As discussed here a couple times already, a second season of Nippon Sangoku always seemed pretty likely. The manga has seen one of the biggest sales spikes of any spring anime, right there with Yomi no Tsugai. As such the announcement of a sequel airing in January came as absolutely no surprise – it may in fact have been planned as a split-cour all along (indeed, the timing suggests it) and the sales boom was just gravy. I would imagine fans of a certain orange Japanese political party are lapping it up, and there are a lot of them in anime’s target demographic age group.

For me this show is a one and done, at least in terms of blogging purposes. It won the Patron poll and I’m not sorry it did, because it was always visually interesting and frequently pretty fun. But the writing totally lost me, and not even for the reason I expected it to (mostly). There were just too many dumb people doing dumb things. And what’s worse, not that smart people being portrayed as geniuses. If you’re the sort of person who thinks spouting random Sun Tzu quotes makes you smart (and sound smart) this is the sort of manga you’re probably going to write.

Can anyone say they’re surprised that Seii walked right into Kaku’s brilliant trap? They were a paper tiger, just here to make the Yamato bros seem brilliant by comparison. The car drop stratagem goes off without a hitch, and the Seii army is duly dispatched. It’s interesting that the one prominent female character in the series is absolutely the most gullible and emotionally fraught commander imaginable. Interesting, but not surprising.

That would seem to segue the story into a war with Buo, the third of the three nations from the title. We haven’t seen or heard much from them but we get a peek in here. Their emperor/leader is named Hojo, and one of his court – Himehito – is apparently a descendant of the Yamato Imperial family (he may or may not be there as a hostage). Buo’s plan was to invade Yamato while they were preoccupied with Seii in Fukui, but the Kaku gambit put a stop to that. These folks dress in modern “Japanese” style clothing, and Hojo doesn’t seem like the impulsive or reckless type.

Taira’s reassertion of control slams a brake on the transition to a Buo war though, it seems. He has Ohga assassinated under the pretext of a Seii attack, and sacrifices two of his advisors for the sake of selling the story. He then imprisons Ryuumon and a bunch of his people (including Misumi), demotes his puppet emperor to officially a puppet, and rips up all the peace agreements Ohga signed with a sword at her neck. It’s back to war with Seii, which at this point is pretty much chum in the water, with Taira marching at the head of a Yamato army that can’t possibly lose.

I gotta say, I don’t really care about any of these people because they never get developed as characters beyond their utilitarian role in the plot. But Denki is at least interesting, and probably the most legitimately clever among the main cast. I was disappointed we never saw if there was any reckoning between he and Tonotsugu, who had to know Denki intended to sacrifice him in service of his original plan. Maybe that’s coming in S2, but maybe not, as character dynamics don’t matter a whole lot in Nippon Sangoku.

Military strategy anime can be fun, and this one was a lot of the time. Its ventures into politics were pretty cringy but thankfully they were less frequent than I feared they might be. I’m just disappointed the show was at its best in the first few episodes, and basically spun its wheels after that. There was a ton of creativity in the production itself, though, and that really saved Nippon Sangoku from being generic or bland. That too seemed to peak early on, and things got a bit more conventional visually after the first few episodes. But it was a matter of degree. A very good production, and one I imagine got as much out of the manga as was there to get.