So I finished watching the Shion no Ou the flowers of hard blood (しおんの王) 22 episode tv anime series. On the whole the series had a certain charm and appealing character which captivated me in spite of the fact that the quality level for the work was extremely low.
As I stated previously the show is basically about a mute girl whose parents were murdered that plays the japanese board game Shougi (shogi)which has been referred to as “japanese chess”. Go is sometimes erroneously called that as well however those two games are extremely dissimilar. Well as far as I know about chess and shougi there are similarities between the goal (capture the opposing king while protecting your own) and movement patterns of some of the pieces but other than that the setup formation is different as are… maybe the number of pieces and the play strategy. The big difference between shogi and chess is that you can reuse captured pieces in shogi. Also promotion works a bit differently in that more pieces than just the pawns can be promoted (it is only the pawns that can be promoted in chess isn’t it?) and the promotion zone isn’t only the opposite side of the board as it is in chess. So between those two there are a lot more variables than there are in chess and game play differs accordingly.
So shogi aside, the majority of the show takes place during an unprecedented open tournament between male and female pro shogi players and amateur shogi players of all abilities for a large prize (50 million yen). And within that the majority of the focus is on Shion’s own matches. On at least one occasion a side character had their match relegated to the “cold” opening segment. The plot otherwise mostly revolves around Shion being harassed and people investigating the murder of her parents.
I can not state enough times how massively disappointed I was that this show wasn’t about Shion traveling around solving crimes in between her shogi matches. The show never tries to get you to think this, that was apparently just an observation I heard a long time ago from someone who had no familiarity with the work yet was predicting the course of the series. However if the show would have been like that I’d have enjoyed it more even though it probably would have just been worse.
Various things annoyed me about the show. The first was how blatant it was from the first episode who the killer was, the second was that you are explicitly told who it is before the last episode of the show so it peaks before the climax. The other thing was how stupid the plot involving Saito Ayumi was. You have a male character cross dressing who is actually voiced by a woman. Just having a female character would have been better in the first place. Then on top of it all his hair gets chopped off.
Aside from the plot the animation was horrid and the character designs, mostly the hair and clothing styles of the bland looking characters, weren’t any better. Being a show with absolutely no action and a number of still sequences there isn’t an excuse for how terrible the show looked. There is a scene near the end of the last episode in particular between the Hani brothers where the animation is so bad that Satoru looks like a paper bag that’s floating around. Being a mere 22 episodes makes this more inexcusable.
Now on the bright side of being only 22 episodes, it didn’t have two stupid recap episodes as many shows are apt to do and I’m pretty sure it ran over new years and golden week (basically the two major holiday periods in japan). Then again it would have likely only been in production during new years so golden week shouldn’t have been an issue, but it is common for shows in production during new years to just throw out a recap episode during that time period which is usually half way through one way or the other. You know Golden week delayed shipment of something I was waiting on and that really pissed me off. Things like that and “business days” really piss me off but that is another story.
Soooooo in the end I’m not sure what Shion no Ou was trying to accomplish. The odd background to the story was probably just an attempt at spicing up the typical “sports saga” (perhaps similar to how you had a ghost in Hikaru no Go) but since everything else about the series was typical of those types of works it just seemed out of place. I read something interesting about how Hikaru no Go had reinvigorated Go among youth but that there hasn’t really been a series to do that with Shogi. In this same report it was alleged that more youth play shogi in the first place. On the other hand Go is a game that is played widely enough around the world, Mahjong (which is really less a game of skill than chance) as well, certainly throughout asia, but Shogi is confined mostly to japan. It’s pretty easy to imagine shogi totally dying out eventually. That would be too bad since It really is a more interesting game than chess. Though in my case I’d be even worse at it than chess. That might be true of a lot of people.
Actually that reminds me of something I read about the stagnation of japanese companies and products. In particular even though something like the majority of people in japan use cell phones and their service is provided by japanese companies, japanese mobile phones are not much of a factor, certainly on the world market. Hmmm in fact the only electronics field I’m particularly aware of being dominated by japan (I have to wonder if they don’t dominate comics and animation as far as production goes) is console gaming but by the same token PC gaming is weak in japan and the consoles are mostly made with components from american companies anyway. In fact since the likes of Sony and Nintendo are diversified worldwide one can wonder how much anything that goes on R&D wise is still related to Japan. Though that is neither here nor there. And certainly the Iphone rapidly became the most popular cellphone in the world anyway so you can’t really blame japanese for that. And it really has nothing to do with shion no ou but this is my blog so I can write crap if I want to. You might try it sometime.
The Sky Before Dawn 