The suspension of student council president, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, has created a power vacuum at Basara Academy. Now, Date Masamune and Sanada Yukimura find themselves vying for the top spot. But they aren’t the only ones with their eyes on the prize. – HIDIVE
Streaming: HIDIVE
Episodes: 12
Source: Game Series
Episode Summary: It’s election season at Basara High School, and the primary candidates are feverishly trying to drum up support as they work to replace the displaced student council president. The rivalries have even filtered down into some of the sports clubs, as the soccer team and baseball team fight over who has ownership of the practice field. As the argument gets even more heated, club leaders Date Masamune and Sanada Yukimura decide to work things out the way they know best – through sports.
Their hot-blooded kickball game exists as a bit of a proxy war for the larger conflicts going on throughout the school. Candidates Tokugawa and Mitsunari use the event as a campaign opportunity as both teams prevent one-another from scoring any points. As the sun sets, Yukimura and Masamune go one-on-one to decide the victor, and with his master’s guidance Yukimura comes out on top. The competition is quickly made moot, however, as headmaster Oda Nobunaga puts an end to the game (and the entire playing field).
Impressions: I’ve mentioned previously about how my knowledge of Japanese history is spotty. Case in point: the Sengoku period in Japan, which essentially marks a time of civil war across the nation, is something I’m only really familiar with through the original Sengoku Basara, and even then primarily just the very basics (since I only managed to get a few episodes in). Some of the names are familiar and I have a general knowledge of what the ultimate results were, but beyond that I’m no expert. I mention this because Gakuen Basara, an anime based on a previous anime and a video game before that, is the type of series that requires at least a bit of familiarity with history in order to get the full effect of what the series is trying to accomplish, and that sub-set of Western fandom is likely not huge.
Previous anime series in the Sengoku Basara franchise took high-level traits of various generals and distilled them into their most simplistic, hot-blooded (and therefore comedically-useful) aspects, creating entertainment out of a set of very specific in-jokes. This doesn’t mean that the anime franchise is entirely without entertainment value to those of us who aren’t historians; a wise person pointed out to me once that, even if we as humans don’t always understand the details of a joke, we can sense whether something has the cadence of one and can still have some reaction to it. As children, one thing we learn to recognize at some point or another is the concept of parody humor – we realize that something is being referenced even if we don’t have the experience of the source material. I think of all the Bugs Bunny cartoons I watched as a kid that contained musical references, Shakespeare parodies, historical comedy… it wasn’t until much later in life that I figured out what those moments were aping, but I could sense something about them that felt referential.
This series, however, is a parody of a parody – a high school AU of a video game adaptation of a real period in Japan’s history. While I think some argument can be made that the fact this series is so far removed from real life means that foreknowledge of the major players is no longer necessary, what struck me almost instantly was the feeling that this episode would have been much more entertaining if I had some more background to grasp the material.
The conflicts between school sports teams serve as a decent analogue for wartime skirmishes, and that’s where I found the episode to be most successful. There’s something fairly humorous about small-scale conflicts, those things that we adults look back on fondly once we’re out in the world, becoming overblown by the comical seriousness of the characters involved. Everything’s a fight when you’re dealing with limited resources, and having to, ugh, share a playing field is out of the question. The gags of this nature were all worth a chuckle or two and this is where I feel like just about anyone could pick the show up and glean a little bit of entertainment.
The issue is, sometimes being able to understand a very baseline joke is unsatisfying when you can tell there’s a more complicated gag hiding just out of reach. One of the reasons why I never got very far into either Gintama or Hozuki’s Coolheadedness had less to do with any quality-related issues (to my understanding, both are considered very good) and more to do with just not really relating to the full spectrum of humor. Especially with Gintama, which is both historical parody as well as general shounen media parody, there was always the sense that the fast-paced slapstick-style material was just a cover for more sophisticated (but still silly) humor. To be clear, this is more a me problem as a viewer than any issue with the anime series itself; just because I feel bad about my lack of Sengoku Period knowledge doesn’t mean that this series ought to change its approach.
Really the one legitimate issue I have with this episode is that its visual rendering is several steps down from Sengoku Basara. Production I.G.’s animation for this series’ precursor did a lot to both capture and enhance the over-the-top masculine attitudes of its protagonists, and I’ve watched the first episode over again several times in the past just to re-live the ridiculous conflict between Yukimura and Masamune. Here, Brain’s Base does a serviceable job with the material, but the animation has a stiff and reserved feeling that’s less impressive. Though a school conflict is certainly smaller-scale than a war for swaths of Japanese territory, the emotions are portrayed as the same, so a similar focus on over-the-top animation would have really helped capture the spirit of the original.
I’ll reiterate that my taste for anime comedy is very strange and specific (just think “Nichijou“) so I think my relationship with this series was possibly doomed from the start. That said, for history buffs, gamers, or Sengoku Basara fans, I really think that this series (assuming subsequent episodes are similar) could be a winner, or at least a fun diversion.
Pros: It has the same hot-blooded action and humor of Sengoku Basara, just on a smaller scale.
Cons: The humor and background content is very specific, which limits its audience.
Grade: B-