Written for Secret Santa 2016 Look, I’ve watched plenty of ecchi fighting anime where the clothes explode off a girl because someone put chi into a punch. But I don’t think anything prepared me for the middle-of-the-road meh-fest that was Ikkitousen. It doesn’t have the humor-factor that made Tenjo Tenge fun. It doesn’t have the interesting powers that Sekirei or My-Hime brings to the table. It has a rather uninteresting plotline that when looked at has more holes than swiss cheese. I’ll go into more detail below.
Story: It starts off simple enough. There are multiple schools that have earring-wearing fighters, and their entire purpose is to beat the snot out of each other on a regular basis and report to the “boss” of each school. New girl shows up, gets into a battle with her school’s elite and after getting hurt, goes Super Saiyan… Oh, because she’s named for this old-time general from 1800 years ago in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Here’s where the plot falls apart. The characters are named for war generals, and it’s their “destiny” to fight each other, in fact at the end of certain episodes it explains the history behind some of the fights. Ok, so then don’t name your kid after a war general. Problem fucking solved. No more deadly brawls. Or why aren’t there more Hakufu’s if it’s one of the destined winners?. The second plot hole is if this has been going on for 1800 years, surely they would have arenas for the Great Fighters Tournament? I get that they want to have a “street fighter” vibe with the rooftops and parking garage fights, but with 1800 years of fighting, and the Tournament happening every 3-ish years, you’d think they’d sell tickets to this or something. Oh, and the plot take two full episodes to have onsens and pools because the fanservice wasn’t ridiculous enough. Oh, and rape, a couple times. Never shown, just implied, but still.
Sound: The opening is so very late 90’s/early 20s. A mix of jazzy Japanese and English followed by fast paced Japanese rapping. In my opinion, it was as well done as other combinations I’ve heard, and it wasn’t very catchy. The ending is slow and almost feels like it belongs in a romance drama. I don’t think it matched the pace and plot of the anime. I didn’t find Hakufu’s voice acting all that great, and several of the background characters had zero effort put into their voices. The sound affects aren’t bad, a bit exaggerated at times. Lastly, the background music is a tad campy; it fits the overly campy plot, though.
Animation: I will say this for the animation, it’s consistent. The proportions of the characters don’t drastically change from scene to scene, like I’ve seen in other fanservice-y anime from the same era coughDearScough. However, the fighting scenes are a lot of still frames or poorly animated moves. A lot of the animation budget seems was for panty shots and almost-nip-slip. Does the animation hold up to today’s standards? God no. Does it hold up to the standards of the early 2000’s? It’s about average for the time period. I’ve seen better, I’ve seen worse. Looking at other titles in J.C. Staff’s repertoire from the same era (Ai Yori Aoishi, Karin, Zero no Tsukaima), it’s pretty standard.
Characters: Here, let me show you what the main character sounds like 99% of the time.
And the rest aren’t much better. There are maybe 2-3 characters of this entire show that I actually still liked towards the end, and they had bit parts. I didn’t get a chance to hate them. The main cast was so unlikeable and unfunny that they weren’t able to balance out the ridiculous plot. Due to the plot having a “fight your destiny” vibe, I was hoping for character development on some level. I know, pretty dumb to hope for with this mix of genres…
Should you watch this? I’d say no. Yes, it’s one of the longer running ecchi-fighters, but there are better series out there to spend your time on.