That’s it, it’s over! Battle Spirits Shounen Toppa Bashin is done. But it wouldn’t be much of a review if I didn’t give my thoughts on the series as a whole.
This segment is going to be a lot of text, I will add images if I feel they are relevant but do not expect any.
First and foremost, I’ll discuss the characters.
Characters
The most important thing to drive any story is Characters, characters are, essentially what drive a story, because we are people, we are driven by stories that have characters.
The Cornerstone 6
The “Cornerstone 6” quite frankly are done fairly well… with the exception of one of them. Each character is given a relatively decent amount of focus, even Bashin takes a backseat in order to flash out the other members of his group at times. And they’re handled quite nicely. There are some issues though.
Bashin drives the story and the story will bend and break to suit him if need be, it doesn’t feel like it does that, rather it seems to punish him when he attempts to, Bashin, while he does start off annoying is consistently humbled by the plot, and eventually gets quite a fair bit of wisdom and maturity once he reaches the end of the series. I will admit, while I hated him to begin with, he’s certainly high on my list of characters now.
J is handled rather consistently up until his issues with his Father come into focus. He continually makes agreements with Bashin, goes back on them because he refuses to actually act on them, and then gets depressed about it. Even making a Face-Heel turn (becoming a bad guy) while still feeling like he’s betrayed Bashin by doing so. This becomes inconsistent with how he treats Bashin while in that state though, he pours his heart out to Bashin and then proceeds to say he’s worse than weak and practically assault him. For someone who was doing this because he felt he had to in order to get closer to Uchuuchouten to eliminate the Thousand Spirits group to free his father, he certainly didn’t act like he felt forced to do it. In short, J suffers from having several depicted moments that suggest he should be acting one way, and either fails to do so or outright contradicts them.
Striker is more relegated to a supporting character role, not much develops after he learns to play Battle Spirits, my issue with him is that he’s extremely under-utilized around the middle section of the series, he gets an X-Rare, uses it once and then is never seen playing again for an extremely long amount of time.
Suiren/My Sunshine is, fine, a lot of her problems come from being an idol but nothing actually threatens it, so she just seems like an interesting supporting character, I don’t have any complaints with how she’s handled, much as her Idol persona frustrates me.
Meganeko is handled VERY well, she’s given basically what Striker doesn’t get, she develops from a non-battler into a fully fledged one, upgrading from a character that revolves around Bashin into her own, independant being. Her personality even developing small changes before becoming almost nigh-unrecognizeable without me even noticing. Meganeko is done VERY well as a character. My only complaint that involves her is more a problem with Smile than herself.
Kyouka is done horribly, and to talk about her I also need to talk about the character of Card Sensei.
Card Sensei is, early on in the series, quite drastically indicated to be the Blue battler for the series. He wears a lot of blue, Guragurii has the same collar the other animals do, and even talks. Etcetera. Unfortunately this completely clashes with the plot because Card Sensei is built up to leave for an extended period of time. Which would be fine if he returned when BS03 was released and Blue was unveiled. This doesn’t occur. Instead returning on the cusp of BS04 only to hand his baton to Kyouka.
Kyouka is given the role that Card Sensei spent all series being foreshadowed and built up towards having, and her only claim to fame was battling Meganeko like once. She’s there to tick a box, once she HAS the Cornerstone she’s not shown battling AT. ALL. Except in a dream sequence in an Episode that might as well have not existed! All of that Episodes features could have been used detailing the Battle with Nine and I would feel so much better about it. But its losses all around and they paint her to be an awful character despite her being motivated to play and take part in the Battle Spirits club, fighting the likes of My Sunshine all day, a Tournament level battler, yet still being awful enough that she doesn’t know an opposing card has higher BP than her own?
It’s ridiculous, she’s used like bin to throw whatever trash you forgot to fill out at. Which feels even worse because she acts as a happy and composed female battler counterpart to the emotional Meganeko and the cocky Suiren. But she’s awarded MacGuffins for no discernable reason and then tossed aside. How do you effectively manage 5 characters at once and can’t find it in you to even give the 6th a LITTLE spotlight.
The Thousand Spirits Group
These guys, as villains act as opposition to the characters, I have nothing much to say about a fair few of them. Those being Two, Three, Five and Eight.
Five is obvious, covered my issues above. Two, Three and Eight serve very specific purposes as supporting characters/minor antagonists and fulfill that role almost perfectly. Two, along with Smile acted as a mechanism to try and coax J toward eventually becoming Jack Knight, once Jack Knight was close to being finalized, Elliott no longer served a purpose and thus retired.
Three, Kiano, he spends a lot of the series missing and only arrives precisely when he needs to. He’s an excellent mechanism to finalize J’s eventual role shift. I did have complaints about how he’s painted to be sympathetic right when J does his role shift but in all honesty he’s not around all that long before he is presented to be that way, I retract that criticism.
And Eight has been a mentor-type for the characters in a roundabout way, awarding them X-Rares and eventually taking over Card Sensei’s role directly.
Anyway, them aside, let’s talk about the other Numbers, starting with Seven.
