Ayaka: A Story of Bonds and Wounds – The Summer 2023 Anime Preview Guide

What is this?

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.

How was the first episode?

Nicholas Dupree

Rating:

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.

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

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…