Rage of Bahamut: Genesis

Mistarcia is a land where humans, gods, and demons coexist. They have lived in tempered peace for 2,000 years since rallying their powers to seal the terrible elder dragon, Bahamut, to prevent the world’s destruction. Far from tales of mythical beasts and and ancient prophecies, silver-tongued bounty hunter Favaro Leone travels the globe looking for a quick buck and an easy time. But his luck is doomed to falter when he encounters a young woman seeking safe travel to the mysterious town of Helheim.

Rage of Bahamut: Genesis is an odd duck as far as adaptations go. What do you do when you’ve got a popular card game and you’re asked to make an anime out of it? Most would follow in Yu-Gi-Oh!’s footsteps (which ironically is backwards since the YGO card game came about after it became the staple feature of the manga), depicting teenagers battling with cards in duels that are ‘more than just a game’. These days, many anime are created for the express purpose of later making further profit off a card game, such as Fantasista Doll and WIXOSS. Cards are a compact, handy concept and people love to collect cards – it’s a win/win situation. So what would Keiichi Sato do, when approached with Rage of Bahamut?

Keiichi Sato may best be known as the director of Tiger & Bunny and original concept creator for The Big O. Primarily a mecha designer, he is a self-professed nostalgia lover which knowledgably seeps into his production credits. His work can very easily be placed into a particular time period and genre just at surface level. The Big O invokes an anime twist on Batman: The Animated Series and early-90s action drama. Tiger & Bunny covers superhero serials and works the very idea of nostalgia into the plot; a world where superheroes have become processed and monetized yet protagonist Kotetsu longs for a time when ‘real’ heroes were needed. His concepts seem to be based heavily on ‘super heroes’ as depicted by the age of their origin, not necessarily the classic, stalwart heroes we envision. For instance, the heroes of westerns aren’t exactly the most sympathetic or approachable individuals. They’re often loners who operate on their own code of justice, they may even be crass and rude anti-heroes, but in the end, they still get the job done. With Rage of Bahamut: Genesis, Sato got the chance to expand his oeuvre to this type of character and setting.

Assuming most of Sato’s direction is influenced by his personal nostalgia, I can only assume he has strong feelings about Hollywood westerns and fantasy adventures, as Bahamut is overflowing with cinematic pizzazz unusual for an Eastern production. The series opens not unlike we were watching a scene from The Princess Bride, as bounty hunters Favaro and Kaisar give chase on horseback, gallivanting over rooftops and bridges, flashy on-screen text revealing their names for the audience. There’s an obvious blend of Tarantino in the mix as well for comedic elements, with just the slightest touch of his eclectic irreverence spicing up the rivals’ banter.  Sato assaults our senses on a grand scale, taking a fantasy card game and actually adapting a story from within the universe of the game, not just making a show about cards. Instead we got a swashbuckling fantasy epic pitting a sleazy, good-for-nothing anti-hero against the fate of the entire world. More of that, please.

Bahamut is a simple Hollywood-fare story about saving the world from prophecy-foretold destruction that saves itself from total homogeneity by its karmic cast of characters. Favaro is a snarky rascal only looking out for his own hide, shadowed by his old friend Kaisar, a goody-goody moral compass in thought, word, and deed. Upon meeting Amira, the strange girl who fell from the heavens and seeks passage to Helheim, Favaro and Kaisar are strung along from one locale to the next, meeting gods and demons and learning the truth of their families’ sordid pasts, eventually coming together to tackle Amira’s fate. This is not a story where the protagonists necessarily change, but rather meet at a common ground of understanding and work around their differences – because the story at work isn’t REALLY theirs though the viewer generally follows Favaro’s perception of events. They just got caught up in another, bigger story and are being flung around like marionettes. The presence of Amira and Rita the undead zombie girl (yes really), help mediate that conclusion.

