Amatsuki Episode 1 - This Rainy Night’s Moon
OP - Casting Dice (Yuuki Kanno) - there are strings. There are spoilers (zomg special fox deity powers!). It’s an alright OP, I guess.
ED - Namae no Nae Michi (Kaori Hikita) - within four chords I could tell you that Yuki Kajiura wrote this song. Watch the spotlight move! Watch the parasol spin!
You can tell a show is fast paced when someone loses an eye before the first ten minutes are up…
Tokidoki Rikugo (or Toki to his friends, if he actually has any - Amatsuki does not dwell on setting the poor boy’s backstory up for long) is forced to go to a “virtual reality” Edo museum when he flunks a history test that he doesn’t really give a toss about. After bumping into another pupil from his school, Kon, Something Strange Happens - the VR glasses don’t seem necessary any more, as Toki finds himself in ACTUAL Edo-era Japan.
Well, if Edo-era Japan had giant chimerical monsters and freaky high-pitched voiced be-robed beings saying cryptic things to you, that is.
Said monster takes a swipe at Toki and damages his eye somehow, producing an awful lot of blood and little in the way of exploding eyeballs or lacerations. It turns red, it’s obviously important, I’m happy to roll with it for now. The most important thing is, of course, that Toki gets rescued by a sword-wielding lady and allowed to recuperate - and who does he wake up to find but Kon, who has apparently been in VR Edo Land for 2 years now and has learnt to grow his hair to bishounen lengths as a result. He, like Toki, was attacked by monsters on arriving - whilst Toki can no longer see out of his red eye, Kon has a wound to his right arm rendering it useless. After some exposition about the world they are in, monsters etc. Kon gets beaten up by the sword lady, Kuchiha, for causing a commotion blah blah blah padding padding padding, and we end up with Toki torn between being happy at being out of his old, boring life and tormented by the harsh realities of Edo.
The worst thing to say about Amatsuki is that it’s very, very derivative. Of course you can’t really use the person-in-another-world plot and make it especially original, but it’s not really the plot that’s the “problem” - it’s the look of the show. Despite using a different overall director, the art and animation directors have conspired together to make this show look as much like Shounen Onmyouji as possible, and it’s very offputting as the setting of the two shows is so similar. The use of Kaori Hikita singing a Kajiura ending song also suggests that Studio Deen are taking a lot of inspiration from their previous show’s style - not that it’s necessarily a bad thing (the decent animation for the action sequences has carried through, for instance) but I find it a little disconcerting.
Otherwise… well, the show’s fine really based on one episode. There’s nothing particularly exciting about it but it was pleasantly surprising in that it wasn’t totally naff, the characters weren’t annoying (although perhaps a little thinly sketched given the breakneck pace of the introduction) and I will probably give the next episode a shot.
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