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There is no such thing as gambling anime.

In reality, shows people refer to as “gambling anime” are simply shonen battle anime with gambling characteristics - entertainment where the stories are all based around various characters resolving their conflicts with each other; only in these shows it’s not about superhuman martial arts masters or kids with superpowers fighting each other; but regular-ass human beings contriving more and more ways to play games of logic against each other, for the purpose of whatever plot-relevant stakes at hand at any given moment. Collective aesthetic dissimilarity, then, is what drives people to proclaim works like these to be in ... a separate genre; but it’s best to regard them as fundamentally no different from your Dragon Balls, your Attacks on Titan, your Chainsaw Men; or even your Revolutionary Girls Utena or Kills la Kill; because it gives you a much better understanding of the plot mechanics these works utilize to entertain you, but also a much broader range of comparison between works, to understand WHY these stories work.

Once you consider these stories not as part of a separate group of things that came out of nowhere but things with a lineage; you get to see what influences their creators had and where their ideas came from. All of which is to say that, generally, gambling anime are stories with the foundations of shonen battle manga with the mechanics of classical whodunnit murder mysteries thrown on top of them; except in these works the murder is turned into a game that the detective needs to win, and “figuring out the murderer by gathering evidence and deducing what happened” becomes “figuring out the true mechanics of the game/the moves the other player is making/the method the opponent uses to cheat by examining the game’s rules and the opponent’s actions and winning the game”. They are shonen battle stories because the protagonist faces a continuous stream of villains of ever-growing threat level; but they work like detective novels in that there is no violence and confrontations aren’t decided by who can overpower whom with whatever magic powers they have, but rather who can outsmart the other. It’s just that “gambling” is the best word we have so far to convey “murder mystery without the murder”; and “outsmarting” as a genre name sounds stupid.

I’m explaining all of this upfront because I need you to believe me when I tell you that one of the primary reasons to watch Kakegurui Twin, the prequel series to its parent series Kakegurui; is because its main character, Saotome Mary, is one of the greatest, most unique shonen anime protagonists of all-time.

So; Kakegurui. It’s that super popular cartoon series about all the kids of Japan’s rich and powerful going to the same elite high school to make connections with each other and definitely get into college, where all the kids are forced into playing gambling games with each other to win more money, because if they don’t have any, they become the slaves of the kids who do have money, to do whatever bidding they have. It’s a unique-enough setting and setup which even makes room for anti-capitalist messaging (if Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is the most libertarian anime ever made, this franchise is by far the most incidentally socialist), but more importantly it’s the perfect foundation for the utterly unique structure with which it tells its shonen battle manga plot, most of which structure is replicated in this spinoff series to a fantastic degree. As stated before, Kakegurui Twin is the prequel to mainline series Kakegurui: a one-off villain turned secondary protagonist in the main story, this prequel stars Saotome Mary, fresh-faced working class first year high school student looking to make it big in the elite high school she studied and lucked herself into attending alongside all the rich kids; forced to partake alongside her friends in a series of gambling games against rich and powerful students within the school in order to keep herself out of what is essentially human slavery.

If you watched Kakegurui and its sequel series (or read the manga) and liked it enough to even be reading a review about its spinoff, rest assured that all the things that make Kakegurui what it is are found just as well here. A student somehow forces the main character to take part in a gamble, which if the main character lost would mean her becoming a slave to the school’s system, but the main character figures out how the game REALLY works/figures out how the opponent is cheating, uses the game’s mechanics/the opponent’s cheating methods against the opponent, the main character wins; the opponent cries, rinse and repeat until the end credits of the last episode whereupon you beg Netflix for another season on Twitter until the story is complete; but it’s the way this is done and everything around it that makes Kakegurui Twin utterly compelling and wildly entertaining (just like its progenitor).

First, there are the gambles. These are not your everyday games that you would play in a casino (not that the kids in this school aren’t shown to be playing exactly those games all the time), but rather wholly unique and original games thought up exclusively for this story by original author Kawamoto Homura! You have your card and board games, sure; but nothing of its kind can touch Kakegurui when it comes to variety! This is a series where characters’ fates depend upon succeeding in games based on things as wildly diverse as speed dating and cryptic scavenger hunts! Every single one of these games has their rules explained in detail, and the show goes to great lengths to explain, step-by-step, every last decision made by every character involved in the game, oftentimes as a big dramatic reveal at the end. If you are smart enough, you can figure out the way to beat the game alongside Mary in real-time, but even if you aren’t, the explanations given at the end are always 100% purely logical - you can rewatch an episode after finding out how to beat it and see every character’s actions in a brand-new light! (And unlike certain other shows in the same vein, games here are far shorter than four real-life hours.)

Then there is Kakegurui Twin’s supporting cast. Let’s not mince words: the Kakegurui franchise as a whole has one of the greatest casts of characters in anime history, and Kakegurui Twin’s cast is no exception. Internal monologue is the name of the game here (hehe); as not only are these used to explain what happens in the game, rather the games themselves are used as reflections of the characters participating in them! This allows the runtime to provide incredibly vivid and detailed insights into the personalities of these characters! There is barely a single throwaway named character in Kakegurui: every character in the series has his/her own unique view of the world, unique ideology, unique desires and unique relationship to every other member of the cast; and these relationships are in constant flux! Every single game is posed as a psychological battle between characters; where their entire personalities and worldviews are pit against Saotome Mary; and every game is mined for every last shred of possible characterization, be it a deep dive into one of the characters’ personality and beliefs, as reflected through their actions in games, or the character development that comes after a game is over. What puts it over the top is that, like I said, this is not a story about superpowered characters, these are regular kids who live the same lives as you and I do. And because we spend so much time with them during the games; because we are privy to every last one of their thoughts and feelings; few anime make the viewer so empathetic towards its characters as Kakegurui! From childhood friend Hanatemari Tsuzura’s unwavering admiration of Mary, to Mikura Sado’s sexual submission and unending idolization of principal villain Juraku Sachiko (an overbearing, domineering, sadistic presence matched by few other characters), you FEEL for these kids, their triumphs, their despair, their desperation! And because these kids ultimately have to still go to the same school once their conflict is over, you get to watch what happens to them in the aftermath! Other series have used this kind of device to have a recurring cast of villains before; that is true. But none of those series had a cast of characters this dynamic, none of those series make the viewer want to see what happens to the characters THIS much! When you start watching Kakegurui Twin, you think the main draw of the series is getting to see the games play out, once it’s drawn you in, you understand that what keeps you coming back is that you want to see what happens to EVERYBODY in this story!

