The Fall 2023 Anime Preview Guide

Ragna Crimson

Dragon hunters: warriors armed with special silver weapons who kill their prey for bounty. Lowest among their ranks is Ragna, who forms an improbable partnership with the young genius Leonica, a master dragon slayer with more kills to her name than almost any other. All Ragna wants is to stay by Leonica's side, but his dream is shattered by an attack from the deadliest dragon imaginable.

Ragna Crimson is based on a manga of the same name by Daiki Kobayashi. The anime series is streaming on HIDIVE on Saturdays.

With this first episode of Ragna Crimson, it's time to ask ourselves the question once again: “Did this episode need to be double-length?” The answer: “No, but it definitely helped.”

The thing about this episode is that much of it is a string of clichés. It's obvious from the start who the old man is and that Ragna will suddenly become overpowered and kill all the dragons in one shot to save the girl by the time the credits roll. It's stuff we've seen a billion times before across all kinds of settings.

The extra 22 minutes of runtime we get in this episode is designed to allow the more original parts of the story the room they need to breathe. Leo, for example, is far more than a simple damsel in distress. When people belittle Ragna for riding her coattails, her response is that anyone can join her—she's even willing to give them all the money and fame. She's only interested in killing dragons—the stronger the better. Thus, anyone who joins her will be taking the most dangerous missions all the time. This is why no one takes her up on her offer—except for Ragna who has already accepted he will die sooner or later.

Everyone close to Ragna has died time and again. Thus, he is suffering from some extreme survivors guilt. However, having seen Leo's strength up close, he believes she is the one person who won't die and leave him alone (he'll die first). What he doesn't realize is that she's come to care for him more than her dragon-killing dream. That she would die to save him—which is what happened in the original timeline. Their complex and evolving relationship adds a lot of depth to the story—especially now that their roles have become somewhat reversed.

The other solid aspect of the story is the peek into the dragon mindset. Simply put, what we care about and what dragons care about aren't the same. The dragons wipe an entire country off the map—massacre every human resident—because a single pastry shop went out of business. The only reason they don't kill all human life is simply that they don't care enough to do so. To them, the fight against mankind is not a war, it's pest extermination.

It's kind of like the relationship between humans and wolves. Even though they are dangerous animals, since we see them as lesser life forms, we just let them be as long as they're keeping to themselves. But once they effect something we care about—like farms or livestock—the gloves come off in an extreme way.

All in all, this comes out feeling like a slightly above average fantasy story. It's largely cliché for sure but has more than a few interesting ideas and complex characters to explore.

...Now if only the dragons didn't inexplicably wear modern day suits and ties for some odd reason.

If I can start this off by being petty for a moment, I hate Leo's face. I hate looking at it. I hate her big droopy eyes that look like they're about to fall off her forehead at any moment. I hate the dangly flesh-fang that makes her smile seem like it was drawn on crooked. I don't like it, and I spent much of this premiere anticipating her tragic death so that I wouldn't have to keep seeing her.

Outside of that, this premiere is solid. It's edgy as all get-out and makes less use of its double-length than you might expect, but if you're interested in some dark and brooding action fantasy, this one looks like a good pick. The time travel conceit makes for a solid source of our average hero gaining unstoppable power this early on, and the drive to stop all the various tragedies that would define his future is a good motivation. If anything, it helps the story keep from overloading itself with edgy melodrama from the start, and the conceit of Ragna now having to battle his way through the upper echelon of Dragon-kind is some classic shonen boss-rush storytelling. They perhaps hammer on the impending doom too hard – we see Ragna's dream of the future what feels like ten times before the fateful day – but overall, it does a good job setting up these characters and story.

It also looks pretty good outside of Leo's dumb little face. There's some solid animation, and they smartly use saturated reds and blacks to better blend the CG dragon models during the big fight. The fights look nice, communicating the carnage and viciousness of the dragons well, and the sequence of Ragna unlocking dragonslayer ultra instinct is pretty dang cool. It's not going to be the action or fantasy standout of the season, but there are solid action fundamentals with a healthy amount of polish here.

My biggest issue is that, while there's nothing wrong with this show (besides Leo's goddamn face), there's not much I'm attached to. Ragna is a pretty simple guy, and his relationship with Leo is pretty standard. The world seems rather basic based on everything we've seen, considering the dragons work on vampire rules with their weakness to silver and sunlight. I'm well past the age where being full of blood and darkness was enough to make a show the coolest thing ever, so I'm left with a premiere I think is fine, but I don't have any interest in continuing past it. Maybe I'll see what's up with the cool witch lady in the OP if she's in episode two? Otherwise, I'm fine leaving this one to its own devices.

