Tensui no Sakuna Hime – 01

To be honest I’m trying to remember the last P.A. Works series I really liked. Skip & Loafer, Ya Boy Kongming, Appare Ranman – all pretty decent but nothing I’d say was all that memorable. We’ve come a long way from the days when I would have ranked them among my favorite studios. Their penchant for doing things differently (until Kongming they’d never done a manga adaptation) always worked in their favor. But their original stuff has taken on an increasingly generic pallor over the years, and I just don’t sense the creative spark or visual ambition that I once did.

In fact, the last PAW show I was really enthusiastic about was probably the second season of Uchouten Kazoku, a novel adaptation quite different from anything PAW had done before or has since. And it was directed by Yoshihara Masayuki, who’s at the helm of Tensui no Sakuna Hime. As such I really had to check this one out – especially since, as I always say, the most important staff on an original series is the writer. And the writer here is Hanada Jukki, one of the most experienced and respected in the industry. That’s mostly with adaptations but he has done some good original work too (like Mahoromatic).

My first impressions were not good – a flood of CGI, which feels totally out of place in a P.A. Works show. That receded, thankfully, but on balance I have to say Sakuna Hime doesn’t have the lush visuals one might hope for in a P.A. Works series about the Gods in their Heaven. The main Kami in focus here is the titular one, a spoiled little harvest goddess who’s lived off the largesse of her missing parents’ rice harvest and refuses to do any work herself. She has a familiar named Tama who looks like a fat little flying dog, and a best friend named Kokorawa who’s more hard-working and smarter but lower-ranked.

Sakuna’s life of ease literally goes up in smoke when a group of humans cross the Bridge of Heaven (which appears and disappears seemingly at random) in search of respite from grim conditions in the Lower Realm. This is all very clearly based on feudal Japan but for whatever reason very slightly tweaked (the country is called “Yanato” and the Kami’s names are slightly changed from actual Shinto ones). After her carelessness causes the rice storehouse to burn down, Sakuna is exiled by boss Kami Kamuhitsuki to the Isle of Demons – with the trespassing humans – to learn the value of hard work.

While on balance I find this premiere fairly indifferent, I do sense some possibility here. This premise in the hands of this triumvirate of studio, director, and writer, should be something notable – on paper at least. But that may be the nostalgia factor talking. I never really got caught up in the story and none of the characters made a big impression. But there a few individual moments when a little spark flew, and I feel like I owe it to myself to at least see if the pedigree will start to shine through.

Kami no Tou: Tower of God Ouji no Kikan – 01

Ah, Tower of God. What a strange relationship I have with this series. It’s my favorite manhwa without a doubt, though that’s not a terribly high bar. But I dropped it so long ago that I remember very few details these days. And even the anime ended three years ago more or less. As such a lot of this premiere was a blur to me – bits and pieces trickled back but my memory of names and faces is a patchwork quilt at best. ToG is just such an incredibly ponderous and bloated story with so many characters that I just threw in the towel (and it’s still running – I shudder to think what it’s like now).

Still, for all that, there were parts of the series that I genuinely loved. And the chunk of it that this season should cover is before it really jumped the shark hard – there’s some great stuff still to come, and great characters still to be introduced. The first season from Telecom Animation Film was pretty indifferent as an adaptation. This time around we have a new studio (The Answer Studio Co Ltd. – way too many periods in that name) and director (Takeuchi Kazuyishi). But I’m frankly still not expecting a lot production-wise – I’m quite surprised a second season was even greenlit to tell you the truth.

As we rejoin the story Bam has survived being pushed off the edge of the tower by that pusbag Rachel (I remember that much), and Yuri has headed home to Daddy Jahad with Blue April in tow. Cue a timeskip, and we join a blond-haired pretender named Ja Wangan on the 20th floor, preparing to take the E-Rank exam not for the first time. He’s visited by debt collectors (as you recall the exam fees are pretty exorbitant), and it’s made clear that this is the last chance to pass, or else it’s organ harvest time for Ja.

We get into some low-key scuffling in the first phase of the exam, centered around guess who. Our little protagonist has grown taller and his hair longer, and he’s clearly been changed by his experience. A bunch of other new faces (one of whom recongizes Bam’s cloak as belonging to the feared crime organization FUG) get introduced too, whose names you can look up if you’re curious. This is still the good part of the manhwa but I still get exhausted just from thinking about all the development and meandering turns still to come.

I’m going to have to have to a good think about whether I want to cover Kami no Tou this time around. I do have a lot of fond memories of the next couple of arcs, but I just don’t have the patience – or blogging time – that I used to. It’s such a relentlessly busy story that even the good parts are exhausting to write about. I guess I’ll wait and see how I feel after another ep or two, once the rush of premieres has slowed and the season settled into a groove.