The Heike Story anime simultaneously:
A) Paces and structures the story in a way that makes it impossible to understand without having read the source material.
B) Shifts the focus of the story to anime-original elements like the new female protagonist and eye-based superpowers.
The result is a mess that doesn’t work as a stand-alone series and doesn’t work as an adaptation.
More on point A:
This is just one example of the many. The second episode of the show tells (via a 30-second narration) the story of a dancer Gio. She used to be the Taira patriarch Kiyomori’s favorite, but then he kicked her out, replacing her with another dancer, Hotoke-gozen. Except Gio was still demanded to come and hang out with Hotoke-gozen, who was lonely. Later, the episode shows Gio, her sister, and her mother as nuns, talking about how Kiyomori was cruel to her. And finally, the episode ends with Hotoke-gozen also becoming a nun.
So, who are all these people, and what is the point of having them in the show? Well, turns out you have to read the original to know the answer to these questions.
You see, despite ordering her to visit, Kiyomori treated Gio like shit, to such a degree that she wanted to kill herself. And then her sister wanted to kill herself out of solidarity. And their mother threatened that if they killed themselves, she would also kill herself, and it would be their fault, so they couldn’t. At which point Gio and Sister opted for the next best thing and abandoned the world to be hermit nuns. And so did their mother. And so did Hotoke-gozen, because she felt guilty. The moral of the story: Kiyomori is a dick, and also impermanence of life or some other nihilistic shit, idk, I’m not a Buddhist.
None of that is showed in the anime. Even assuming that Heike Monogatari is as well known in Japan as the Iliad in the West (everyone knows Iphidamas, son of Antenor, right?), that’s just not how adaptations are supposed to work. Either explain your side plots properly or don’t bother including them.
More on point B:
Biwa is one of the worst protagonists I’ve ever seen. She manages to achieve the unachievable. She simultaneously:
1) Has zero presence.
2) Is a giant eyesore.
One - she is completely irrelevant to the story. The only thing she has to do with the plot events is kinda being around when things happen. I mean, sure, she is supposed to represent the wandering musicians who had passed on Heike Monogatari into the present (the name Biwa is so on the nose, if this was a series about the American Revolution, her name would’ve been Constitution), but that’s a very poor and misguided excuse for having a main character that doesn’t influence the story they are a part of in any way.
Two - she is not integrated into the base story at all. This is freaking Heian Era, the very first scene of the show actually demonstrates how merely raising your voice against the ruling class gets people executed on the spot - and then there’s Biwa constantly yelling at all these feudal lords and court officials like a rebellious teen that pulls a “you’re not my real dad” card on his step-father after getting caught with a cigarette - and no one bats an eye. This character would make much more sense if she would've been a student from the future who time-travels to this period for her history class report and is invisible/incorporeal to the locals.
Four - Biwa and other anime-original elements of the show are generic anime fluff devoid of actual originality. She is yet another “plucky anime tomboy with a clumsy surrogate father” cliche (just from recent memory, Dororo, Arte, Deca-Dence, and this very season’s Sakugan all share this cliche). In this show’s world, having heterochromia gives you superpowers, just like in Rozen Maiden, Darker than Black, and Wonder Egg Priority. The disproportionate amount of screen time allocated to minor female characters suffering because it was hard to be a woman in ye olde times is the laziest Oscar-bait imaginable. And so on, and so forth.
If you want to see a good adaptation of an ancient epic poem that tells the story through a lens of modern values yet respects the source material, watch the movie Troy with Brad Pitt.
If you want to see a good anime about the plight of a Japanese woman in the patriarchal Japanese society, watch Hisone to Maso-tan (or just about anything by Okada Mari).
If you want to see a good anime with lots of feet drawn by Yamada Naoko, watch Koe no Katachi.
If you want to see a good anime with a ye-olde-Japan art style, watch Mononoke.
But I don’t see any particular reason to watch The Heike Story anime.
4/10 for “nothing of value.”
