English Dub Season Review: Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer Season One

Based on the Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Satoshi Mizukami. Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer (Or “Hoshi no Samidare” In Japan) follows College student Yuuhi Amamiya’s monotonous life when its turned upside down with the appearance of Sir Noi Crezant, a talking brown lizard claiming to be a knight of justice. Noi further elaborates that the world is in peril and threatened by the mage Animus who wishes to annihilate it with his Biscuit Hammer, an enormous structure suspended in Earth’s orbit. As the newly appointed Lizard Knight, Yuuhi must fight alongside other Beast Knights to protect the princess and save the planet from destruction.

Unimpressed by the prospect of risking his life, Yuuhi continues his day as usual until a golem creature created by Animus suddenly confronts him. Yuuhi is instantly overpowered, but his neighbor, Princess Samidare Asahina, luckily rescues him. To his surprise, Samidare’s intention starkly differs from Crezant’s; instead of saving the world, she aims to destroy it with her own hands. Captivated by her firm ambition, Yuuhi resolves to become stronger and help Samidare realize her goal. As the pair continues to fight against Animus’ golems, Yuuhi finds himself gradually gaining an interest in life but will the chains of his past trauma restrain him from progressing further?

On the technical side, this anime series was produced by NAZ and directed by Nobuaki Nakanishi, with Satoshi Mizukami, the original author, and Yūichirō Momose writing the scripts, Hajime Hatakeyama designing the characters, and Takatsugu Wakabayashi composing the music. The first opening theme song is “Dawn Light” by Half time Old, while the first ending theme song is “Reflexion” by SpendyMily. The second opening theme song is “Be the Hero” by Raon. While Sano Ibuki performed the second ending theme song “Zero” from Episodes 13–17 and 19–24, while the Pillows (Famous for doing music for the FLCL franchise) performed the third ending theme song “Poem of Babylon Angel” for Episode 18.

At first glance, Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer (Or “Hoshi no Samidare” in Japan) looks like your average show. However, in reality, the show is a mixed bag of creative ideas. But the heart of the story is about a college kid named Yuuhi who is just your average boy. However, he soon gets chosen to destroy something called “the biscuit hammer” Which strangely looks like a continent-sized cartoon mallet that forebodingly looms over the planet yet normal people can’t see it unless they end up having magic powers like Yuuhi. And this is further explained/confirmed by a knight that got turned into a brown lizard (Noi) who has chosen him to be one of the people to help destroy the biscuit hammer and protect a “princess” who just so happens to be Yuuhi’s next door neighbor, Samidare.

What frustrated me the most when watching this was that while the writing was decent, it sadly shot itself in the foot by the ugliness of the production. The cast was big and not many of the characters were well-developed outside the main two. But when it does delve into character development, it delivers in spades even if it’s in small doses. It’s not the typical childish view of growing up that most authors have in most teen stories within anime or manga titles.

Overall, if this adaptation got released a decade or so ago, it would’ve been regarded as a classic even if it looked the way it does today. The animation and look of the show aren’t very engaging and the anime solely relies on its writing and characters to carry it which is not entirely a bad thing as those aspects are very enjoyable. But it does make it hard to recommend in this age of well-animated shows and films that came out around the same year that had great-looking animation and better production values. While I don’t see a Season 2 in the future, I do hope someday if they remake this, they’ll deliver in equal parts writing and animation if they wanna get this right the second time.