Finally; Saotome Mary. As I said, she is one of the greatest, most unique shonen protagonists of all-time. Other main characters facing similar challenges all have an intrinsic quality to them that is commonly associated with positive qualities. They’re generally protective of others, love adventure and having a friendly fight, they never give up and always trust their friends. They are never shown to have any vices, and even the very notion of them having any interest in the opposite sex tends to be verboten (stories like these never allow a main character to have any kind of sexuality). You know the type; you’ve seen a million shonen anime with main characters like this by now (at least it’s better than the milquetoast non-entities of the isekai genre). Even within its similar group of stories; as far as main characters go, Madarame Baku of Usogui fame is the smartest man in the world who has everything planned out years in advance, and Itou Kaiji of… Kaiji wins because of his indomitable will to survive. Even in the main Kakegurui series, protagonist Jabami Yumeko’s sole character flaw is her compulsive addiction to gambling; and even that is shown as mostly being a danger to herself as opposed to others.

Saotome Mary’s strength comes from the pride she takes in herself.

Throughout the series, Saotome Mary’s triumphs come not from a will to defend others, not from a need to save the world or all else is lost, not even out of desperate self-preservation, but simply from an utter and absolute refusal to bow to her enemies! In every gesture, in every frame, in every line of dialog, the audience gets the sense that this is a woman with infinite self-regard, who’s ingenuity, daring, inventiveness and brilliance stems out of her single-minded dedication to the idea that she. Will. Not. Lose. This is a character who becomes a gambling genius out of pure spite against people who think they’re smarter than her and want to fuck her over! Yet she never succumbs to petty sadism like her enemies, her infinite self-confidence is always secondary to her sense of righteousness! Where, if you were a villain, other battle manga protagonists would, after defeating you, offer you a helping hand and give you a speech about how you can turn over a new leaf and be a good person from now on; in Kakeguru Twin, Saotome Mary will publicly dress you down, utterly destroy your ego, call you a bitch, and essentially dare you to quit being a bitch! She will get you to start getting character development and become a better person through the sheer power of what can only be called weaponized smugness!

It’s this sense of tempered ruthlessness that makes Saotome Mary stand out as one of the all-time great lead characters in anime. Whether it's her thinking hard about her next move in order to make it in her school, whether it's her being upset and exasperated over what the school does to it's students, or when she is panicking over betrayal, this is a woman impossibly admirable, yet more human and more relatable than most other lead characters in the entire medium; an absolute showstopper of a performance that few will ever forget! Here's a comparison that you will probably understand: Imagine if Seto Kaiba from the original Yu-Gi-Oh! series was gender swapped and given a show to star in, defeating villains who have no idea who they are messing with, and you will know what Kakegurui Twin is like.

(Special mention must go to other principal villain Mibuomi Aoi; possibly the scariest, most horrifying sociopath in anime; a terrifying piece of shit who you get the sense doesn’t even live in reality, and only begrudgingly treats the people around him as humans because they’re easier to order around that way; one of the greatest anime villains, period.)

And of course, the entire thing is gorgeous. The series trademark of making the characters faces extremely distorted and ugly in order to portray their deranged emotions on screen remains, but so much of this thing is infused with so much style, so many different styles of filmmaking and animation is used all throughout the show. The music is still the same freeform jazz, so that's still a plus. And in general, the drawings are superbly beautiful, and Dolby Vision gives the series top notch image quality.

That is to say: Kakegurui Twin is more Kakegurui. It's one of the absolute best things on TV today, adapted from one of the absolute best things on shelves today; a new perspective and fresh addition to a group of the most enthralling characters you've ever seen. The only reason the overall rating is a 9 is because the story is not finished yet (this will be amended eventually, lesz the world should perish prior); but trust me: this thing is a fucking masterpiece!

$1 000 000 question (first person to get it right gets a cookie): of all martial arts manga in publication during the time of 2001 to 2010, why was History’s Strongest Disciple Kenichi the only one to get an animated adaptation?

The answer is mind blowing in its simplicity and infuriating in its implications: because its fight scenes were (and still are, to this very day) complete shit!

The uncomfortable truth is that no good martial arts manga in this day and age will ever get animated because animating even a decent (not a GOOD) fight sequence takes stupid amounts of work hours and money. Nowadays, ... when the only people who purchase anime DVDs in Japan are sociopaths, chronically overweight women and male pedophiles (since, for some odd reason, they are the only swaths of people that can afford doing so), an anime series of true quality earning success in its homeland might as well be considered an utter miracle. And even then people don’t buy it for what makes it good. How many people in Japan do you think bought Bakemonogatari not because of its impeccable writing, but to masturbate over its female characters? (Answer: all of them. (Here’s another cookie.))(Things are kind of sort of similarly as bad in the west, except not to Japan’s extent.)
I’m saying all this to lament the fact that even though it will never be, nothing in the world would look as good as Change 123 in animated form. The reason for this being that no martial arts manga ever made, and probably ever to be made, is and will ever be better than Change 123.


