The Summer 2023 Anime Preview Guide

Ayaka: A Story of Bonds and Wounds

Yukito Yanagi is an orphan who one day encounters an eccentric disciple of his father. The strange man takes him to his birthplace on Ayakajima, made up of seven islands where mysterious beings called "Mitama" and dragons are rumored to reside. There, Yukito meets his father's two other disciples, who protect the harmony of Ayakajima which soon threatens to collapse.

Ayaka: A Story of Bonds and Wounds is an original story by GoRA and King Records. It streams on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

This is one of those anime-originals that feels like it was built entirely by a marketing firm. Everything about this premiere insists that it started from somebody commissioning art of a quartet of generically attractive, color-coded anime boys to make merch of. Then everything from their respective personalities to the actual plot was filled in later. The result is a viewing experience that leaves no real impact and, hampered by a dull art style and generic world building, leaves you feeling like you just chewed an old piece of gum for 20 minutes.

The only moderately interesting parts of the episode are the bits that don't make any sense – like our brooding teenage hero being left to live in foster care for ten years, seemingly just because the plot needed him to grow up not understanding his special powers. So we needed to arbitrarily keep him away from the island full of family friends who could have actually explained things to him before now. They justify it by saying it was the will of Yukito's dead father, but it's such a thin excuse that it just makes you think all these characters are brainless idiots who abandoned a child for most of his life until he was useful. Co-star Jingi's day-drunk asshole persona does nothing to discredit that theory, especially when he literally starts playing a game on his phone while Yukito exposits his sad backstory. So at best, we have weak writing that makes everybody look like a total jerk; at worst they really are jerks and the show just isn't interested in addressing that.

Other than that bizarre, ragged scrap of plotting, there's nothing interesting here. It's your standard exorcism-based monster fighting, a flavor of action that's pretty overdone right now. You've got a bunch of nature spirits and sometimes they turn into monsters, which our group of boys will have to fight them using their myriad magical abilities. Yukito, of course, has a special power that he'll have to learn to control. Like I said, these are all spare parts and standard issue ideas that you can find anywhere, and with the show's dull animation and duller characters, you'd be better off searching out just about any other supernatural action anime.

I can understand how Yukito is done with Jingi's bullshit, because I am too. He's a character who seems utterly dedicated to making as terrible a first impression as possible, first showing up drunk at Yukito's school and then tossing him off a bridge before using a magic bag to carry him off. Is he doing these things in service of carrying out Yukito's father's wishes? Yes, but surely there are better ways to go about it.

Fortunately, that seems to be the most abrasive part of this episode, although it must be said that it seems set on being deliberately obtuse. Yukito has spent the past ten-odd years living in mainland Japan after his father's death, and now that he's graduated from middle school, it seems it's time to return to the Ayaka Islands where he was born. The islands, whose name in Japanese is one syllable off from the word “ayakashi,” have a strange supernatural history, and Yukito's affinity for water is part of that. I wouldn't blame him for being upset that his father's desire that he spend ten years in foster care on the mainland (in reality a group home) deprived him of the chance to understand his relationship with water, because it seems unnecessarily cruel to not have given the poor kid any way of knowing why he can make rivers attack people. It's almost too little, too late by the time he's brought back to the islands.

If there's a hook here, it's figuring out why Yukito's dad acted as he did and what the implications are for Yukito now that he's back on-island. His powers are clearly strong, but it's just as apparent that he needs to learn how to use them; Jingi keeps saying that he has “brute strength” but not much else. The island landscape is littered with good spirits (mitama) and malicious ones (ara-mitama), and it seems as if Yukito's needed to help with their management, although we only really have Jingi's actions to base that idea on so far. There are elements of this episode that are very interesting, like the trains that run on water between the islands and the contrast between the adorable mitama and the alarming ara-mitama, and they do make up for some of the issues, like the episode's deep desire to be at least a little edgy. I wouldn't call this a strong premiere, but it is intriguing enough to merit a second episode. If it can sort itself out and dial Jingi back, it may be a fun supernatural action show.

So full disclosure: this is actually the second time I've seen AYAKA, since I attended a preview screening at Sakura Con three months ago. If you go back and read my coverage, you'll see that I found it to be a dull slog. Well, now it's out for real, and spoiler alert, my opinion hasn't shifted a single bit.

Conceptually, it has the potential to be a fun-but-forgettable supernatural action series. Using the Shinto concept of the mitama is actually fairly novel to my knowledge. The mitama, the spirit of a kami or a dead person, is divided into four aspects: the wild and violent ara-mitama; the serene and functional nigi-mitama; the happy and loving saki-mitama; and the wise and powerful kushi-mitama. They're part of an ancient aspect of the religion and have been interpreted differently by different philosophers, scholars, and practitioners over the centuries. I haven't seen them come up in anime or manga, even ones that are explicitly about Shintoism, though they're a mainstay of the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona game series. Plus, incorporating Shintoism into a story's worldview nearly universally leads to some cool imagery, since it's among the most aesthetically pleasing of the world's religions, at least in my opinion.

