This Week in Anime

Is Cygames a Mark of Anime Quality?

Chris
You know, ever since the success of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury's yuri mecha, many wondered when we might get a counterpart yaoi robot show. But I don't know that anyone expected it to arrive so quickly or be so literal.

Right outta the robot-riding gate, that little logo was the reason the audience probably should have predicted that Bravern would be a wilder ride than its promos were initially presenting it as. You can put all the gritty, grounded, "real" robots in the trailers you want, but the involvement of one Masami Ōbari would make that suspect enough. With Cygames in production, many weebs have been trained to expect the unexpected.

It's hardly a distinguishing maneuver; companies like Bushiroad are also doing it. But in many other cases, that anime production is predicated on seeding IPs that might grow into lucrative new multimedia/gacha properties. Cygames, on the other hand, has made a habit of just driving dump-truck loads of money up to offbeat projects that they have no intention to market or idea how to market as franchises.

Even being the first one and a mobile game tie-in, Genesis still immediately set the standard for what viewers would regard as the "Cygames premiere"—a (virtually) original production effectively rooted in a standby genre or two, but bursting with enough personality and wild swerves to get everyone talking about it after it aired, despite little buzz before.

It makes it an absolute crime that Rage of Bahamut Genesis has been buried under several layers of defunct streaming services since. But kids, if you've still got an active Funimation account and want to see what MAPPA looked like before Yuri!!! on Ice and afforded what was, according to legends at the time, an "unlimited budget" by their mobage sugar daddies, absolutely give it a look.

The other crime is that the sequel season to Genesis turned out kinda lousy, but look, they're a gacha company, which means you can never really know what you'll get.

You and I have previously discussed the double-edged sword of mobage money. But for all the ill-gotten nature of those gains, the hit ratio of Cygames' criminal corner of it stands out. As with Rage of Bahamut, this applies to many of their game tie-in productions. Uma Musume continues to be one of my favorite series in recent years, and the Princess Connect anime was way better than anyone reasonably would've expected from something that was both a gacha commercial and an isekai.

The latter also stands out as one of those premieres that caught everyone off-guard in its season.

Fewer characters getting basic stuff like stat sheets and skills explained to them, please, and more of them getting even basic things explained, like that money can be exchanged for goods and services.

These horse girls eat like, well, you know.

Cygames' marketing strategies would eventually become a whole separate aspect. As much buzz as the initial ad got, I don't recall the premiere of Uma Musume's anime itself being quite the showstopper as other examples. There was respect for its surprising commitment to its technically bizarre world-building, but otherwise, a fair amount of befuddled staring (admittedly, that was mainly on the Western side).

It feels like it took a minute for it to grow into the kind of notorious moneymaker you'd expect from the illicit convergence of horse racing and gacha games.

And it's the consistent success of series like Uma Musume and a little franchise you might've heard of called Granblue Fantasy that has seemingly let the company move into producing series with out-of-nowhere reputations. Also, one for premieres that feature outlandish, incongruous musical numbers.

Zombie Land Saga was the one that truly hit that "Where the hell did this come from?!" reaction the way Rage of Bahamut had years earlier, then turned the amps up to eleven. Especially given the question of what to expect from a show about zombie pop idols produced by a gacha game company and animated by...MAPPA, again?

They know how to make an impact.

It's amazing how well that first episode sells itself with only two members of its main cast even conscious, though one of them being Miyano at his Miyano-est certainly helps. By the time you get to the end with its screaming head-banging zombie idol death-metal concert, you get a sense of how this bizarre monster accumulated two seasons, a multitude of tie-ins, and a guest appearance in the UK Parliament.

Where's that domino meme when you need it?

It's supposed to be a series about promoting the prefecture of Saga itself. Though how well it's marketed in the area can be...arguable. Regardless, there's that sense that the Cygames suits behind Zombie Land Saga weren't too fussed about how they could or should monetize something like it. Instead, they'd lean into that whole "What the hell is happening here?" aspect when it came to promoting shows like 2022's Akiba Maid War.

I recall you, Nick, and I all listing Akiba Maid War among our most anticipated anime of the Fall 2022 season just off the back of that mystery-box trailer. The series doesn't treat you like an idiot; it makes its true, violent nature apparent from the very beginning of its premiere. But even then, the full power of that first episode was enough to get a whole bunch of my circle talking (and dancing).

Sometimes, simple is best. Akiba Maid War has a fair amount in common with Zombie Land Saga, being a juxtaposed genre mash-up and even repeating the gag of having a non-verbal character who's later revealed to be played by a legendary veteran seiyuu.

This one swaps out MAPPA for Cygames' previous Uma Musume collaborators P.A. Works. This inadvertently makes me wonder if Akiba Maid War technically counts as part of that studio's overarching series of working women anime.

What makes Akiba Maid War, along with Zombie Land Saga before it, work so well is having pretty serious legs beyond the strong shock-value opener. Seriously, if you're a reader who watched the beginning of this show for the memes and never got around to the rest of it, I implore you to do so. It turns into a genuinely worthy crime story, with one of my favorite endings in recent memory.

It's not always a sure thing. The way Zombie Land Saga and Akiba Maid War landed seemed to inspire Cygames to play up the mysterious element of their original productions as a matter of course. And yeah, I was at least a little interested in 2023's The Marginal Service based on those past successes and its obtuse early promo pics that just looked like this.

But all the strategic nudity in the world isn't going to matter when the anime you eventually premiere lacks any of that word-of-mouth impact and is instead a pretty standard supernatural cop show that feels like a less-cool Men in Black.

Then again, this show is up for a Crunchyroll Anime Award, so what do I know?

Not every pull is going to be an SSR. Thankfully, Brave Bang Bravern! seems to have avoided being consigned to that sort of dustbin, if the way my social media feed lit up last Thursday was any indication. Even Crunchyroll cruelly delaying their release of the show doesn't seem to have hurt it. Perhaps because that meant we got two episodes dropped at once, with the second being where the really good stuff started.

It's the studio they used to animate the similarly extra Uma Musume: Road to the Top ONA last year. That setup let director Cheng Zhi Liao and her crew cut loose on one of Cygames' flagship franchises. Hopefully, the same conditions bode well for allowing a master of the mecha craft like Obari to work his magic on Bravern.

Years of coldly stern faceplate mechs mean the youths have missed out on the handsome facial features of Obari's Brave 'bots. It's about time they learned.

They also include the robot finishing enemies off with an explosion before turning around and transforming with a stock sequence in front of a giant sigil, so I think it's safe to say Obari and the team know what they're doing after all these years.

Obari is a lot of things, but he's never been a coward. Much as Bravern singing his theme song at the end of the first episode fits the bill of the Cygames Musical Number™️, the debut of the show's ending theme marked it as the true inheritor, if the amount of excited posting I saw of it was any indication. My own included.

This show's got our number.

It works so well that I was enthralled watching it, even if the extra week delay meant I was spoiled on the "Super Robot crashes a Real Robot anime" genre twist. That's a sign, like Rage of Bahamut, Zombie Land Saga, and Akiba Maid War before it, of having strong fundamentals with the material it's also subverting.

Look, as long as Cygames wants to keep giving creatives like Obari so much leeway he can call up his favorite beer company to ask them to let him include a cameo in his queer robot cartoon; I'm inclined to let them. Shilling gacha is reprehensible. Where it's at is marketing the crisp, refreshing taste of Kona Brewing Co. beer!*

*Please Enjoy Responsibly