Let’s talk about fight choreography for a moment, and how it relates to the kind of powers characters in works of fiction have.
No, scratch that, let’s talk about what a fight, as in two or more people engaging in combat, is. (DEEP discussion incoming.)

Combat is the act of two or more opposing wills attempting to force their own will down on each other. The will that successfully forces itself on all others is the victor. And in order to make as sure as possible that a will gets forced upon another; those with specific wills will go to great lengths to ensure the superiority of their own will above the wills of others. Some create weapons to use in battle, some use others people/animals as weapons in battle, some decide to use their own body as a weapon in battle. When the latter is only taken to the level of strengthening bodily physique, it is referred to as body building. When it is taken to the level of extensively studying and practicing specific combat maneuvers and tactics, specific close combat scenarios, it is commonly referred to as practicing a “martial art”.

They are funny things, martial arts. The most common thing associated with those who practice them is great physical strength in lieu of all other personal merits, but they are some of the most brainpower-intensive activities out there. You see, optimally, the potential of the human body is unanimous across the board. Not accounting for differences in sex and age, extensive martial arts training will yield similar results for just about everybody. That’s why in combat between similarly trained individuals, the amount of combat training combatants went through takes a backseat as a deciding factor in the outcome of the battle to the inherent traits of the combatants: willpower, intelligence, courage, that kind of stuff. It’s not enough to be strong and skilled; you need to have the brains to know what you should do and when you should do it, the willpower to bear with things until you can, and the courage to pull it off.

It is when all combatants possess these attributes when the most thrilling, most amazing, most entertaining fights occur. And if you’re creating a story, it’s probable that you don’t have what it takes to translate the visceral thrills of a really good fight into your chosen medium. After all, you’re supposed to be a storyteller, not a fight choreographer.
Though if you’re making a story with lots of action it sure helps.

(This is the point where we talk about fight choreography, and how it relates to the kind of powers characters in works of fiction have.)

One of the bigger problems of manga that put a huge emphasis on their action scenes is that most of the time they are made by people who have the imagination to think up very interesting powers for their characters, but at the same time, believe that the mere fact that their characters are using these cool and awesome powers automatically makes the fights they participate in interesting.

But a fight is nothing without choreography.

You need to make a fight interesting. You need to make a fight visceral. You need to have characters take punches. But most of all:

YOU NEED TO HAVE THE EVENTS THAT TAKE PLACE DURING A FIGHT MATTER FOR ITS OUTCOME!

It can be excused if a story fails at the first three. Not everybody has talent for this type of thing. But when the conclusion of the fight is not derived from the actual contents of that fight, you ruin the pathos of the whole shebang, effectively robbing the sequence of any purpose whatsoever.

You end up creating what I like to call a shonen battle.

I’m now going to illustrate what I mean by a shonen battle with a few examples.

In Naruto, the character Uchiha Sasuke wishes to become stronger. He therefore allows himself to be kidnapped by the four minions of the (at that time) central evil character of the story, since he was promised that that character would indeed, make him stronger. The four minions set off with Sasuke to the villain’s hideout. Naturally, titular character Naruto gathers up some of his merry ninja friends to go and try to stop Sasuke’s “kidnapping”. When they meet up with the minions on the way, one of those merry friends stays behind to battle the specific minion.
One of these battles concerns one Naruto-friend Hyuuga Neii and main villain minion Kidomaru. Hyuuga Neji has an ability called Byakugan. Not only does this allow him to see the flow of chakra (the special substance/force of the Naruto universe that is found in everything), it also grants him full 360 degree vision. Well, not exactly. There is a small hole behind his back that his vision does not cover. The story takes a long time to go out of its way to explain this.
Kidomaru is a spider-like guy that has four hands, can create lethal webbings out of chakra, and can also turn the material used for the webbings solid and fire arrows out of his mouth.
The battle takes place inside a forest, on a circular plane surrounded by trees. Neji is in the center, while Kidomaru hides in the treetops.
The entire battle consists of Kidomaru torturing Neji with his arrows, essentially playing around with his prey. At the climax of the battle, Kidomaru successfully fires an arrow from his mouth into the small vision-hole behind Neji. Neji in turn infuses the arrow (all of Kidomaru’s arrows are –until he lets go- tied to Kidomaru directly via webbing at the arrow’s end) with chakra, which reaches Kidomaru through the webbing and kills him. This is never explained. Neji survives just barely.

Another example: In Deadman Wonderland, in a prison designed as an amusement park, in an event called Carnival Corpse which pits people who can use their own blood as makeshift weapons against each other in combat, main character Igarashi Ganta fights a young girl named Minatsuki Takami. Ganta has the ability to fire his blood like a gun fires bullets. Minatsuki can use her blood as you would use a whip. Except it is sharp and it cuts. The fight takes place in an open ring you’d find in a boxing match or an MMA tournament.
Long story short (to only emphasize the battle itself): Minatsuki first stuns Ganta with her blood whip, crippling him for a short while. Ganta tries to fire at Minatsuki, but she always uses her blood to block the attacks. Ganta finally does a ricochet shot from one of the ring’s corners and hits Minatsuki in the back. In retaliation, Minatsuki user her blood-whip to tie Ganta up, hands and feet.
Ganta then hops over to Minatsuki and head-butts her into unconsciousness.