Seven’s role seems almost perfectly set up to be the alternative Blue Battler given that while Card Sensei and Kyouka are the chosen Blue Battler, Galaxy Seven is what the show deems to be the designated blue player for the show, unveiling 2 out of the 3 Blue X-Rares the show depicts. But because of his role as a member of the Numbers Elite he’s effectively rendered incapable of inheriting the Cornerstone as he wouldn’t be able to take part in many of the battles the heroes involve themselves in. But given how few Kyouka gets in her role I’m not sure it would have mattered. I’m just not sure why Kyouka needed to become a relevant member of the Cornerstone 6 when Galaxy Seven could have filled that role nicely. Eight being a member of the opposition in Team Numbers Elite might have gotten the “Masako” sub-plot resolved a lot neater if Galaxy made the developed decision to stay with Team Shomen Toppa. Or you know, just make Card Sensei do what he was supposed to and the Galaxy Seven thing wouldn’t have been a problem, attempting to put Kyouka into a Blue role created more problems than it solved.
Smile… Smile Smile Smile, honestly, I think he’s become my favourite character in the series after the nightmare that was Episode 50’s redeeming of Nine. His existence and his backstory create tension when Meganeko studies under Card Sensei, because he’s the conclusion of what happened the last time Card Sensei took on a student. His initial personality reflected Meganeko’s before he completely discarded it. He’s brought into the series introducing a new colour, defeats the series rival, and is effectively placed there as a threat.
…Before proceeding to have the crap kicked out of him battle after battle with no discernable effect on his psyche up until the LAST one where they do salvage the problem a little bit by having him curse his inability to defeat any other character. This is good, a problem that was becoming pervasive eventually gets addressed in-story, it was good.
And then J becomes Jack Knight and he kind of just does nothing the whole series, we’re not seen a single FRAME of his tag with J and yet the show continues to keep telling us “They’re strong! Please believe us!”
He never fully reconciles with anyone about any part of his backstory despite being a consistent appearance in episodes since his introduction, even in the epilogue he doesn’t develop ONE IOTA whatsoever when that should have happened once he broke down in front of J. None of his tensions are ever resolved and his most developed moment was him ripping off Seven’s Mask at the end of the series because Nine was a coward. That’s it, and he’s not apologetic for being freed after the fact. He’s a good character and his energy carries a lot of enjoyment but nothing about him changes and it makes him get pretty stagnant pretty quickly.
Nine, geez, how to ruin a completely perfect villain, he’s the most composed of the cast and seems to take an interest in Bashin explicitly, even ordering Eight to keep an eye on him outside the orders of Uchuuchouten. All of this suggests SOME intrigue in Bashin specifically…
And then at some point after he interacts with Hayami and Hayami rejects him he just 180’s, there’s no distinctive display of his anger developing anywhere, there’s no breakdown, no shift, nothing indicates his sudden change in behaviour, he just dons a red suit after Jack Knight leaves and then immediately ignores Bashin and starts targeting Cornerstones, and wants to end the world. He then spends the whole series getting called out for Poor Luck before displaying RIDICULOUS feats of Luck. Gets his ass beat by Bashin, gets his Main Antagonist role nabbed back by Uchuuchouten, and then proceeds to be INSTANTLY redeemed by a post-hoc rationalization of “Oh, Nine was being controlled by his Rage and now Uchuuchouten has it, we cool now”
WHAT!?
Nine’s entire “Magnificent Bastard” persona… was the product of him just being really angry? To say I feel jipped is a complete understatement.
They never explained what he was angry about, though implied to be due to his poor luck, they never explained what caught his interest in Bashin such that he EMULATED HIS DECK. They never explain why his rage was special enough that it could have been taken away by a shiny rock along with his memories.
It’s ridiculous.
And don’t get me started on Uchuuchouten. From EPISODE ONE, Uchuuchouten is straight up name-dropped, and we don’t see or hear from him until around the first Tournament by which all he does is start the tournament with a speech. He’s then not even brought up except as a motivator for J to aim at and no one says why.
It’s not until Episode TWENTY SIX that he get a MILD idea of what he’s up to.
Only in the LAST Episode do they explain anything about him and it’s not much, things still up in the air involve how Bashin Touha became Uchuuchouten, Why he did so, why Uchuuchouten wanted to destroy the world pre-absorbing Nine’s Rage, How he has the ability to summon cards from the Future (which could have been a useful ability to use earlier in the series when debuting new cards to the cast like the ones Smile and J got)
Uchuuchouten was so under-utilized despite the amount of potential he had as a main villain, its like the Writers were almost scared to use him out of fear that he wouldn’t be a mysterious villain, his mysteries shouldn’t persist PASSED the show’s end. It seems highly rushed and they couldn’t get that info in because Episode limits.
Speaking of which.
Episodic/Narrative Structure
This is by far the WORST Battle Spirits series just on account of how its Episodic structure takes place. None of the main plot actually OCCURS before Episode 26, and the first half is spent just introducing characters before throwing a bunch of meaningless events at them to get them to battle while not showcasing anything interesting.
