Alternative title(s): Ayaka: A Story of Bonds and Wounds
Anime original by Studio Blanc
Streaming on Crunchyroll

Premise

Yukito Yanagi has spent most of his young life in a foster home, but one day he’s summoned back to the chain of islands where he spent his early childhood, where it’s revealed to him that he has special powers to battle a breed of monsters known as ‘Mitama’.

Zigg’s verdict: Shallow Water

I feel like I should like Ayaka more than I do. After all, this is a completely original new story that’s not an awful isekai or a morally bankrupt fetish show. It has decent production values, there’s some not-awful magic effects, and the action seems, if not inspired, at least basically competent. By those standards it’s practically a unicorn, especially in a season that seems largely barren of much else of value.

Thing is though, a story has to be more than the sum total of its component parts, and on that count Ayaka falls apart pretty quickly. There’s a cloying genericism that suffuses the entire production, a sort of underlying dullness which sucks the energy out of anything that might be interesting or novel at first glance. Lead character Yukito is an exceptionally bland loner, while his companion Jingi is trying so hard to be a hip, edgy rebel that it just sinks him deeper into a well of cliche. The monsters seem to be pretty rote yokai-adjacent creatures who are made of nasty CGI, and the setting is an equally familiar pastiche of rural Japan that’s so picture postcard perfect it’s a hairs breadth away from comedy.

The only thing that’s really notable about the plot of this opener is how awkwardly and unconvincingly the story has to twist to sideline Yukito for the better part of a decade, just so he can come back as a clueless audience surrogate. It’s so poorly integrated the characters even comment in-universe about how bizarre the setup is. Needless to say, such narrative lumpiness in your first chapter is not an especially promising sign for the writing to come.

Really, the entire thing smacks of something that has been relentlessly focus-grouped and designed by committee to the point any sort of individuality and flair has been sucked out.  The only thing which really pops are the ultra-stylized, primary colour themed main characters, who are all very pretty, fashionable and….yeah, you’ve probably guessed by this point, but this is an ikemen show that’s more concerned with ginning up a bunch of handsome boys and giving them sexual tension with each other than telling a real story. In fact, it’s created by GoRa, the author collective who are behind the inexplicably popular K, a very similar franchise of pretty boys indulging in vaguely supernatural action and a lot of ship tease. If you’re a fan of K, or of this kind of thing in general, you might get something from this, but I don’t think I will be and on those grounds I can’t recommend this.