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For those of you who don’t know, this is a show that was created by the same manga-ka that created Ranma ½, Inuyasha, and Lum. I had actually never known of this show until I was just glimpsing at a list of dubbed anime. Having said this, the show is a bit odd in comparing it to the shows she normally does.

The story follows two characters the most part, a man and woman who have eaten mermaid flesh and so have gained immortality. Throughout the story, you can see the different changes of the world as years go by. In a way, this is somewhat like RIN: Daughters of Mnemosyne in that sense. A lot of times though, they do look back on Yuta’s life, sometimes making it a bit hard to understand exactly what is going on when we pop back suddenly into a new time frame. Once in a while, it is hard to pick out what is looking to the past and what is actually in the ‘present’ day time frame since some places never change. It makes me wonder why they didn’t just show Yuto’s life threw up till when he meets Mana instead of flopping back and forward.

The stories not only follow these two as they travel around but also seem to be cases in where others have been affected by mermaids weather eating their flesh, having ashes dumped on them, had drunken mermaid blood, or even just had someone they knew eaten by a mermaid. We get a sort of case file of the mysterious world of the mermaid powers which reminds me of shows like Petshop of Horror and detective anime, just a little more based on one specific piece of the mermaid mythos.

The idea of mermaids being able to give birth is actually a really cool thing to see and I love how they put that into the show. It’s awesome and I have never really seen that happen in a show so it makes it rather different then other mermaid tales. Another really interesting thing is that the went off the normal folklore of the mermaids looks, having them be beautiful women sometimes and then giving them a monstrous look when they are fighting someone. Most of the time now a days, we look at a mermaid and we want to see the beautiful women with flowing hair but in reality, the story of a mermaid was placed as them being true monsters, something to be feared instead of loved.

The artwork is pretty much the same as Inuyasha and all her other shows. It’s pretty much the same in how the eyes and coloring is. There are some things that seem a bit off in their faces, when looking straight on, they look rather flat but when looking at them in profile, they show more to the face. Other things like details on the boats and water is pretty good. The scales of the mermaid seem to be different when you look between when they have them on and when they wash up on shore. Though it feels like a show that had cut corners on many pieces of the animation, it was a normal thing for them to do stuff like that when this first came out so I still give them props for making it pretty enjoyable.

The voices are really bad in the English dub. Non of them actually match the lip flaps. As I kept watching it, the Japanese voices did grow on me but that didn’t help the lip flap problem which did get a bit better as the story kept going but never seemed all that good. For it being a 2003 show (No, I don’t know when the actual dubbing took place) I would of thought it would have been just a little bit better. Music is so so, not great, and again, not that bad.

A small note to anyone looking for the manga, it is under the name Mermaid Saga by Rumiko Takahashi.