A new card here and a new card there could be showcased while the plot was going on rather than forsaking it so that you could.
And oh jesus the TURN SKIPPING. Battle Spirits may not be the quickest game in the world, but it is not long, very few games grind so far that you reach Turn 11 without many lives lost or in some cases, a player having won. And yet the show insists on consistently starting from a super late turn. 20 or 30 or whatever.
It’s completely unrealistic because it’s being done to showcase multi-card combos that wouldn’t work otherwise, but I’ve calculated the core used during those episodes and they overshoot the amount of core they should have on those turns CONSISTENTLY, so the one reason I could think of that they would do such a thing doesn’t even fly, anyone paying attention is just expected to assume they got core they don’t have from SOMEWHERE earlier in the game.
Now, I don’t mind a Card Game anime having one-off episodes that don’t further the plot, that’s completely fine, but for example Episode 17 didn’t further the plot, NOR did it succeed in actually doing anything, it didn’t even have a battle and the topics detailed in the episode don’t actually get followed up on because the Main character, while promising to use off-colour cards doesn’t do so, and then has the same argument much later during the game against Amade Us. So then what was the point of Episode 17? It’s genuinely an episode that could be skipped and absolutely nothing of value would have been lost. Episodes like that appear and take up spots for things that could have actual meaning, like Episode 44 giving Kyouka some spotlight except it doesn’t because she’s just a dream in spite of the cool X-Rare she unveiled.
What a pain in the ass.
Mechanics
And oh joy the inconsistent story-telling. Facts we establish very early on get either ignored or straight up retconned later with no explanation. Some can ONLY be inferred if you’re paying very close analytical attention like I was.
Here’s a couple established facts of the show:
- A Cornerstone AND it’s related Animal partner is required to open the Gate to Isekai
- A Nazo-Otona awards X-Rares when defeated. Players who receive X-Rares in this way receive a High Ranker Pass.
- Elliott, in an attempt to raise interest in the game, created the Tag Battle System and hosted a Secret Tournament with J to unveil it.
At some point in the show, these established facts get broken multiple times.
The Cornerstone 6 have shown on multiple occasions the ability to open the gate without the presence of their Animal Partner, before recalling that requirement, for example J does so against Elliott during their meeting at school in spite of Okyou’s absence. While conveniently remembering it when Bashin and Striker need a Batosupi fix.
Nazo-Otonas, have consistently been stated to award X-Rares when defeated but Nazo-Otonas have failed to do so MORE times than they’ve succeeded, granted Bashin himself gets angry about this at times but they don’t ever explain or even suggest WHY they choose to award X-Rares at all if the notion is il-concieved.
Elliott creates a Tag Battle System and hosts a secret Tournament for it, its marketed as a new thing, yet it somehow existed WELL before Elliott announced it, because Hayami and Touha, along with Kiano and Aunt Kiano were tag battlers forever ago?
I dunno about you sunshine but that shit don’t add up.
Final Thoughts
The battles as a whole at least, are good, the times they choose to debut cards is relatively good, the battles are engaging, with the exception of Episode 49 and another one I can’t remember off the top of my head, but the time when the part of the fight we DO get is uninteresting is few and far between.
I believe the story’s problems comes from an oversaturation of characters and rather than letting side characters be side characters they try to get as many of them developed as possible resulting in strange situations where a character is given an important role and then does nothing with it. It feels like they went with a more episode-by-episode basis for storytelling and only decided to shift into an overarching plot halfway, that would explain away at least half the narrative troubles.
Less characters means the ones you do have can be focused on a lot more, the other characters don’t need to just stop existing but don’t show any focus to something you’re not intending on making use of later. The characters you WERE able to put a healthy amount of focus into, did come out rather well, you had a nice and varied cast of believable characters and then just failed to use them at times.
I feel like writers need to take notes of established facts they need to consider when doing or stating things that are relevant so that new information does not out right contradict previous information WITHOUT appropriate reason to do so.
All in all, these are all problems that just follow on from close examination of it, if watched as an episodic series just wanting to see some battles and not particularly worried about the plot holding itself up under scrutiny then you know what? It’s a good show, the Episodes themselves don’t contradict themselves within the scope of the Episode, its usually between them that issues occur.
all in all, Battle Spirits Shounen Toppa Bashin is a series that sets a lot of standards in the series that are carried over in later ones, and does an excellent job for a first anime in 2009 making use of CGI 3D Models to showcase the games. The characters are all fairly good and the plot, in general, doesn’t entirely fail at being unique. Where it falters can basically be summarised as internal consistency in, basically everywhere. A little out of touch with the actual game itself sprinkled with a bit of lack of creativity in producing battles that could be believed to have happened, and combos possible under low amounts of core. As well as extremely poor treatment of the show’s main villains compared to the rest of the cast.
In any case, that’s all I really got. Battle Spirits Shounen Toppa Bashin is, at least for me, completely over. And I can’t wait to move on to its Spiritual successor, Gekiha Dan, which I will absolutely be comparing to Toppa Bashin as its practically a rewrite of Toppa Bashin’s plot under close examination.
I’ll see you then!
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