What’s wrong with the above mentioned fight scenes? Well, to begin with, notice how, even though the fights took a considerable amount of time to describe, there was not actually a lot going on in them. Notice also that the injuries the characters suffered during the course of battle are largely superfluous. But most importantly:

Notice how the outcome of the battle, the way the battle ended had nothing to do with anything that previously happened in the fight.

This is a serious problem, and it is a detriment to every single fight sequence in which it occurs. We understand that the creators believe these types of resolutions are “humorous” and/or “ironic”, but in practice, it just makes the consumer feel like he/she has been just wasting his/her time with the whole shebang.

Let it be said: a good fight MUST have its ending derived from the events that occurred during the fight itself.

However, there is another thing that is common with these two examples and a lot of other stories too: they are not choreographed well. At all.

Why is that? Why can’t most manga authors (and for the record, people who create fiction in general) create well (or at least adequately) choreographed fight scenes?

The answer: because their characters have supernatural powers!

This might sound odd, but it makes complete sense. Remember when we talked about the potential of the human body? When we talked about how that potential is pretty much the same for just about everybody? It’s precisely THAT fact that forces people’s inherent traits to be deciding factors in battle. And in a work of fiction, it’s that kind of realism, that adhering to the fact that there is only so much the human body can do that NECESSERALY produces outstanding combat sequences. Just look at Kung-Fu movies: the ones with the best fights will always be the ones in which characters don’t have any sort of supernatural powers at all.

So what exactly happens when characters have supernatural powers?

Consider a situation where you’re writing/directing a fight sequence, and your characters don’t have supernatural powers. That doesn’t leave you much to work with. Or does it? Yes, there’s only so much a human body can do, but that much is still MUCH. Sure it requires a metric ton of creativity to make a realistic combat sequence (from the perspective of the kind of powers participants use –it’s not who/what are fighting, it’s how they fight) interesting, but if you can pull it off, you’ll basically always create something outstanding and memorable.

But what if characters can do more than a human can? How about much more?

The thing is, once you give characters supernatural powers, you’ve broken through the limit of the natural abilities of the human body. Your characters are now given carte blanche to do physically impossible things.
You also give your imagination carte blanche to do whatever the hell it wants. Sky’s the limit with superpowers!

But why, then, are super powered fights just not as interesting as martial arts combat?

Two things are at work here: one is the internal logic of the story; the other is what superpowers do to the way a fight looks.

For one thing, it’s completely logical for super powered beings to see no point in close quarters combat. They are capable of stuff that is impossible in real life, so why limit their selves to only what their body can do in a fight?

But the most important reason realistic martial arts combat is always more interesting than super powered combat is this: it takes far less effort to make super powered combat look interesting.

Super powered characters can do all kinds of stuff. And since those powers are the product of the author’s imagination, which he/she undoubtedly wants to show off, the focus in these battles turns to the attacks themselves, not to their execution – in complete opposite with depictions of realistic combat, where, since both audience and author are well acquainted with the workings and capabilities of the human body, it’s up to the author to make the best out of those capabilities. In super powered combat, it takes only a small amount of imagination to come up with new powers to give to characters so they can turn the tables in the narrative, whereas you need far more creativity for a realistic fight sequence to stay exciting all the way through.

Yes, we went there: CREATING A SINGLE WELL CHOREOGRAPHED REALISTIC FIGHT SEQUENCE TAKES FAR MORE EFFORT AND CREATIVITY THAN COMING UP WITH A MYRIAD OF SUPERPOWERS!

This is why even in self-proclaimed “martial arts” manga, manhwa and manhua you can see fights that are
-filled with barely intelligible bullshit phlebotinum babble and pointless special ki attacks (Veritas)
-made with amateuristic, embarrassing blurry lines with almost no thought given to make the events on page seem even the tiniest bit thrilling (Aiki) (Don’t even get me started on character behavior in that manga.)
-just plain boring and uninteresting (History’s Strongest Disciple Kenichi)

But this isn’t exclusive to “martial arts” manga: take the magical girl genre for example. Two notable recent entries in the genre are Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha and the Pretty Cure franchise. While both properties kick the door down for their respective genre, it’s fascinating to examine the differences between the methods of the two and to compare how different an impression they leave on the discerning viewer.

Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha is the more “adult oriented” of the two, yet its combat, consisting of endless waves of uninteresting beam spam (or in the case of the last episode of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A’s: a prototype of the summoning sequence of the most powerful Guardian Force of Final Fantasy XXVII) leaves neither the characters with any sense of immdediate danger or actual sense of struggle, and also the viewer in a near-constant state of boredom.

Pretty Cure on the other hand, while obviously created for a young audience, wows just about everybody with how it turns its own magical girls into martial arts ass-kicking machines. Yes, the cures are inhumanly strong, but the directing makes up for it by making their enemies also similarly strong, and the many, many seasons don’t shy away from introducing close quarters combat choreography that put many “adult” “martial arts” manga and their ilk to shame.
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha is often referred to as a mecha anime with magical girls. We believe this says pretty much everything needed to be said about fans of mecha anime.

Tangentially related but relevant: every scene in the animated version of Death Note in which the directing gives dramatic camera angles, special graphic and sound effects usually reserved for vampire resurrections, epic magic spells, Michael Bay explosions and Zack Snyder fight scenes to the most mundane of everyday tasks, such as looking at people, eating a potato chip and writing in a notebook. Once again, it takes huge amounts of creativity and effort, and until a good outcome is reached, it doesn’t even look good, but when pulled off well, the impression it leaves on the viewer is far more profound than any supernatural power presented in the same way would.

We’ll say it again, this time in simplified form for easier understanding:

SUPERNATURAL POWERS ARE THE DEATH OF FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHY!



