Hifuu Katsudou Kiroku: The Sealed Esoteric History

Now here’s something a bit different from my usual reviews. Instead of looking at an anime this time around, we’re looking at a Chinese Cartoon! That’s right, and a doujin one at that. Hence, I’ll be covering this series episode by episode.

Hifuu Club Activity Record Episode 1 is a Touhou fan video project, and it primarily revolves around a fan interpretation of The First Gensou-Lunar War, framed through the Hifuu Club’s retelling of the events in the Outside World. The premise on its own is rather interesting, especially since the other Touhou fanimes choose to either adapt the games’ storylines or have a more ... relaxing tone to it. Hifuu Club Activity Record’s tone is decidedly more serious, though not melancholic. Its story does have higher stakes to it than say Summer Day Dream.

Let me make this clear early on, if you’re not familiar with Touhou as a series, you may want to give this a pass. It’s not the type of anime that would get you into the series, nor is it suitable for anyone who doesn’t know anything about the series. From the get go the main characters are characters from the Music CD spinoffs and the story revolves around a fan interpretation of an event that was only important to the series around the early 2000s.

Now then, Hifuu Club Activity Record is still an enjoyable watch. Original characters are also included in the story but they do not hamper one’s enjoyment of the episode and they are well integrated into the storyline, so good on that. While the story’s actual conclusion and resolution is only found within the official Touhou canon manga/video games, this fan cartoon does provide an interesting prologue, or what if scenario on the events leading up to the Gensou-Lunar War and ultimately Kaguya’s exile.

Storywise, despite being an original story, you need at least a few years worth of Touhou canon in order to fully understand it, primarily Imperishable Night, Cage In Lunatic Runagate, and Silent Sinner In Blue. The stories to the Music CDs aren’t necessary as Renko and Maribel’s interactions can be enjoyed without a thorough knowledge of the series.

The action sequences are serviceable, nothing too exciting, but it works well for what it’s trying to go for in terms of plot progression. Seeing characters like Suika or Yorihime so beautifully and vividly animated in battle sequences make for an enjoyable watch. The dialogue between Maribel and Renko, essentially the narrators for the episode, flow naturally and is quite accurate to their interactions in the series canon. The opening soundtrack and the ending theme are superb remixes of Touhou music and the voice acting is top notch.

Ultimately, Hifuu Club Activity Record is an animation project by fans for fans. If you’re not already a fan of Touhou, I’d say give this one a pass; otherwise, you’re in for a treat.


Hifuu Club Activity Record Episode Moon can be freely viewed on YouTube, uploaded by the creators themselves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjd7A5j20hc

If you enjoyed the conversation between Renko and Maribel during that 53-minute train ride, you should also enjoy this. The story rely a lot on you already knowing a lot about Touhou lore as a whole, and to me, it seeks to fill in the gaps(not the Yakumo's ones) in the existing lore of Touhou, like about the Genso-Lunar war, which is only briefly mentioned in Perfect Memento in Sctrict Sense, or about the past of people at the Scarlet Devil Mansion, or about the past of Sanae. All of those are not talked about in detail in the official Touhou lore, thus this anime ... is the creators' version of these events. It fills in the details and at the same time, it also give us a version of the Outside World in the "near future" through the perspective of Renko and Maribel. Of course, all Touhou fans will have other different version of these events too, and to me, it is fun seeing other people's perspective of the lore, sometimes incorporating it into my own headcanon. The fact that the creators used Renko and Maribel to retell those events in Gensokyo is really nice too, it fits the kind of activity that the Hifuu Club would do

But if you are not a Touhou fan, just go explore other contents of Touhou first before watching this anime, or it would just seem like a boring anime that just seems kind of random

Out of all of the touhou anime out there, Hifuu Katsudou Kiroku: The Sealed Esoteric History pretty good, but I'd still consider Phantasm to be better animation quality wise.
The problem I have with this show is how uninteresting the plot is. There is no action scenes really, and 99% of the show is dialogue. Plus, you aren't even in Gensokyo in this story, and instead are in modern day (futuristic) Japan as a setting for a lot of it. Not only is the modern day setting extremely mundane, but the characters in it don't make it any better for how lackluster they seem to be, ... and the dialogue that they sputter out is mind numbingly boring. I swear, the adapted materials for this show is extremely bad, and the pacing is extremely slow. I made a point that Phantasm had quite fast paced episodes, and this story suffers the exact opposite.
Especially in the first episode, if you take out the modern day fluff, you basically get five minutes of real action and dialogue. Seriously, and they expanded that to 24 minutes of random exposition and content being dragged out. There's probably less than 30 seconds of any fighting, and for the most part, the fighting choreography is mediocre. Even if you are a huge touhou fan (I am not), I really doubt that this would capture your attention for an entire hour's worth of pointless dialogue of loose adaptations of arcs that managed to be dragged out to all hell.
Characters look pretty good, but the lip-syncing is bad and there's a lot of still frames of people just talking. Background is nothing to write home about, but that's not the reason why this show fails.