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What happens when you adapt a late 80's action-comedy robot anime inspired by Bikkuriman, NES roleplaying games and 80's pop culture references (with the early 90's sequel) into the late 90's? You get a one with 90's pop culture references, much more serious shonen action and a rather clever social commentary on how the advancement of society has influenced people losing its kind heart to them and the others.

The story starts with a slightly older Wataru losing its 'kind heart' due to Ankokudar and starting to act like a junior high delinquent. Shibaraku and Himiko takes Wataru back to Sokaizan, stating that he need to ... save Sokaizan once again with the rainbow going monochrome again and save the civilliian and his kind heart.

Kurama, the former-bad anthro bird guy is absent from this entry (although he was mentioned once) and was replaced by Suzume, a 90's glamorous tomboy girl which rides a different bird Mashin, with a evangelion cockpit. In addtion, an androgenous wooden toy Shoryushi (Toraou) came alive as Seiju also joins the cast to find his master.

New evil characters has been introduced, the Donarukami family, who overthrowned Soukaizan. comprising of a Fire demon king, ice-cold queen, Doran the sly drag queen, Dolk the mysterious swordsman voiced by Chisa Yokoyama of Sakura wars fame and Dode, the evil kid which later befriends Toraou. Out of the recurring villains seen in the Wataru series, the Donarukami family breaks the mold of the archetypal villians of the original series and depicted as a serious, empathetic and humane characters with its own development arc and proper explaination on what lead them to team with Ankokudar and steal the 'kind heart'.

The animation has been significantly improved from the previous series, and possibly the most visually appealing one within the series. The transformation bank scene always looked great throughout this series, but this one is top-notch.
Also, it is noted that in comparison to the original (and 2), which utilised a 'world boss' scheme, Chou introduces a 'stage boss' scheme. To accommodate this, the world building is more dense in Chou, with every location having more variety. Each stages looks established and more 'realistic' and 'believable' in contrary to the absolute wacky, yet linear nature of the original series .
In the original series, the bosses did not revert back to good civillians until the world has been cleared. Meanwhle in Chou, the bosses and the 'stage' reverts back to good, after each stage bosses has been defeated.

One of the issues which this entry suffers from, is the inability to decide whether it wants to be a sequel, 90's reboot or a remake of the 1st series (although this was purposely done to avoid sequel fatigue) This entry is seemingly a remake with the focus on reverting Soukaizan back to its coloursed state like the original, but is a sequel in the sense that Wataru has already had the previous adventures with Shibaraku, Himiko and Toraou.

However, nothing becomes more problematic with the overpowered nature of Sword-King Ryujinmaru, introduced in the MIDWAY of the series, with the ability to cut ANY objects and also allow to CUT DIMENSIONS (the only thing it can't cut is the kind heart). The mere existence of this breaks the latter half of the anime into a repetitive mess, nullifying the essential struggling required in most robot animes to make the battles thrilling. What makes it worse is that the later Ryujinmaru form has been underutilised, despite the anime including a very emotional development arc with Tama, a initially comic relief cat character which joins Wataru and his friends.

From the 2020 sequel 'The Seven Spirits Of Ryujinmaru', fan states that it kinda retconned that this entry might not be fully canon and wasn't the entry which the fans of the original series wanted.

Still, this is a great robot anime which worth a check, with its emotional themes. It's flawed but quite good.

Let me tell you the three mind blowing facts about Hanoka which no-one seems to know.

1)Although the anime is produced by RAMS, the entire Flash animation, Screenplay, directing is entirely done by literally one person, Mr Aruzi Morino.

2) The anime is only a small part of a bigger story created by the creator, Aruzi Morino.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOMXsjgUA7pxkEX3d8OmZbw


3) The anime actually has a DVD version, which inserts better character and setting development, new and altered scenes and a prologue and an epilogue, which ends with a happy ending.
...
https://lostmediawiki.com/Hanoka:_The_DVD_Cut_(found_unaired/unsurfaced_version_of_flash_anime;_2008)


So, every people in a very niche anime community seems to destructively hates this anime as a 'worst anime ever made' in a similar line to Mars of Destruction and Skelter Heaven. To be honest, it's not bad as people says. The major problem of this anime is that, RAMS HAS ABUSED ONE PERSON'S PASSIONATE ANIME PROJECT AS A SHODDY METHOD TO PROMOTE THEIR INHOUSE VOICE-ACTORS.

Sure. The Flash animation seems lazy with the motion tweens, the story, characters and settings are cliched Sci-Fi War story stuff, forced ecological messages and the climax is... just plain bad. Still, the flash animation itself is technically superior to the crude newsgrounds animation and the basic narrative structure of the film is fairly okay.

In terms of voice acting, it is a hit and miss. Sakura Nogawa as Hanoka does a pretty good job. However, Momoko Saito (who is primarily notable as a loli type voice actor) as Yuuri (a shota soldier) is just horrrendous. Even in the DVD interivew, whilst other voice actors had treated the anime seriously, Momoko Saito has totally misinterpret the anime's premises as a war time version of Captain Planet. Even saying that 'I think this anime is about ecology. LET'S USE ECO-BAGS!.

Overall, it's a mediocre anime if its sawn INDIVIDUALLY. Still, if you understand Morino's Lore, you might get a whole lot better idea of this anime and enjoy more.