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Actually talking about the manga now.
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Change 123 comes in guns blazing, screaming “I’m here to fuck shit up, I’m here to show you all how it’s done, and I’m all about chicks kicking ass!” at the top of its lungs. Change 123 is idea storytelling at its finest, the likes of which the literary scene hasn’t seen since the original nine volumes of GUNNM. In fact, remember the awesomeness and badassery it took the main character in GUNNM an entire volume to achieve? The main (female) character in Change 123 reaches it in just one chapter! That’s a mere fifty pages! In fact, the first chapter of Change 123 might just be the best opening chapter any manga ever had, ever!

Not only for its action, but also due to how well it sets up what Change 123 is about: half showing the world how women in fights should be portrayed, and half the development of a very complicated relationship.

The main male character of the story is one Hideo Kosukegawa. The highs cool kid is a nerd, a huge Kamen Raider fan, meek but a pure, kind soul. The kind of person total assholes would call a moralfag.

The story begins with him witnessing the attepted rape of one of his female classmates in an alley. One Gettou Motoko, she is extremely shy and prone to passing out at the slightest of things, so naturally she faints at the rape attempt.

Except, right after that, her personality completely changes and send the rapist flying into his car with a single kick.

Knowing that her classmate witnessed this, Kosukegawa gets called home by “Motoko”, asking him to swear secrecy in exchange for an explanation.

It’s at this point that the brilliance of Change 123 first shines: at her home, Motoko explains that she can fight so well because it’s not actually her fighting. The twist is that she was raised by three different people calling themselves her father. Incidentally, all three of those men are expert martial artists: one is a mercenary, one is Jiu-jitsu master, and the third is a karateka. The thing is, all three of the girl’s “fathers” have trained Motoko in their own method of combat, and this is where the uniqueness of Change 123 comes in: Since Motoko is so shy, in order to cope with all the training, she developed Dissociative Personality Disorder: in effect, she unconsciously created three distinct personalities inside of her mind to protect her from the hardships of the training of her fathers.

The title of the manga, in fact, references Motoko’s three personalities: The correct Japanese pronounciation is chenji hifumi, or Hi-Fu-Mi: Hibiki (a japanese form of count one: HItotsu), the first personality, is hotheaded, brash, loves to fight, as is proficient in Karate. Fujiko (two: FUtotsu) is calm, collected, mature, and excels at armed combat of all kind, while Mikiri (three, MItsu) is childlike, innocent, well-meaning and is an expert in jiu-jitsu.

Already Change 123 succeeds in effortlessly overcoming the biggest challenge of the story in a unique and interesting way: why on Earth would a high school girl be so proficient in combat? By explaining that the training Motoko underwent during her childhood was not exactly to her liking, and by also explaining that Motoko’s three alternate personalities were created specifically in retaliation to the aforementioned training, the reader believes that her alternate personalities would actually enjoy combat and would willingly partake in training.

Kosukegawa evidently swears to help Motoko overcome her condition at all costs. The two quickly become friends, and in the second half of the chapter they dicide to go to a beach.

Recursiveness: the guy that tried to rape Motoko earlier in the chapter has been spying on her, and now comes back to seek revenge on the girl for beating him up. He promptly ambushes the two on the beach. It’s important to note that, the wimp that he is, Kosukegawa actually stands up to the guy (inspiration all gained from Kamen Raider), tries to buy some time so Motoko can get away. Alas, Motoko faints, and her alternate personalities emerge to save the day.

This is the point where Change 123 truly lives up to and exceeds its purpose with flying colors: look far and wide, all over the medium, but you will never, ever find one other manga that has action sequences as good as those of Change 123. For one thing, the art is flawless, beautiful, and sublime: every image is perfectly clear, not a single blur in sight when it isn’t stylistically uncalled for. It is one thing that the artist can draw incredibly beautiful women realistically and diversely (and, as a true rarity amongst this type of manga, equally diversely drawn and handsome men), but what truly benefits from the skill of the artist is how every action is perfectly understandable: the images are so clearly drawn and the angles from which the action is shown is always so perfect that I don’t think it is possible even for people with mental issues not to be able to understand what goes on during a fight sequence. (Shin Angyo Onshi, with its overly detailed drawings at the expense of visibility comes to mind as the polar opposite.)

But as previously established a fight is nothing without choreography, and this is where Change 123 truly outshines the competition: it has the best fight choreography of any manga ever made! Not merely martial arts manga – I mean everything in the medium! The people who make Change 123 understand absolutely everything about fights and what makes them interesting:

-They understand that watching a woman kick ass is inherently more gratifying than watching a man kick ass
- They understand that not making the opposing sides sexually equal (or at least close to it) – in other words, being too cowardly/pandering to have your female characters fight male characters - will result in the reader’s inability to take the fights seriously (notice how History’s Strongest Disciple Kenichi shoots its own self in the foot in this regard – although that presupposes that the creator of History’s Strongest Disciple Kenichi is capable of drawing a good fight sequence, so forget I said anything)
-They understand that what happens during a fight must matter for its outcome
-They understand that if you want to create not only amusement at the fight choreography but also genuine tension in the fight, you need to have your characters take hits, and take them hard
-They understand that in order to produce good fight choreography; you must keep the combat realistic, free of any sort of supernatural or over the top bullshit

The fights in Change 123 are perfect. Characters are varied, their methods of combat well fleshed out, they hit hard, they take hits, they suffer damage, they fight variedly, they are dangerous, they aren’t afraid to hit a girl, they fight realistically. Not to say that it never goes over the top, but when it does, it always does it to comedic effect, and never in the longer, important fight scenes. And even when it introduces its own special terminology for battle, it never feels like tacked on bullshit.

