Ikki Tousen – Big Boobs meets Chinese History – Series 1

So True

For whatever reason, I woke up the other day dead on ideas. Life, winter, Olympics (Shaun White, placed 4^th, goddamn it!) and other stuff have strained me. So, with life stretched hard, I decided to open up my backlog and go through some shows I always wanted to watch. For context, I’m going to talk about the first series of this Anime. The year was 2004, I was working at a large retail chain back when you could buy Anime in a store. We had 1 show that I must have restocked a thousand times, it always sold out. That show was Ikki Tousen. I remember seeing a scuzzy guy with long pony tails buy a volume of the Anime, then put it under a documentary and walk carefully to the front and try to buy the show without being embarrassed.

I seriously restocked this DVD a thousand times in my life.

Now I suffer from a lack of caring what people think about me – I watch weird shit all the time. I’m also a huge Takashi Watanabe fan, he has always been one of my favorite series directors, and this show would move forward with a lot of the work he would do in the future. He is the “God Of Action/Ecchi Fan Service” for a reason.

This is the guy who did Slayers, Freezing, and Shakugan No Shana. These are some my favorite action shows, that have fun characters and great stories. Selling figures and merchandise, this show brought a lot of Otaku action figures and merchandise into the world. This particular show has history, one of which being a love it or hate it type of show.

A sample of some of the show’s tamer figures

In the Kanto Region of Japan, seven high schools fight for supremacy. Each fighter has a jewel which has the essence of warriors from the Three Kingdom Era of China. They also have their fate – Hakufu Sonsaku is our main female protagonist, and she is meant to represent the conqueror Sun Ce. In history, Sun Ce would conquest the Wu territory of China in 200 A.D. Basically, the ending of this Anime was spoiled 1,800 years ago… Or is it?

Ikki Tousen has successfully brought the action ecchi fan service shows back into the limelight. I was surprised by the level of perverseness that existed in such an older mainstream anime. As an ecchi fan service show, it’s much more in your face with underwear and fetish stuff than I expected. For its time, the level of fetishism is quite exuberant, after all it is over 10 years old.

Here’s a little list of the fetishes the show plays:

1. Girl with an eyepatch
2. Underage drinking
3. Lesbian rape
4. Spanking
5. Urination
6. Choking
7. Maids
8. Molestation
9. Implied incest
10. Masochism
11. Camel Toe and panty shots everywhere…

I could really go on, but the show summed it up in the second episode when during a fight, the lead female is being choked out as sh talks about how she’s receiving pleasure while pissing herself and then passing out. With her unconscious, a male character makes a joke about jerking off on the other girl’s leg. Yep, Anime! The show appears to have one weird fetish per episode to exploit. Normally the sexuality in these types of shows are played for fun and with tongue firmly in cheek. Ikki Tousen, however, is creepy about it. I know moral detachment is an element in these kind of shows, but there is a point which I have reached, which provides a test of my sanity.

Trying to keep this PG-13. Not working well.

The show lacks any sort of cynicism – they assume that the audience has no moral limits and will just accept the perversion. The series is so unabashedly sleazy in every conceivable way it almost feels like it was made by people who don’t understand moral codes. So, the question is, does the show have any redeeming factors?

Yes, purely in its characters, despite how mean-spirited, dark, and gross this show’s sexual politics are. Hakufu is a charming character in the midst of an annoying world the series takes place in. Also, there’s a nice feeling of satisfaction when she kicks the shit out of people perving out at her. Another refreshing point is that the female characters are the strongest in the show. Hakufu is both feminine and strong and her mom is a charming MILF-type character who wants to have sex with teenage boys (this show can be equally creepy).

There are also homosexual undertones between male characters, I believe as an attempt to even out some of the show’s misogyny. Taking any of this content too seriously will make this show unwatchable to most people, plus, the history stuff is also fun to play along with. If you’ve read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, you’ll get something out of this.

On the animation, man this is a CHEAP show. Real cheap, especially for a fighting Anime. Speed lines and low frame rates everywhere. The character models are underwhelming as well. The story makes little to no sense at all and it spends 80% of its time explaining the plot, yet it’s still hard to keep up with. I re-watched episodes multiple times trying to get certain things and ended up having to read Wikipedia entries just to understand the story.

Despite how cheap it is, it is creative with its budget. Takashi Watanabe’s visual touches are definitely visible here. It seems he was trying to do as much as possible with the very little money he had in this production. If it wasn’t for Watanabe’s direction, the show would be completely unwatchable. Watanabe as a director is very good at using parts of the material and pulling out the characters that are interesting. Also, that intro theme is a wondrous piece of J-pop nostalgia, so bad and dated it’s good.

Well, is Ikki Tousen any good? Nope – it is lurid, scummy trash from start to finish. If you’re trying to argue otherwise, you’re wasting your time. However, while its trashy and tasteless, it’s at least honest about what it’s trying to be and shows off what a great animation director can do with little to work with. It also has a downright silly English dub. That is just plain wacky at times, with especially terrible acting by Ted Sroka. The voice actors understand how silly the material is and they go over the top, hyper serious, every second of the dub. It saved my sanity with it’s silliness. 

Ikki Tousen certainly isn’t for everyone, but if you’re a fan of this genre, it’s worth watching to have context for what modern anime is. Next time, Wastelanders… Series 2 – Dragon Destiny. FFFFUUUCK.

At least it’s having fun and knows what it is.

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