Ken En Ken: Aoki Kagayaki is based on the 2004 Taiwanese role-playing game Xuan Yuan Jian Waizhuan: Cang zhi Tao, whose story is set in the Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history (approximately 770–476 BC). – MAL
Streaming: Crunchyroll
Episodes: 13
Source: Taiwanese RPG
Episode Summary: Yin, Ning, and Zhao are three friends who are inseparable until the Taibai Empire’s army arrives and tears their lives apart. Zhao is enslaved by the empire and he believes Yin and Ning were killed as their village burned to the ground. The Empire’s mechanical constructs are now built partly on Zhao’s back. As a quick learner and an insatiable tinkerer, he uses the Empire’s discarded parts to create his own mechanical toys in secret.
Yin and Ning actually survived their village’s destruction. Though Ning lost her arms, she and Yin make a hardscrabble living putting on acrobatic shows as they travel from village to village. One evening as Yin searches for some water, she hears a strange ringing noise from an abandoned house. Inside she’s confronted by a horrifying snake demon and falls through the rotten wood floor to a hidden room. She obtains a mysterious scroll which grants her the companionship of a summoned familiar in the form of a girl named Yun. Yun has considerable power; she’s able to destroy the snake spirit easily. After doing so she disappears. Later, when the village is attacked by Taibai constructs, Yin is able to summon forth Yun and also produce a deadly sword using the scroll’s power; together, they defend the village and destroy the constructs.
In the meantime, Zhao’s illicit tinkering is discovered by the authorities and he and a young girl he’s befriended are taken into custody. Because Zhao was favored by the chief engineer who has since defected to the rebellion, Zhao has now become a suspect. As he faces the empress to receive his punishment, he realizes that she is in fact the girl who became his friend. She grants him a noble title and the all-important task of studying to become the new chief engineer, putting his considerable talents to use for the Taibai Empire.
Impressions: I didn’t know that it was possible to experience whiplash simply from watching an episode of anime! All joking aside, while the first episode of Xuan Yuan Sword Luminary is 24 minutes long like any standard anime episode, there are so many characters and so much narrative crammed into its modest run time that it feels twice as long and half as comprehensible. I can’t fault a series for keeping a quick pace, especially when so many other anime dawdle and fritter away time that could be better spent advancing the plot. But as they say, too much of a good thing is not ideal.
The show has a pretty standard sort of JRPG (or in this case, TRPG) plot. The protagonists enjoy a relatively quiet, idyllic existence until a horde of power-hungry interlopers arrive to tear their lives apart. While there’s clearly a rebellion brewing in the background – we see a brief glimpse of some obvious soon-to-be-members of the ensemble cast confront a regiment of constructs in a ravine at one point – the three protagonists with whom we spend the most time seem relatively uninterested in participating in such rebellious activities, and I find this to be a little off-putting and confusing. Pu Zhao’s attitude is honestly a little bit incomprehensible to me – though he has a vivid flashback to the night his village was burned and his friends supposedly killed, he seems more than willing, even excited to work as an engineer to benefit the Empire. Whether he’s missing parts of his memory or is just an exceedingly forgiving soul, his characterization seems incongruent with what might be expected considering the circumstances. The girls seem relatively unaffected by their situation as well; though they lament the fact that they have to travel from place-to-place in order to earn money and eat, one might look at how they act and believe them to be on a self-imposed journey. The narrative continues to emphasize the horror and injustice of what’s been done to the characters, but their reactions don’t convey that.
The narrative also doesn’t flow very naturally. Rather than moving from beat to beat in an organic way, each new scene feels like someone saying “and then this happened, and then this happened…” breathlessly and without ever getting to the punch line or resolution. There are a ton of things “happening” in this episode, but each new event seems like something a writer wanted to get over with in order to rush forward toward the next scene. It gives the impression that anything occurring at any one time just isn’t all that important in the grand scheme of the story; there’s no time to stop and take a breath or to appreciate the weight of any one scene over another.
There are aspects of the show’s visual style that I find appealing, though as part of the whole there are absolutely some consistency issues. Some of the character animation is actually very impressive. The first time that Yin and Ning put on their acrobatic martial arts performance was very dynamic and life-like and there are a couple of other fight scenes that were fun to watch. I also think that the character designs look nice and the color scheme and costumes are really appealing. This is by no means a comparison in terms of quality, but my first reaction upon seeing some of the costumes and background settings was that they reminded me of Avatar: The Last Airbender‘s general visual aesthetic – more informed by Chinese rather than Japanese architecture and historical clothing. I’m not going to bag on the CG integration in this episode too badly; it’s certainly not the best, and the CG models (especially the constructs) don’t always look like they exist in the same universe as the characters. To be honest, though, it actually makes some of the scenes feel like cut scenes from an older RPG; considering that this is based on a video game, that might be mildly appropriate.
This is just a criticism I have with some of the Japanese and Chinese/Taiwanese co-produced anime I’ve seen (or some which are just based in China or on Chinese mythology or history), but it bothers me somewhat when the characters clearly speak in Japanese but the on-screen translation spells the name as it would be romanized from Chinese. I use my knowledge of Japanese as a supplement to my anime viewing at times (often with names, and sometimes when translations sound strange or I suspect there’s a joke or pun that’s not coming through properly), so when I hear one thing and read another it can be jarring. This is definitely more of a personal preference, though.
I realize I spent the majority of this review picking the episode apart, but for all that was confusing or illogical about it, I actually kind of enjoyed it. This might be a strange thing to say, but it felt very earnest to me, as if the story itself was someone’s passion project. I suspect if I tried to write a story from scratch and didn’t have a good editor, it might come out something like this. Instead I just write rambling anime reviews for your enjoyment. You can blame my editor (joke’s on you – I’m my own editor).
I don’t know that I would recommend this episode without caveats, but it’s certainly an experience. One of the things I like least about writing these reviews is trying to succinctly summarize each episode; as you can see I definitely failed on the “succinct” part, but it was a good challenge. There’s just so much going on that it’s difficult to keep track of; that makes it hard for me to want to impose it on someone else. I think if you’re in the mood for an anime that feels culturally distinct in terms of visual style and storytelling, you might want to give this episode a try. I don’t have a lot of faith in the series as a whole, however.
Pros: The writing seems very earnest. The general aesthetic is appealing.
Cons: There’s too much activity and not enough time to absorb it all. The disconnect between the translation and the voiced language is distracting.
Grade: C-