And there’s so much variety to the fights. I simply refuse to spoil anything about that; you’ll just have to believe me when I say that when it comes to combat, Change 123 trumps everything.

What really makes it so good is that the creators adhere to no particular desire of anybody: they simply make what they would want to read. “I got it, how about three girls storming an American military outpost, kidnapping one of the commandos to teach him a lesson, and fighting his allies on the way out?” As crazy as it sounds, it makes complete sense in context, and actually ends up as one of the most memorable points in the entire series!

And what about the times when there isn’t any action? Almost miraculously, Change 123 is interesting even without any action. The story itself largely revolves around Kosukegawa trying to help Motoko overcome her disorder, the developing relationship between the two over the years, their day to day lives, the many adventures of Motoko’s alternate personalities, those of the friends she gains along the way, and the unraveling of Motoko’s past (which she does not remember – fitting, I suppose). It is portrayed in a completely plausible light, with both the kids coming closer to each other and the secrets of the past of Motoko having an effect on her present – one of those secrets which will become a focal point of the story later on.

Another thing to note is that Change 123 can be gut-busting hilarious. The creators are not only unrivaled master in depictions of close quarters combat, but are also outstanding humorists.

And lastly, the one remaining important factor in the equation of Change 123 is the fan service: truly, no manga does it like Change 123. It’s one thing that most of the main fighting character are purposefully female (they really know how to show off the female form during combat – heck, the fact that they know that combat is the perfect opportunity to show off the female form is the very reason they have made this manga in the first place), but what Change 123 gets away with in terms of full frontal female nudity, and the way in contextualizes each and every one of these occasions to make perfect sense and not feel superfluous at all is truly a master class of originality and creativity. This stuff should be taught in schools, is what I’m saying.

(Change 123 is also filled with references to Getter Robo. Ironic then, that the people who would make the best action sequences of manga to date would be inspired by the one genre notorious for its boring, uncreative, tension-free battle scenes.)

And that’s Change 123: a manga where women kick ass in a completely plausible and incomparably entertaining way, a manga about the developing romantic relationship between two people, a manga of which every single page shines through with the pure love its creators put into it, and a manga that has the guts to end when it has told its story. An unrivaled piece of both wild entertainment and high art, Change 123 sets the bar for martial arts manga, and is right now the universal comparison against all fictional combat.

*As of June 2011, the only manga to come to Change 123 in terms of visceral combat and outstanding fight choreography are Holyland and Wrestle the Underground!

This is what ushered anime into the new millennium. Noir is the very first classic of the third millennia A.D., and as such is a very interesting specimen of times gone.

Now, I must stress that the score I gave it is not an accurate measure of Noir’s actual value. True, Noir is a must watch for anybody who loves japanese animation, but it achieves this by doing absolutely everything wrong. There is so much not right in Noir that calling everything bad in in out is almost as singular an experience as watching the series itself. And yet, it is perhaps exactly this absolutely wrong ... approach Bee Train took to Noir’s creation that seperates it from much of the rest of anime and elevates it into levels reserved for things that must be seen to be believed.

So yeah, Noir tells the story of two females. The first one we are introduced to is Mireille Bouqet. She works as a professionsal assassin. The second female is Kirika Yuumura, a japanese high school student who sends a mysterious message to Mireille, asking to meet her.

That is the basic setup of the first episode, and the entire story itself. What follows from there onward is the exact same thing throughout twenty six episodes that we see in the first one. Let me go into a little detail about this.

But first, a truism: There is a song named „All you need is love”. That title is actually correct. You REALLY only need love when it comes to creating a story. If you love the story you write –and I mean REALLY love it-, you’ll instinctively know exactly what is wrong with your story and exactly how to fix it. Even if it won’t be original, it will be good to experience because the love you have for it simply won’t let you leave it a bad experience. It is also important to note that the creative drive of many –if not all- of the stories created primarily out of their author’s love for them – that is, the creation of their story- can have their origin traced back to a single idea the author had, that the author wanted to expand upon.

Another truism: It is not enough for a story to merely expand upon a single idea in order to be heralded among the greatest of stories. For that, a story must also be about something different by the end. Death Note started out being about a notebook that can kill people, and it ended up being about the battle of wits between two deductive geniouses and a question about the nature of justice. Spice & Wolf started out being about a wolf- goddess, and ended up being about economics. Etcetera.

One of the stunning things about Noir is that it actually IS one of the greatest stories despite violating both of these truisms. It starts out being about women commiting preposterous action sequences, and stays being about women commiting preposterous action sequences. Now let’s examine this closely:

First episode. In the space of a single cut, Mireille goes from France to Japan, and meets with Kirika. not soon after she arrives, both of them get ambushed by black suits. It turns out that not only Mireille, but also Kirika can kill people pretty well (with the phrase „pretty well” being both an overstatement and an understatement at the same time here). Kirika, in particular, has no idea why she can kill so well: she lost all her memories, and all she can remember is the name „Noir”. Which, incidentally, is the pseudonym Mireille works under as an asassin. Mireille takes interest in Kirika because she has a pocketwatch that may or may not play music when it’s lid opens up, and definitely has something to do with the death of Mireilles parents when Mireille was a small child.

The events described above already contained the two things every episode of Noir builds on: building the relationship between Mireille and Kirika, and a ludicrous action sequence. (And let me just say that it’s rare to find an anime series so reliable outside of the magical girl genre or things like Pokémon or Digimon – seriously, in 26 episodes, you get 26 times the girls fire a gun.)

