Tougen Anki

The Anatomy of a Copycat

There’s a particular drained feeling you get when you can see the assembly line working in real time. That’s where *Tougen Anki* lands for me. The premise is genuinely sharp: take the Momotaro legend, flip the moral axis, and ask what happens if the Oni were never the monsters at all. In this version, the descendants of Peach Boy run a fascistic killing machine, and the demons are the hunted ones. Great setup. I was ready for it. Then the first episode starts, and within twenty minutes that clever reversal is buried under a pile of shounen habits so familiar they might as well have come with SKU numbers.



Ato Nonaka and Studio Hibari seem to be building the show out of borrowed parts. You can almost feel them reaching for the usual kit: *Blue Exorcist*’s hidden supernatural academy, *Chainsaw Man*’s splatter, and a lead who yells so hard even Asta from *Black Clover* might ask for a volume cut. The best idea in the mix is the Oni blood technique, the "Blood Eclipse Release," which lets characters forge weapons out of their own blood. That should be a gift to animators, and sometimes it is; the hardening red liquid has a nice sticky ugliness when it becomes a scythe or a gun. But the direction too often flattens it. The fights slip into mushy CGI collisions without much weight or orientation. Maybe that’s budget, maybe it’s storyboarding, maybe it’s both. Either way, the impact keeps evaporating.



What really drags it down is how little trust the script has in the viewer. There’s an early moment with the mentor Naito Mudano that ought to sell the show’s personality on sight. Shiki wakes up tied to a chair in a lavish room, and right there beside him is Naito, calmly doing one-handed pushups balanced on the tip of his umbrella. It’s absurd, memorable, and instantly tells you who this guy is. Then the series panics and explains everything anyway. A narrator—or Naito himself—keeps stepping in to label emotions, decode the power system, and translate scenes that were already speaking clearly. Charles Hartford at *But Why Tho?* had it exactly right when he said the show "devolves into obnoxious characterizations, narration that doesn't trust the audience to see what is right in front of them." Instead of letting the drama land, it turns every beat into a lecture.



I do feel for the cast, because they’re working hard inside a script that keeps short-circuiting them. Kazuki Ura gives Shiki the same ragged intensity he brought to *Blue Lock*, but the role mostly asks him to scream and sulk rather than reveal much underneath. Hiroshi Kamiya fares better as Naito. He’s been refining that bored-but-deadly mentor energy for years—Levi in *Attack on Titan* being the obvious comparison—and his dry, chilly delivery brings the only real sense of control to the series. Watch how his body stays composed while everyone else flails; he does more to sell the world than all the exposition piled on top of him. But even that can only go so far. *Tougen Anki* isn’t a train wreck. In some ways that makes it more frustrating. It wants to posture as a rebel while following the genre handbook page by page.