Summary: Set in a gothic fantasy world. Teito Klein is an orphaned slave, sorry, sklave who became a top military academy student. He also has convenient anmesia and only gets snippets of his past through dreams. However, one particular snippet led him to be pursued by the forces of the Barsburg Empire. Now an escaping convict, Teito’s sheltered by the church and it’s law of sanctuary. Here, he discovered many mysteries surrounding himself, the church, and the Empire itself. So many new questions for Teito to boggle his brains over. Even the church is a place uncertainty: it is under the mythical 7 Ghost protection, but who are the Ghosts really? Teito’s future seems to have spiraled into an unexpectedly perilous path.
This anime debuted in 2009 and is taken from a serialized manga series of the same name. The manga won a double-first prize in the third Zero-Sum Comics Grand-Prix, meaning it was chosen for first place by both readers and editors, which is apparently very rare.
The First Three Episodes:
1: Teito and his blonde friend Mikage take the test to pass military school, which is killing a giant mutant criminal. Teito refuses to kill him, but an army commander with white hair, Cheif Ayanami, steps in and kills him instead. Teito later dreams of his past and it leads to him remembering Ayanami killed an important person in his past. Teito attacks Ayanami and is imprisoned. Mikage helps Teito escape, but not wanting to involve his friend, Teito leaves Mikage behind. He is shot by Ayanami as he flies off.
2: Conveniently, Teito is picked up by three guys who just happen to be part of the Zone of God, the only place the military can't get to him. Teito searches for more information about his past. We learn about these 7 Ghost characters.
3: Haha wow three episodes in and they still haven't taken his chains off. If this kid doesn't die via military, he's probably got tetanus infected wrists to take care of that pesky life thing. Teito stays at the "church" and begins to make connections with the "clergy". He feels guilt about leaving Mikage behind and tries to leave but the "clergy" stop him.
Review: For being an anime about a former sklave boy in a gothic fantasy world where the women to men ratio is apparently 1:5 bazillion, it's not half as fanservicy as you might expect. Also, these guys carry around some of the tamest porn mags I have ever seen in anime. Depending on what you go for in anime, you could take this either way. I almost felt like they wanted it to happen but someone upstairs pulled the cord on that idea so they had to replace the fan service with elegant scenery and piano music. Moving on, The art is pretty good, although not outstanding. Like I said before, most of the good stuff is in the backgrounds and character close-ups. The "action" was where the art was lost most. There really weren't any cool moves or interesting angles. It was that classic "pose and yell at each other and maybe sometimes magic happens" type fighting. Generally I found the whole series to be more talky and thinky than comical and action packed. Personally, I feel like this was a major setback. Not only was the action inhibited, but I feel like the characters as well. Honestly I can't say much about any of them because I feel like they were either evil military, a super nice friend, or the brooding protagonist. And man oh man, is Teito good at brooding.
Overall, I feel like this series has tons of potential, and who knows, maybe I just need to watch more, but the amount of exposition and lack of dynamic animation really stinted it. Overall I put it in the "Nope." category. It honestly isn't my type of anime to begin with; I don't usually go for the more serious melodramas. Also let me say I wouldn't necessarily rank this as a terrible anime, I can see why it would have a fan base. However, don't completely take my word for it, check it out for yourself!
have fun otaku-ing!