The action sequences of Noir: This is it; this is the meat and potatoes of Bee Train. These sequences are the very core ideas implanted into Ryoe Tsukimura’s and Koichi Mashimo’s brains, they are the very reasons Noir exists, and they are also the hallmarks of the series. In every episode, the girls assassinate various targets, ranging from corrupt politicians, judges and corporate executives to war criminals and “revolutionaries”. And every time Kirika and Mireille leap into action, Noir turns into a unique mixture of tragicomedy and trash.

You see, the action sequences of Noir suck! They are preposterous, unrealistic, ludicrous, ridiculous and some other mean words. An action scene in Noir goes like this: Mireille and Kirika enter the compound of their target, at which place they are greeted by the bodyguards of the target. A surreal shootout ensues. Surreal, because of what these scenes are based upon: the concept that even the viewer could take on the enemies Mireille and Kirika face. There are two things you need to know about the people those two gun down on a regular basis: 1) they are always male; 2) they suck at their job! Enemies in Noir could not hit the broad side of a bus, even with unlimited ammo, from three feet away; they stand in the line of open fire, practically freeze in place when they run out of bullets, and never look behind themselves. Their reaction time is about the same as that of your grandmother playing Modern Warfare 2 for the first time on the Xbox 360. They never stop firing when the girls are behind cover. They never move back behind cover. They never so much as slightly injure the girls. They all act like complete morons.

The girls, on the other hand, might as well be godlike beings who almost never miss, can hit a target in the span of half a second after spotting it, constantly show up behind the backs of their targets (they violate the laws of physics and time-space almost every episode), and have this uncanny ability to somehow force their opponents to wait for the girls to shoot first.

Other times, they are the worst assassins ever. They make no plans about approaching their targets at their most vulnerable, opting instead to fight their way through the bodyguards of their target. They make almost no attempts at stealth, and have half- minute long staring contests with their targets before executing them.

Consider a video game adaptation of Noir that is 100% faithful to the source material. You control either Mireille of Kirika, against hordes of mooks who stand in place firing everywhere all over the place, except for that one spot where you are standing. They keep standing there when they run out of bullets. The body of your character has no hit detection in the first place, and the game constantly has auto- aim turned on for you, ensuring that every shot is a direct hit, without even having to aim. You have unlimited magazines for your pistol, and you can spot enemies from a hundred yards away, whereas they can only see about five feet in front of themselves. You can stand in the way of open fire and literally never get hit no matter what happens. Also, you can pause the game at any time, select a location on the map, and teleport your character there, with no regards to distance and height of the destination.

At times, Noir throws all common sense out the window! Two people are fighting, one holding a pistol, the other wielding a knife, and THEY BOTH JUST STAND THERE LIKE THEY SAW A FUCKING GHOST! A staircase full of armed suits simply lets the girls walk up in front of them for half a minute!

This is why I said Noir violates those two truisms: Bee Train obvious loved these action scenes and put a lot of work into conceiving them, but despite all that, they fail to entertain in the way they are supposed to.

Instead, they entertain in a completely different way! You see, it’s important for a story to maintain the illusion that the main character could fail. This is what brings tension into a story. But with Noir, after the first two episodes, you lose all sense of worry over Mireille and Kirika: you know full well that they could send an entire army against those two and the girls would come out unscathed, with every soldier lying dead in front of them. However, this opens the door to an entirely different way to enjoy Noir: what zany way of killing a hundred people will they think of next? Getting deep into Noir, a strange kind of curiosity starts to overtake you. You become fascinated with how these ridiculous gunfights get pulled off with a completely straight face, and you’ll want to see how the girls break the laws of physics and space-time in the next episode. By the end, you’ll be outright laughing at the absurd ways the scenes play out, and you’ll actually start enjoying yourself! It’s the strangest sort of entertainment, but nonetheless, it’s working, and it’s one of the most fascinating things you’ll ever see.

Interesting side note: Although Bee Train was originally conceived in order to “rehabilitate animators”; you’ll be hard pressed to find another piece of Japanese animation made in the 00’s that cuts more corners in terms of actual animation than Noir. Conversations are littered with still shots, collapsing dead bodies are obscured by the environment (or outright cut away from), and there’s no blood at all. (Thankfully, this cheapskate approach does not carry over to the beautifully detailed backgrounds and razor sharp character designs – Mireille in particular, has character design as slick as Chadwardenn’s hair.(Dat hair man (Mireille’s), dat hair!))

The good news is that this all adds up to Noir’s style: when you get down to it, all Noir cares about is it’s plot. So it takes no time building the world around the two girls, neither does it care about any sense of time or place (if one scene plays out with the girls in Corsica, but the plot requires them to be in Paris in the next scene, they’ll simply be there, without a single shot of their travel – Kirika and Mireille are the most unlikely jet setter of all anime). So gunfights are mere obstacles in the way of Noir’s plot advancement, and it actually fits that it can pull off stuff like Mireille holding a gun on a poor bastard without him even knowing it, but never showing her actually shooting the guy. It kind of makes you not care about budget restraints.

So, it only cares about the plot, right? Then it must mean it’s good, right? No, not really. Noir’s plot is a farce, a mere vehicle to get the girls from one ridiculous action scene to the next, even if even then it cares more about advancing itself then producing a situation in which we would worry for the girls.

So then, is at least it’s presentation engaging? Well…

It’s the most straightforward plot in existence, really. It doesn’t care about side characters or side storylines (every character that returns for more than one episode in Noir is a main character). Once the target of the week has been established, it’s off to his (it’s almost always male) execution, with nothing in between. During the time it takes to establish the target, however, that bit I mentioned earlier about the relationship between Mireille and Kirika comes into play. Know this: Noir isn’t really heavy on dialog. Most of the relationship between the two girls plays out in facial expressions and long silences with equally long stills of the girls and their surroundings. This wouldn’t be a problem in and of itself, but the directing in these scenes is so static and lifeless, that if it wasn’t for the action sequences and the nigh constant (and pretty freaking awesome) background music, Noir could be the first animated television series that could get certified for Dogma 95.

