SPRIGGAN

The Relics We Carry

I keep thinking about the way the earth cracks open in Spriggan. Not the first time—there are plenty of those—but the moment when the ground itself seems to remember something terrible, something older than human memory. The 2022 Netflix adaptation of Hiroshi Takashige and Ryōji Minagawa’s manga doesn’t just drop its characters into a world of ancient artifacts and military conspiracies; it buries them in it, forcing them to dig through layers of history that refuse to stay buried.

That’s the tension at the heart of this series: the past isn’t just prologue here. It’s a live wire, sparking in the present, and the people tasked with containing it are as fragile as the rest of us.

The premise is deceptively simple: ARCAM Corporation, a shadowy organization, employs elite agents called Spriggans to recover and safeguard powerful relics left behind by a lost civilization. These aren’t just trinkets; they’re weapons capable of rewriting history, and the wrong hands—governments, mercenaries, fanatics—are always reaching for them. The series leans hard into the geopolitical paranoia of its source material, framing the struggle over these artifacts as a proxy war where the stakes aren’t just territory or ideology, but the very survival of humanity.

It’s a familiar setup for anime, but Spriggan distinguishes itself by treating its relics not as MacGuffins, but as characters in their own right. They have weight. They have memory.

And when they’re activated, the world doesn’t just change—it remembers what it was like to be something else entirely.

Take the scene where a Spriggan agent, Yu Ominae, confronts a rogue operative wielding a relic that manipulates gravity. The fight isn’t just a display of choreographed violence (though it is that, too). It’s a battle against physics itself, with the environment warping around the combatants like a living thing.

The camera lingers on the way debris floats in midair, defying logic, and for a moment, you’re not watching a fight—you’re watching a force of nature being unleashed. The series has a knack for these moments, where the spectacle isn’t just impressive, but uncanny. It’s as if the animators are trying to remind us that the laws we take for granted are just temporary agreements, easily broken by something older and hungrier.