That isn’t to say I find the female characters of Bahamut tied down to a man’s whims – they are anything but. Rita is a completely independent factor who merely tags along because she finds Kaisar’s group interesting. Amira, more than anything, just wants to see her mother again. However, we see through the female characters perhaps too much embellishment of Sato’s Hollywood bender; the negatives of this approach which combat the narrative against their strengths. Though she is independent, Rita has no goals of her own – she just becomes a member of the team and helps out, but to what end? We don’t really know. The people’s holy knight, Jeanne d’Arc (bet you can’t guess who she’s based on), portrayed as an unflappable fortress of patience and good will, is stripped of everything and broken into madness merely to demonstrate one of the villain’s abilities; it feels a shallow conclusion for her character.  Too often in Hollywood, woman are relegated into roles that blatantly service a plot-point or trope, and Bahamut unfortunately falls into this trap with Jeanne and ESPECIALLY with Amira.

The character of Amira is a perplexing one from a conceptual standpoint. She’s at once both sympathetic and likable but also kind of confusingly designed in a way that feels manipulative. Like you weren’t sure what role the writers wanted her to play in the story on an emotional level. Firstly, this IS Amira’s story – everything that happens comes about from her actions. She is literally a tool for the revival of Bahamut; a key locked inside a demure girl who just wants to be reunited with her family and make peace. But it’s in Amira’s personality and portrayal that her purpose as a character (outside being a focal point for the story) gets confused. Before we knew much about her, she was presented like a silent, somewhat absentminded femme fatale: shot in a way not totally objectifying but clearly made to allow us to be admirable of her body. The charm of her character was in the stark difference between her childish introvert side and badass action side, but on both sides equally devoted to her mission – she’s beautiful, straight as an arrow, and can kick your butt. What’s not to like, right? We find out more about her later, and without spoiling as best I can, we discover that her appearance doesn’t quite match her age………explaining her child-like naivety. Emphasis on ‘child-like’. She acts like a child because she is literally a child inside an adult woman’s body. This character that we had been given several curvaceous views of prior to this revelation. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmm.

I’m not AGAINST this type of characterization – a young mind inside a matured body can be handled well, but Bahamut only takes the most predictable, silver screen route. Favaro and Amira develop a relationship by the end of the series that feels like big brother/little sister, so it stings of betrayal when their final scene together ends in a kiss, because every climactic fantasy adventure in Hollywood must end with a kiss. It’s like if at the end of Pacific Rim, Raleigh and Mako had kissed on the lifeboat. The whole movie built up romantic tension between them, and yet it ended on merely the notion of “glad to be alive here with you”, not “I love you”; it was a highly progressive route to take and one I was happy to see, for once not enforcing a romance and only leaving it up to interpretation. This narrative basically forces Amira to mature physically and mentally beyond her years in order to create a sympathetic, likable character who could also satisfy the needs of rote Hollywood romance. It may be a visually satisfying bon voyage from their relationship (and their relationship is my favorite aspect of the story) to have an on-screen smooch – it is a high emotion kind of moment that fits the tone of the final episode – but factually it doesn’t feel right. She’s a character I like……but oddly manipulative in her conception. Like, I dunno, I understand why her existence was one of constant pain and suffering, but to force a traditional romantic ending was too much for me. You feel bad for her more as a creation of the production staff than as a character in the story.

I harped on that quite a bit, but I honestly don’t think Amira is a bad character. She’s manipulated at the expense of the direction and as such lives a sad, terminally short life, but there’s nothing explicitly toxic about her and she’s absolutely still someone you root for. Everyone in Bahamut is. It’s a full-blown extravaganza of one of my favorite types of stories: when multiple factions in a stratified, complex world come together to fight a simple, common enemy. The type of story with twists and turns and clever, gratifying pay-offs that tease and excite; a story that favors non-conventional characterization (even Amira’s is technically non-conventional) to deliver a fresh flavor to mythical lore that has been retread over and over and over again. It’s a story that speaks 100% to lovers of the anti-hero daring-do wiles of Western cinema, and really to no-one else.