Taking the above into account: yes, watching multiple episodes of Noir in a single sitting is a chore. The action scenes have no tension, the non- action scenes are mostly boring, and the characters sometimes have quite frankly infuriating emotions, either from the standpoint of common sense or ethics. (By the way, this is why Noir is such a good glimpse into times gone. Modern day anime pulls out all the stops and doesn’t care what it does until it successfully forced you with’ it’s emotional manipulation into whatever state of mind it wants you to be. Noir is satisfied with merely showing it’s characters having those emotions, however dumbfounding or unsympathetic those emotions may be – they aren’t forcing them on the viewer.) (And it’s not like any character in Noir is that interesting or well written either.)

Also, Noir’s BIG PLOT TWIST is just illogical and dumb. Somehow, nobody was around the Bee Train studios to tell them that people do NOT age selectively – that is, 10+ years of aging for one person is 10+ years of aging for another person too.

Still, despite all those things (or perhaps maybe even precisely due to those things), as an experience, there is nothing in the World like Noir. Even Bee Train couldn’t reproduce it, seeing as Madlax, produced by Bee Train right after Noir, took the ideas of Noir’s action scenes to their logical extremes and ended up with something that is both gut- busting hilarious and migraine- inducing dumb at the same time (no, that does not mean it’s intentional (yes, that means it’s unwatchable)).

Make no mistake: Noir isn’t “so bad it’s good”, it’s a legitimately memorable viewing experience, one that is comparable to nothing in existence, even though the sum of it’s parts would in any other way suggest otherwise, and something that should be mandatory viewing for any person who claims that he/she loves anime, if only to know: “yes, there are thing like this in the World too”.

Having watched this right before I'we written this review, I didn't know what to expect. Then the first frames came in.

Whoa!

WHOA!

OH MY JESUS!

This is it! This is how you make cell animation in 2008! I can tell ya, NOTHING EVER was this beautifully drawn before! I don't think I was even breathing during the second story! It easily puts every other cell animated title to shame(ONLY in terms of animation), and will be the only thing for YEARS to come that will deserve a perfect score. For how it is drawn, naturally.

For in every other aspect, 5 Centimetres per second is a mixed bag. We ... have one story going back and forth on the line from stupid to beautiful. One that is exactly how the entire feature should have been, and one that's just plain moronic. But let's go with the airing order, shall we?

The first story: I don't really know. Sure, it's anice little topic, lovers seperated and all, but it seems as if common sense would be cast aside for drama. How is it, that in the present day, two people who are in love with each other but seperated still communicate by mail? Why does it take a train trip to get the idea of using the telephone to keep in touch? Why does the story give us the illusion that the meeting itself solved anything when later on it disproves itself? Sure enough, the train trip felt agonizing at times (a HUGE plus), but it was just a bit too melodramatic. So like I said, I can't really put it anywhere.

The second story: HELL YEAH! Now this is romance! I don't know how the show manages to make the viewer forget that the imagery plays a huge part in conveying the overall tone, but it does, and you just sit back, and enjoy a rendition of a girls emotions that is so beutiful, and most importantly, so REAL(unlike 90% of everything else in this regard), you instantly forgive life for failures like Tokikaku. This story has a heart, this story has a soul, this story is so much better then the other two, you would have to think it was written by a completely different person! The best of the bunch, hands down!

And so, we arrived at story three, the train to real life will leave from here in ten minutes, we apologize for the inconvenience.

Ever been on a roller coaster? Harken back to the time when you were on it first, the mesmerizing felling of climbing ever higher and higher, until the point where you reach the top, and suddenly, you realise that you don't really want to go down, but you will anyway, and besides, it's the only way to get back on the ground. Not to mention that you can't do anything about it. Now imagine that suddenly, while you are at the top, the roller coaster crumbles undernath you, and you plummet to your doom at terminal velocity until you stop sixteen feet under ground leaving a crater big enough to fit the entire roller coaster in. This is as close as you will come to the experience that is the third story, something for wich the person who gave the green light for it's enclusion should have his/her lungs exposed to ridiculus amounts of Zyklon B. It tryes, and HOW it tryes to give a fitting aftermath to the first story, but the degree it fails at this makes you question the sanity of the mind that ever thought of it's creation, let alone inclusion! It haphazardly introduces new characters for no known reason, and succeeds in making (at least) the main character look like a totally unrelatable, ununderstandable retard by not only having him NOT living in contact with his girl, but rather getting a new one, WHITOUT SEPERATING HIMSELF FROM THE FIRST ONE, AND BEING ANXIOUS ABOUT IT! Basically any bit of common sense that was gathered for these characters in the first story goes out the window so fast, you wonder why there was any reason giving them any in the first place. Plus, it doesn't solve anything! It's Bullshit with a capital B (no, better, a backwards b, a d), and ultimately pulls the production down into mediocre junk territory for making everyone believe that the characters of the first and third story are the real focus of the story, completely overshadowing the brilliant second one. (Thankfully, it's barely ten minutes long, so it can't detract from the value of it's prettyness and it's middle.)

Oh, and if you are going to have a male solo artist singing the end theme of your show, make sure you get one that doesn't sound like me when drunk and trying to parody sing(this goes double for L'arc en ciel).

No wait, Japan doesn't have any of those.