But as far as I can tell from the first episode, the ara mitama are generic scary monsters for the unlikable humans of AYAKA to beat the piss out of in poorly-staged fights. I mean it; the episode's climactic battle against a watery blob in a priest's uniform does a terrible job of concealing the production's meager budget and/or technical limitations, resorting to things like a tight close-up on a character's face as he launches himself through the air with an insufferably smug expression, or big ugly CG water tentacles. It's not incompetent enough to be funny in its flailing, but it's also nowhere near good either, falling into the dreaded middle ground where it's just a chore to sit through.

You know what else is a chore? The characters. The protagonist, Yukito, is a blank-faced bore with little to say except repeat that he doesn't let himself get close to other people like an NPC in an RPG game. Even in moments of extreme distress, he looks either apathetic or vaguely constipated. His costar, Jingi, is more dynamic, but he's a day drinking asshole who litters with empty cans of Chu-Hai and treats Yukito with about as much emotional care as a piece of luggage. And I do mean that literally.

AYAKA is complete dross, lacking in anything to make it more appealing than any one of the billion supernatural action series out there. Just watch the new season of Jujutsu Kaisen or rewatch Mob Psycho 100 if you need cool fights against spirits. Those are so much more engaging.

It's a strange sort of alchemy that goes into creating a story, in that beyond simply having all of the right ingredients set in all of the right amounts, you also have to have that indefinable but absolutely vital spark of magic to turn the concoction into something that takes shape into a meaningful form. Take this show, for instance, Ayaka: A Story of Bonds and Wounds. If you break it down into its component parts, it technically has everything it ought to in order to, you know, be an anime. It's got main character with understandable motivations that has been roped into a wild world of supernatural mystery by the strange new mentor that has come bearing the unbelievable truth about our hero's past and home. It's got action, some jokes, a sense of mystery, and it's animated competently enough to get you from Point A to Point B. Yet, despite having all of the ingredients mixed together in the usual ways, Ayaka's first episode is simply lacking that spark to bring it all together. Instead of getting you invested in its world or its characters, it merely washes over you in a nebulous wave, impossible to grab a hold of before it slips right through you and out of your mind for good.

I'm honestly having a hard time pinning down which aspect of the show, specifically, is responsible for that missing spark. Is it the flat and washed-out visual style? The cliched dialogue and rote character development? The lifeless direction and stilted editing, perhaps? None of these elements, individually, are poor enough to sink a production entirely, but when you take all of these minute cracks in the foundation together, it becomes easier to understand why Ayaka sinks so soon after setting out from the shore.

Yukito isn't a bad protagonist, but he possesses neither the intrigue nor the likeability to carry this story on his own, and Jingi is too much of a cliché to make up for what Yukito lacks on his own. The island setting and the presence of mythical “Mitama” to battle give us the bare minimum excuse for some middling action scenes, but Ayaka does nothing with these elements to allow itself to stand out from the hundreds, if not thousands, of other shows out there that feature grumpy teenagers and their jokey pals doing battle with spooky monsters. The specific monster that Yukito and Jingi fight in this episode looks alright for an all-CG creation, I guess, but what else does it have going for it? Gross, ghostly tendrils and an eye that does that wiggly thing? Buddy, if I had a nickle for every show that thought good monster design began and ended with “gross tendrils and that wiggly eye thing”, I'd have enough money to…well, with inflation and all, I'm not sure I'd actually be able to buy anything, but it'd at least be enough change to fill up a mason jar a little bit, so the point still stands. Skip Ayaka, for sure, unless you have a bad case of insomnia that really needs curing.

To call this first episode of AYAKA run-of-the-mill would be an understatement. We have an orphan boy, Yukito, who has special powers he can't control. This has caused him to isolate himself from others—to put him in a position where he won't get emotionally hurt and lash out. However, he is suddenly drawn into a world where there are other people like himself—where he can learn to control his powers and safely build the emotional relationships he's long been denied. He also gets to fight monsters.

While not an inherently bad setup, the “emotionally damaged orphan with special powers fighting monsters” setup is more than a bit overused in recent years. Because of this, there needs to be something to set it apart from all its contemporaries. I spent the whole episode waiting and hoping for something new or interesting—and it wasn't until the closing seconds of the episode that I finally caught a glimmer.

From what we see in this episode, the setting is a rural island where wandering spirits are commonplace. There are a group of traditional monks using eastern magics to keep corrupted spirits at bay. However, what we see at the end of the episode is that there appears to be a fully modern neighboring island. There, the monks dress in suits and use guns to pacify the spirits. This gives the show the potential to mix and match the traditional with the modern in creative ways—be that visually, physically, or philosophically. The battle of the new versus the old is always a great source of dramatic conflict.

So while this first episode was lackluster, there might be something worthwhile in subsequent episodes. However, as for me, with little-to-no connection to the main characters or the trials they face, I think this is the limit to how far I'll go on this one.