English Dub Season Review: HAKYU HOSHIN ENGI Season One

This franchise deserves a better remake…

Overview (Possible Spoilers Below)

Many beloved classics in Anime with good storytelling have often either disappeared into obscurity, made a direct continuation with mixed results like Dragonball Super, or become remade and updated for modern Audiences such as Parasyte and Devilman: Crybaby. However while those two shows knew what to properly update in those stories while keeping the Manga’s philosophical themes of their respective franchises intact, this show stumbles in a lot of places and sometimes moreso than it should…

As somebody who went into this show blind, I had to heavily research in advance the Manga it’s based on just to understand why it has such a beloved fanbase as this is the 2nd time it was ever been adapted into an Anime, while the first series was based on a Manga in 1996 that was localized in 1999 under the name “Soul Hunter”. But as somebody who didn’t even know the existence of this show, You’d think they would keep the consistent tone the original Anime was going for and yet they failed so damn miserably.

Where remake’s director Aizawa Masahiro succeeds in terms of colorful art, scenery and character designs, keeps missing the mark for me in terms of story structure as more often than usual, Unfocused as character subplots are either hard to keep track on, or out of nowhere tends to open an episode to a flash-forward scene at random that would often spoil later plot points in time such as a specific character deaths or a battle that hasn’t even happened yet which hurts not only fans of the Manga, but even fails to create new fans as it leaves newbies confused at what Aizawa was even trying to accomplish.

Where it does manage to succeed were some decent character moments between the protagonists that play with the viewer’s expectations. Especially when the plot begins to unravel as you learn that the line between good and evil is more complex than Taiko thought it would be. Not every hero such as Taiko’s boss is as virtuous as they’re perceived to be, and not every Villain (Bunchu) see’s their actions as evil as they’re simply stuck with their own stubborn convictions. And the main protagonist Taiko will occasionally do something cool but is easily outshined or overshadowed by other supporting characters & allies within his circle which makes him almost pointless in the proceedings.

Our Take

I really wanted to like this series. It had its share of strong character and story moments, but the early spoilers of various plot-points and character deaths keep it from being perfect or entertaining. Not to mention the most unpardonable sin of this show is most guilty of, would have to be the final episode as it completely deviates from its source material in a way that feels rushed and will most likely infuriate anyone who knows what happens in the Manga while leaving newbies both confused and unsatisfied by the end result.

Some Remakes of Manga-to-Anime adaptations are capable of succeeding if more effort was put into finding a proper balance with better examples of this being Full Metal Alchemist:Brotherhood or “Hellsing:Ultimate” where it managed to be true to the Manga by respecting the source material, while acknowledging the previous anime’s fanbase who were most likely introduced to the franchise through its previous anime iteration. But sadly you don’t get any sort of balance to ease newcomers in and the end result is an unfocused, incoherent mess that will leave anyone with a bad taste in their mouth…