I was going to open with some pithy remark that went something like, “Man, this anime would have totally been perfect if I were still fourteen years old and scribbling down dark Final Fantasy fanfiction ideas in the back of my English notebook during class!” but I'd honestly like to think that even Teenage James would have had to good sense to recognize that Ragna Crimson is pretty goddamned lame. Maybe that's vanity on my part, but to my hypothetical teenaged self's credit, Ragna Crimson goes out of its way to present itself as a grim and “dark” fantasy that would make even the local mallrats that spend all their time holed up in the state's last, decaying Hot Topic take pause and go, “Okay, buddy, you seriously don't need to try so hard.”

This isn't even the kind of gratuitous, exploitative shlock that could make for an entertaining night of drunk riffing with your buddies. No, Ragna Crimson is the kind of wannabe edgelord-bait that thinks all it has to do is toss in a couple of slightly gorier-than-usual death scenes and slather every other shot of the episode in a hideous coat of brown and red color filters. It'd be one thing if this tale of time travel and dragon slaying at least had some real teeth to it. Still, it strictly limits itself to the levels of bloodshed and melodramatic tragedy that could appeal to its target audience while still allowing it shelf space at the very front of a bookstore's YA Fantasy section. In other words, it is lacking in any of the over-the-top ultraviolence that I like to see from my grimdark anime these days, and what limited spectacle that it does attempt looks bad. The whole show looks pretty bad.

That means that the only thing Ragna Crimson can hang its hat on is its storytelling chops, and…er, let's say that the poor thing sure does try, for whatever that's worth. It's attempts to earn our sympathy and emotional investment sure do backfire, though, since all of that effort goes into one specific character: Leo, the precocious-looking but improbably deadly little dragon-slaying daughter-sister-waifu-thing that Ragna spends all of his time doting on. Her goofy flesh-fang and incessant cuteness should clue you in to exactly what kind of role she serves in this story, and I'm sorry, but it doesn't work for me. When the vast majority of a double-length premiere is focused on getting me to care about (and potentially mourn) a doe-eyed little mascot like Leo, only to leave me feeling ripped off when she doesn't end up biting the big one, something has gone horribly wrong.

Everything Ragna Crimson tries to do, from its art to its story to its general vibes, ends up as a pale imitation of other shows that aren't even all that great to begin with. At the end of the day, while this premiere is too fundamentally boring to be particularly offensive or infuriating in its badness, I still can't think of one earthly reason to recommend it.

There's a local legend where I'm from that tells of a cabin boy who was the sole survivor of two separate shipwrecks. After the second, he opted to leave the sea and become a farmer…and two years later, he drowned in a river. The general takeaway is that if the water wants you, it'll have you, and Ragna's life seems to follow a similar trajectory here, only with “dragons” substituted for “water.” Dragons have destroyed his life no fewer than three times when the narrative begins, which makes his decision to become a dragon hunter a little surprising – especially since his greatest fear seems to be losing more people he cares about to a dragon's maw.

All of this – and if we're being honest, the entire double-length first episode – is meant to show us how very much Ragna dislikes dragons and fears being left alone. He's teamed up with twelve-year-old dragon-killing prodigy Leonica because she's told him she's the one person who won't die on him, but even though he wants to believe her, he just as plainly has trouble doing so. It certainly doesn't help that he's being visited by an almost Dickensian ghost of his future, feeding him horrible visions of what's to come. Presumably, the idea is to give Ragna a really good reason to become a dragon-murdering machine himself, as well as the skills to do so, and it does succeed in showing us the lead-up to just that. Did it need to be forty-seven minutes long? I'm torn. As far as I can recall, this is the first, extra-long chapter of the manga adapted with decent (or more than decent) fidelity, which may influence your feelings about it. And I appreciate that we get a good sense of who Ragna is and his attachment to Leo because it could have come across as much creepier than it does. We also get a clear sense of how dragons in this fantasy world function and their hierarchy, which I appreciate. But with that said, I think just half of this could have been an excellent regular-length episode that offered enough intrigue to have viewers coming back.

Aside from Ragna's creepy, light-pupiled eyes, I like how this looks. The odd combination of late 19th-century technology and medieval fighting equipment works better than I would have assumed, and the balance of light and dark works very well. Leo also isn't nearly as annoying as she could have been, and neither is Sykes, her self-styled adult rival, so if the red being at the end looks like someone threw a bunch of random crap in a character design generator and hit “go,” I can excuse it. This may fill the dark fantasy spot on your slate if that's a genre you like, so even if this isn't great, it still has enough potential to see where it goes.