Toppa Bashin – Episode 1

When watching TV, make sure you’re in a well lit room… And don’t sit too close to the screen okay?

The Lovely Meganeko

Alright, Episode 1. Let’s do this.

Depending on what you’re watching, you’ll likely see this message pop up often before the opening plays, this is a trend that I commonly see last up until apparently Sword-Eyes. I don’t know if that’s because the sources I use omit the Sword-Eyes’ opening or people kept getting fed up with the repeated messages.

Regardless, Meganeko is always a nice sight to see, I’ll give her a proper introduction when she appears during the show.

Time for the Opening!

You’ll notice at this point there’s a color theme going on with the game, for those who don’t know anything about the game, Battle Spirits revolves around an assortment of colors, and color is a recurring theme when it comes to the show, you can usually tell what color a character uses by the way they dress (but this can often be used on purpose to trick you)

Currently in Battle Spirits Toppa Bashin, there are 4 colors, White, Red, Purple and Green.

J (Yes his name is a literal letter) here is a White user, White is the Color of Defense, themed around Machinery and Ice, typically White cards will have some ability to defend yourself, like gaining power when blocking, or ending your opponent’s Attack Step.

There are much better sources for learning the rules though, so give them a read if you want to properly understand them, they can get pretty complicated.

Either they consider J a Deuteragonist as he’s the first to be introduced, or they were super new to this.

Anyway, this is Toppa Bashin, he uses the Color Red, Red is the Color of Offense, themed around various Lizard-like creatures such as Dragons, Dinosaurs, and the element of Fire and Lightning. They often have effects that give them Power when they are attacking, or outright destroying enemy cards.

Red is also typically the color given to main characters. It gets old quick.

Purple is what I like to call the Color of Oppression, themed around Ghosts and Horrors, they’re also themed around the element of Darkness. The reason why I call it the Color of Oppression is because they have lots of abilities that mess with the opponent’s core, the resource he needs to play and power up spirits. With many effects that remove opposing core from spirits, destroy spirits that have certain core arrangements (like not having enough core, or rarely, having too much), or flat out removing the total amount of core your opponent gets to play with. They also have various other punishment based options, such as destroying exhausted spirits.

And the final color for a short while, Green, the color of Speed, themed around Nature and the element of Wind. Green typically has lots of effects designed to further accelerate your victory, the most common being to boost your core so you can summon more expensive spirits earlier, but they can also exhaust your opponent’s spirits so they can’t block, or flat out take lives under certain circumstances to reduce how many times they need to attack.

You’ll notice a theme with Colors having opposites, White is defense, Red is offense, Purple removes core, Green gains core.

Well, that’s the colors out of the way, hopefully I won’t need to address anything else in the opening.

Also, those who DO play the game, shut up, I’m aware there is two things I’m missing here, I’ll discuss them when they’re introduced.

And now, the episode title, “Front Breaking Bashin Enters Stage”

Toppa Bashin’s catchphrase is “Shomen Toppa!” which roughly translates to “Break through the front”, no this clearly has nothing to do with the subber’s name, I have no clue what you’re talking about.

Of course in unrealistic card game anime, the subject of the series is basically the best thing since sliced bread. So they have massive stadiums dedicated to people playing cards on a table.

They should have just opened with this instead of hyping me up to watch a tournament match. I would have cared significantly less about having the championship match ripped from my eyes.

Thankfully the alarm clock has saved us from the terror of actually having to watch the plot develop and we can finally get to the card games.

So apparently a celebrity since elementary school because he’s good at Card games, this is J, the horribly named user of White. And SINCE he’s a White user, he’s going to be our main character’s rival for the rest of the series, as White is Red’s opposite in this game.

A common occurrence given the slow pace of the game until the next season (I’m going to complain about this a lot, try to stop me!) is that they’ll skip to certain phases of the game. They’re better with it way much later but it’s still annoying how later episodes have them play cost 8 cards with like no reduction just because we’ve skipped to turn 20.

For the newer players: the reason this looks bad from the outset is it’s the Purple Player’s (known as Suiren), turn. She has 5 Spirits out and J only has 2, and you can see his Life counter only has 3 Core on it. The typical way to stop a Spirit’s attack is for a Spirit to block, otherwise you lose a life. Since J can only stop 2 attacks, 3 will go to the life, and J will lose.

Typical block here, he needs to protect his life

And that immediately brings us to the first fuck up of the series.

If you haven’t noticed the problem yet, I’ll explain it:

So when Fenrircannon here Blocks, it gains 1000 BP for the duration of the turn, meanwhile you can see from the screenshot that Draculious has 4000 BP since it only has a single core on it.

When Spirits have equal BP, both spirits in the battle will be destroyed. And Fenrircannon’s ability applies at ALL levels. And his effect is not optional. Meaning they had equal BP.