This is one of the least ‘anime’ anime you can find; there’s nary a drop of otaku conventions or Japanese culture to be found. Scenes are shot in ways that emphasize location as a valued part of the story – even the episode titles are often marked by the city the characters’ are currently in. Traditional anime story-telling is very insular and tends to focus on the individual character as the #1 construct of the story. They are the draw – the world exists around them, in spite of them, as commonly the setting of an anime has little bearing on the story’s ultimate conclusion, because it is reliant on the characters. In contrast, Western story-telling relies heavily on context and setting; worlds that characters exist IN. Bahamut introduces a world where many characters exist, but don’t always take center-stage, because the setting is the star player. Fans of traditional anime look for stories with characters that they can latch onto, whether it be a character they relate to or just a cute/hot girl they want to draw fanart of. They are less concerned with the world the characters exist in, which is why I think Rage of Bahamut: Genesis will not be a very popular ‘anime’, at least not on its home shores.

A prime example of this disconnect between Bahamut as a Japanese anime and as a Western-styled animation can be seen in the character Cerberus. She’s probably the most traditional anime ‘thing’ in all of Bahamut. She’s a demon, a representation of the same Cerberus of Greek legend, but instead of having three heads, she’s imagined in a lithe, loli’s body with independently sentient dog heads for hands. Were this a regular anime, I guarantee Cerberus would be getting all the screentime because she’s a cute girl with a funny visual quirk. It’s like Kantai Collection – it’s a genius concept made specifically for otaku. But here, Cerberus gets virtually nothing to do but occasionally mug for the camera; no character arc, no fight scene, no nothing. There are several characters like this in Bahamut who come and go with little warning, or whose screentime is directly proportionate to the needs of the story, not the wants of an audience. This is not the type of character usage otaku want to see. They want characters they like to appear on-screen a lot and do anything, not only operate as a function of the world and story they exist in. Bahamut does not satisfy that mindset.

What Bahamut does satisfy is my desire for an entertaining story filled with entertaining characters directed through the lens of big budget cinema. But before I end the review, I have to ask – does Bahamut satisfy fans of the original card game? It is an adaptation, after all – is it a GOOD adaptation? That’s hard to say, as there isn’t a concrete narrative in the original Rage of Bahamut card game to adapt. It’s a fantasy game with fantasy instances and fantasy monsters to fight – there are only mini-stories acting as player events to win riches (more cards). But based on what I’ve heard, the anime does provide forms of fanservice to those who just so happen to have played the card game. All of the character designs come from existing cards, so, congratulations, nameless bounty hunter guy, you are now Kaisar! One cute scene in Episode 2 has Favaro picking out clothes for Amira. The varying outfits she tries on in humorous quick-cuts are all based off player class designs from the game, so that’s a nice touch. It’s primarily aesthetic details that carry over from card game to anime. But honestly I don’t see much point in figuring out if Bahamut is a good adaptation – it’s good enough that it doesn’t need to be considered an adaptation.

Though it may have missteps in its execution as far as its female characters are concerned, Rage of Bahamut: Genesis is the most fun I’ve experienced in watching an anime in years. Few animated works that aren’t movies capture the sense of pure cinematic joy this one does. Keiichi Sato takes inspiration from various directors spanning a wide legacy of contemporary American film-making, and while he doesn’t apply their techniques with the same level of competence or fulfillment, their style bounds through the screen and rivets you, just for the fact that few anime dare to utilize this type of direction. The last anime I watched that invoked such a feeling was The UNLIMITED: Hyobu Kyousuke, a lesser-known spin-off of Zettai Karen Children focusing on the bad guys of the latter. The UNLIMITED follows a distinct Japanese structure in its characters and story, but the direction brought that Western style to the table that favors scripted action set-pieces. The story was also delivered in a way that made it easy for the audience to enjoy the spin-off even if you hadn’t seen the original show. Likewise, Rage of Bahamut: Genesis is a show that’s easy to enjoy even if you haven’t played the original card game – because it’s an original creation of its own right by nature of its unique, bombastic cinematic groove that deserves to be celebrated to the max.

You can currently find all subbed episodes of Rage of Bahamut: Genesis streaming online courtesy of FUNimation. A home video release has not been announced at this time.