Hakyuu Houshin Engi

Hakyu Houshin Engi is every generic fighting tournament shonen anime in a nutshell. It hasn't even masked itself to look like something else. It simply does not care, and frankly neither do I.

Most viewers will not like this anime for two simple reasons: It's not very good and most of all, not very enjoyable either. It walks the path of mediocrity without even trying to be anything. The outcome is very bland and a total lackluster.

This adaptation did surprisingly many questionable choices. First and foremost is the lack of introduction. Viewers are quite directly thrown into a random world around random characters. Nothing ... is explained, things just somewhat are there and stuff happens because it does. One could say that this is the right approach considering how direct and linear the story and narrative ends up being. Still, the lack of build up, world building and events that in generally offer reasons to care about any characters - make the series not really worth of caring about and most of all not very memorable. On top of that, nothing really happens during the whole run. Episode after episode, I was waiting for the series to go somewhere, but all it did was end without accomplishing much.

The characters are hardly worth of talking about. It seems like the author was afraid he would create shonen stereotypes and copy-pasted character macros from other shonen series, so instead he tried to abandon all these things. The outcome is not very pretty. Practically all characters are so empty that they aren't even worth of being disliked.

The animation is a lackluster as well. Most living things look lifeless and sturdy objects. In most lazily animated series, the illusion of animation is done with camera work. Rollovers, zoom outs and that kind of small tricks typically focusing on backdrops. In this series, the character movement is often executed in similar fashion. Instead of the camera moving from place a to place b on solid speed, it's the still character macro drawn on a piece of paper that is moved from place a to place b. It looks cheap and weird. In all honesty, the animation got miles better during the run, but the sad part is that the hideously executed movements from the first half of the series are among the most memorable things from this series for the reason that nothing else really stands out.

The music in this series makes the series seem better than it is. I am not sure how they managed to get Fear, and Loathing in Lass Vegas take part in this project, but they did. Most of the BGM is pretty chill and catchy. The voice acting is bland and makes the characters seem even more empty shells than they otherwise are.

Overall this series is lacking in most of everything. It's hard to find any of it very interesting. Most of the things in it are so boring that even the most annoying things don't seem all that annoying because you simply won't care about them either. The series is so spectacularly unnoteworthy in both good and bad that I can't really call it anything other than the pinnacle of average.