Despite this, the show frames it has Draculious having won. Rather than a mutual destruction.

And yes while Suiren could have used a BP increasing effect before Draculious’ attack. They didn’t show it, so it don’t count! Plus it lets me steal the LPArchive’s famed fuckup tally.

That aside, on with the show!

You’ll probably see this statement a lot where a character is “cornered”, obviously it means a character is losing but interestingly, there’s a pattern for when the show uses it, and it’s most often when, in a given turn, a player has the visible ability to win.

So because Suiren has 2 Spirits and J has no Spirits and 2 life remaining, the “cornered” prompt pops up because if J does nothing, Suiren will win.

You’re probably wondering why I haven’t introduced Suiren yet, it’s because she actually gets an official introduction episode after this. So I’ll do her introduction then. Until that point, she’s just an ordinary card battler.

J throws out Silent Wall right when Suiren makes an attempt on his 2 Lives, Silent Wall forcibly ends a player’s turn after their attack finishes. Sadly it’s after and not before, hence why the necessity to do this at 2 life, and not one.

Also, Magic card debut!

Mate just say the Attack step is over, it’s not that hard.

I’d probably go over why this is a bad game state if I could just ignore the fact that there are 2 Draculious that should be as dead as a doorknob right about now.

Suiren’s had her win cut short, leaving her with only 1 blocker, this can happen often when you’re not reading into your opponent’s hand and you run into a card that ends your attack step prematurely.

All J has to do is summon enough spirits to cut her life down, we haven’t actually had a good view of Suiren’s life up til now.

J’s amassed a board of 5 spirits, so by this logic Suiren should have 4 life if he’s going to win this.

Freaking finally, we get a view of Suiren’s life, and given that it’s currently at 4, that means Suiren is “cornered”

Edit: I somehow failed to mention that Suiren actually lost this match, she had no responses to J’s onslaught so of course, she lost all her lives.

Lose all your life, you lose, buddy.

I suppose they’re just foreshadowing that there’s a big bad in the show by name dropping him rather than just showing us a scene with him in it.

They also mention that this is J’s 2nd championship win, I didn’t think 2 wins made you a celebrity but okay.

Except maybe ending her turn after the Fenrircannon’s were beaten?

It’s not rocket science…

So this is Aibou (Yes I know it’s just Japanese for Partner), Toppa’s pet mouse. He’s adorable but he get’s less so as the series goes on, enjoy it while you can.

This is Hayami Bashin, Toppa’s mother, she knows her son well enough to keep egging him on through his main catchphrase, “Shomen Toppa!”, she’s also a Taxi driver. Gotta make ends meet.

Now would be a good time to introduce our main character, Toppa Bashin, normally referred to as just “Bashin” even by his mother.

He’s the resident Red player, and his main character trait is just being overly straight forward. He’s a shounen protagonist, what do you expect?

Interestingly he doesn’t have his ace card for the series at the beginning of the show, he gets that a bit later. I believe he’s the only character to acquire his ace mid show. Burning Soul could be another example but that main character already has his ace, he just doesn’t unveil it.

And finally, Ace’s in the show are referred to as “Key Spirits”, they’re the Key to your Deck’s victory.

And here we have Meganeko, she currently does NOT play Battle Spirits (Blasphemy!) but has a romantic interest in our resident dumbass, Toppa.

If I didn’t like her character so much I’d call her a dumbass for liking said dumbass.

And finally we have… “Card Sensei”

He’s the Teacher for our young protagonists.

And extremely emotional about Battle Spirits to the point where he let’s Students stand on his freaking desk.

I suppose I should start calling him Bashin from now on, everyone else seems to do it.

The power of writing as I watch, you get caught by stuff like this. Because of course the shounen protagonist falls asleep in class AND sits at the back, closest to the window.

He also just had a dream about announcing that he lost in the preliminaries of a summer tournament, so this identifies him as a weak player.

It’s just a shame unlike most card game protagonists, he doesn’t have stupid hair… I actually quite like his fiery ginger hair.

Also apparently the shops in this show are called “Batosupi Centers”, Batosupi being a classic Japanese method of shortening 2 words into one by omitting the last few syllables in them and putting them together. “Eroge” is another example of them doing this.

So “Nazo-Otona” is a shortening for “Nazo no Otona” which apparently this sub translates to “Mysterious adult”

And more telling instead of showing, a bunch of kids discussing beating a random stranger who is SPECIFICALLY an adult who is mysterious rewards them with something? Not creepy at all

Thanks for telling your viewers to take on random strange adults in the street, this won’t go badly at all.

And in typical salty player fashion, time to aggressively toss your possibly expensive deck on the floor when you lose a game to your classmate who had a hand of EYEBURNS.

I’m with this guy, why would you throw away money like that?

