giving us a crash course in the basics of youko and katawara before we even hit the eyecatch. That does rob the sequence of some of its oomph, but it also frees up the latter half of the episode to further establish the cast and their dynamic, rather than dragging out the mystery of Jinka and Youko's natures. Considering this is set to be a long-haul adaptation, that's a smart move, because we need to understand the appeal of these characters and their world if we're going to stick with them for so long.

No particular cast member is all that complicated, but they work very nicely together. Shinsuke is your classic shōnen protagonist, caught up in his desire to get stronger and prove himself, but neither Jinka nor Tama have any patience for his bluster. Likewise, Jinka's misanthropy could quickly wear thin if he was allowed to be all dark and moody, but Tama never humors his edge lord nonsense. Tama, meanwhile, ping pongs chaotically between seeming wise beyond her (apparent) years and like a naive child. Her argument to the bandits to give up their violent ways and form a community of peace and support is a nice one, but also wholly ineffective, neatly showing us that while she's got some good ideas, she's got no skill in communicating them in a way that will convince anyone. Combined, this trio of misfits ends up with an infectious chemistry that leaves room for all of them to develop but can easily carry a story on its own.

The downside is that the sheer speed of this episode means that chemistry doesn't always have time to settle, having to share time with introducing new characters and concepts that don't fully have room to settle. The action scenes are fun, fast, and use some inventive angles to emphasize Jinta's supernatural agility, but they happen so quickly that individual action beats never have time to breathe. They're at least animated well enough to work as spectacle, but even an extra 30 seconds of breathing room would probably do them a lot of good. There are still some nice moments, like how Shinsuke's first win on the battlefield isn't a courageous victory but an act of panicked desperation that sends him running headfirst into a fight he couldn't possibly win. That single sequence already makes his character – and the show's overall perspective on violence – a lot more interesting all on its own.

Overall, the fast pacing is a small problem – especially compared to the last long-awaited Mizukami adaptation we got – and everything else here is more than enough to make up for it. I already want to know more about Jinka and Tama, how they met, and what their end goal of preaching against the violence of the world is. This is one of Mizukami's series I haven't read yet, but the man has never let me down, and I'm thrilled to see where this one goes.