• The execution, on the other hand, could have been handled better in the anime adaptation: Satelight isn’t known for the best production quality, so we see some scenes where figures aren’t animated and slide across the scene. The sun-spot lighting effect was also used quite a bit and I personally think this effect looks really cheap; I prefer hand-drawn lighting rather than a weird orbital sun glare that looks off-putting in a two-dimensional setting.
• This series is full of enigmatic characters that the viewer gets naturally drawn to―whether it’s feeling sympathy for the tough war-hound, Amnelis, or feeling an affinity for Aldo Naris, despite his questionable perspective on morality and devious nature; getting attached to the Han Solo of the series, István, despite him having zero loyalty to any of the character other than Rinda, or feeling sympathy for the wandering bard, Marius, who has minimal screen time, but still had an incredibly touching couple of episodes that created urgency in the tremendously large narrative that the story uses to torrentially devastate the audience; a tour-de-force towards the end.
• Similar to the atmosphere in Fist of the North Star, the medieval setting lends itself to showing the cruelty at the core of the human species in a more blatant manner than our world, a civilization which is programmed to not hurt each other and has morality strongly instilled in us from childhood. There are cruel courtiers, emissaries, and mages who will manipulate, kill, or betray anyone in order to earn notoriety in the kingdom, though the story is written with terse brutality, there is a sense of human will and sympathy among many of the characters.
• The motivations behind the characters are strong, even with Guin being an amnesiac, though I personally think that the anime version could have dipped into Guin’s character more than it did―the story often revolved around all of the other characters more, especially after Also Naris’ introduction, despite the series being called GUIN Saga.
• The story for this series is adapted from 126 novels, so it’s clear that the story ends without a resolution. But, the anime is treated with a great amount of reverence and respect for the source material, despite the sometimes clunky Satelight-isms; Guin Saga’s world invites intrigue and attachment to all of its many characters. I was inspired to start reading the novel series after finishing the anime, so I browsed the Barnes and Noble website and they have translated a few of the novels―BUT, there seems to be no plans of translating them all and when I scanned through the reviews, it seems that the translation is very poor. Time to learn Japanese!
• Overall, the world and characters stirred up the side of me that is fascinated with political intrigue. I would suggest this series if you are a big fan of political espionage and corruption within a court system, where a genius royal has to circumvent the rules in order to accomplish his lofty goals, as well as fresh perspectives on character writing that is typically not seen in anime. A very interesting viewing experience; I haven’t seen anything else quite like it. My rating: 7/10.
• SN: I bought the BD collection that Sentai released and it has VERY GOOD special features: including an extensive interview with the author, Kaoru Kurimoto, and it’s really motivating to watch, to see how a person who writes an insane amount of novels functions, what motivates them, what makes them tick. There’s also an interview with her editor/husband and he also has an interesting perspective about who she was as a person/creator. I recommend you pick it up if you have a chance, out of all of the anime BDs I own, this is my favorite purchase!