And now we get introduced to “Striker” (YES THATS HIS NAME) and if he’s ever detached from the topic of football for any longer than an episode I think he will actually spontaneously combust.

Also for some reason the footage shifted to a wider format, which isn’t the worst thing in the world other than it is noticeable.

Anyway after some bantering about football in a card game anime (BLASPHEMY!) we have Bashin decide to use the cards the extra decided to toss away. Except they’re Green and he’s primarily a Red user.

We can see how this is gonna go…

So Striker buggers off and Bashin now has Green cards…

Considering he hasn’t played a single game yet this can only end badly. He’s already been highlighted as a poor player before this.

Jumping straight to the Battle Spirits center, it seems Bashin has left behind Meganeko… That bastard…

And also he’s missed J, his Rival. Not nearly enough punishment for wronging the innocence that is Meganeko but it’ll do for now.

So Bashin just up and leaves the place he ditched Meganeko for to go hunt his REAL love interest.

to say I’m seething is an understatement.

Oh wow he gets to ditch Meganeko and gets rewarded with J?

Okay I’ll shut up about Meganeko.

Ah yes the ol’ “I’m too high class to associate with you lower class peasants!”

Unless he just specifically means Bashin, which I would totally take as my headcanon.

Don’t associate with Bashin.

Since Subs don’t capture voices, Bashin is imitating J

If Bashin’s Dad weren’t missing, I’d probably make a joke about how shounen protagonist’s often have their Dad’s missing.

So he’ll take his Cat’s suggestion over his Father’s? Interesting.

And finally we get a bloody battle, about god damn time.

Ah yes, the ever resonant words of entering the Battlefield. This is typically used to invoke whatever Deus Ex Machina is required to have a battle basically anywhere. It’s also those types of Battlefields where the cards come to life.

And after a 2 minute long sequence of the Battlefield manifesting, we’re finally ready to battle.

J just summoned a freaking stadium that brings creatures to life right in front of you.

Be less excited! Be scared! Have a negative emotion god dammit!

Understatement of the freaking year…

Another thing unique to this anime specifically is that the Battlefield opens up to release summoned spirits. And it bothers me because after watching the later series, you expect them to kind of be in the lower section of the battlefield.

But nope they just kind of float high up in the air

In Battle Spirits, you start the game with 4 cards in hand, but only your Core step is skipped on the first turn.

So Bashin only having 4 cards in his hand after drawing here is extremely odd considering he’s only summoned Eyeburn. So he should be back at 5 cards now.

Ah, interesting move.

J left his Cost 1 Icemaiden at Level 1, leaving it with less BP than Eyeburn’s Level 1 BP.

You start with 4 core and Icemaiden only needs 2 core to be at level 2, So I’m surprised J didn’t level it up when he played it. This attack would be unsafe for Bashin as he could lose Eyeburn if Icemaiden blocked at level 2.

Unless of course, that’s his plan, to make it safe for Bashin to attack so he can reduce his lives to play more cards.

Several ways you can go about such a simple scenario to achieve certain results. It’s why I love this game.

Not gonna lie I feel jipped, there goes my super in depth analysis for the first episode battle.

I’m not angry…. I swear…

YOU SEE THOSE GREEN THINGS NEXT TO THE COST BASHIN?
THATS COST REDUCTION
AT LEAST PUT SOME GREEN FODDER IN THERE.

Gowsilvia has the ability to gain BP for each core in the reserve.

If he had fulfilled the reductions for it, so if his field were green spirits, he could summon this for 3 cost instead of 6.

He could bring it up to level 2 or leave it at level 1, and it’d have 5000 BP

Defensive Aura gives +3000 BP to all blocking Spirits… which is more than Gowsilvia’s Level 1 BP.
No core in the reserve to boost it either. He lost Gowsilvia for literally no reason.

Make room for a better main character.

Of course, absolutely no reason for J to take a life when he can beat Metalburn. The previous situation was just to discourage Bashin from attacking.

But unless you have a contingency, don’t attack when your opponent has bigger numbers.

So they skipped like 8 turns of the fight and still needed to make it a 2 parter? Well okay then.

The earlier episodes are of course, the worst, since it’s early into the first anime’s life. Also I’m sure the CGI takes a huge cut of the budget.

I also noticed there’s no Card of the Day for this show yet, so I don’t really get to talk about any specific cards yet.

Oh well, my opinion for this episode is obviously rather biased, you basically watch Bashin be an asshole for most of the episode before his rival sets him straight.

also I love how quick he was to declare a card weak right after stating that no card is useless.

The characters are pretty well written at the very least, feeling anger at Bashin for being Bashin is better than feeling bored by him.

Until next episode, I’ll leave a footnote below which will become a Hyperlink when the next post comes out.

Episode 2 ->