Drifters

Name(s): Drifters: Battle in a Brand-new World War
Director(s): Kenichi Suzuki
Format(s): TV series (12 episodes)
Genre(s): Action / Drama / Fantasy / Seinen
Studio(s): Hoods Entertainment
Release Date(s): October 7, 2016 – December 23, 2016

Originally Published: June 2, 2017 (11:59 AM)

Screw you, Some-Stuffs subs. I’ll wait one week, fine. But 23 weeks is when I draw the fucking line. So yeah, this is Drifters, Kouta Hirano‘s latest manga after he finished Hellsing. I was a big fan of Hellsing Ultimate and this was a promising premise. The same way Fate/Zero was a promising premise, because it’s the same thing. Famous icons from history are warped to a single fantasy setting to duke it out, because whatever.

Fate/Zero had a swath of writing problems if you ask me, but the main one was how poorly that premise was used. The icons chosen were often obscure to the point of barely being relevant, and their historical depictions of their character were warped beyond recognition to where the characters just shared a common name and occasionally referenced their mythology. Add to the fact they’re often overshadowed by boring original characters and I quickly lose interest.

Drifters immediately mended most of these problems. The choices for historical figures is much broader and features more well-known people, and they take center stage instead of the original characters. Every other problem is the same. The characters act blatantly nothing like their typical depiction and are given arbitrary magical powers, so the interesting hypothetical of seeing Nobunaga face Rasputin for some fucking reason is wasted. It boggles my mind. Maybe I’ll write my own manga.

There are parts where its head is in the right place, but it doesn’t count for much when you can’t trust the narrative’s depiction of its characters. Nobunaga in the series takes a heavy interest in guns and how they can be used in warfare, and in Japan he’s known for pioneering guns in Japanese warfare. But when something serious and cool like this has to exist alongside the fact that Nobunaga in Drifters is a silly old man who constantly makes jokes about an elf’s big boobs, the whole atmosphere falls apart. You can never put aside your suspension of disbelief enough.

Let’s talk about the humor, because it’s garbage. It was garbage in Hellsing Ultimate but dealt out in sparser amounts which got sparser as the show went along, and it was also presented in a far less obnoxious way. Every single episode of Drifters has the same cutaway gags shoved into the most serious of scenes where characters take on crude, comic facial expressions and scream silly shit over a nonsense background of pigs flying or something. It’s typical Japanese humor as well, characters overreacting to something strange or making jokes about tits. Fuck off with this shit. Who would ever watch this to laugh?

Another issue is that the cast hasn’t really been utilized well. A lot of those interesting character picks barely get any screen time compared to the main trio of Japanese war heroes. They have Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid which is fucking awesome, but I hope you don’t mind seeing them like, once. This I can understand a little bit, because the plot’s still in its infancy, and once Hellsing Ultimate set its pieces up for its main event, the perspective switching between them and showing all the moving parts was one of the show’s best-handled parts. So hopefully we’re still in the set-up portion.

The art style of the show is pretty great and effort was made to capture the dark intensity of Hirano’s art and even to bear similarity to Hellsing Ultimate, but the show suffers visually in other areas. The main thing is that the direction is frequently quite poor, especially in action scenes. The flow of everyone’s movements feels chaotic because the scenes put so much little effort into establishing the surrounding areas. There’s little sense of positioning or space, so when a character moves around their actions have no meaning because it all seems so arbitrary without context. It breaks immersion and it’s something that’s fast without being fun or interesting to watch.

The best example is probably Toyo’s fight with Joan of Arc, a fight which exacerbates these problems because the whole setting’s engulfed in flames in the middle of the night. It’s already difficult to make out the surroundings at a glance and it looks like characters are flipping around wildly and randomly for no reason. If you can’t contextualize the fight then you can’t actually get a sense of what danger there is, or why anyone’s moves are impressive or significant.

Well, I guess that about covers it. Drifters season one was pretty average. I reject the notion that Hellsing Ultimate is superficially cool, because I think all of its action is incredibly well-plotted, and the script outside of the action is very strong. But since Drifters doesn’t yet have those qualities, it actually is that shallow “badassery” with visual intensity but nothing underneath it to prop it up. I’m going to watch season 2 because I want to believe in Hirano’s ability to salvage the plot, but the directors of the anime themselves also have to make significant changes. If this weren’t a Hirano work, I don’t know if I would keep watching.

---

Drifters (OVA)

Name(s): Drifters Second Season
Director(s): Kenichi Suzuki (OVA 1–2) / Hitomi Ezoe (OVA 3)
Format(s): Original video animation [OVA] (2 episodes)
Genre(s): Action / Drama / Fantasy / Seinen
Studio(s): Hoods Entertainment
Release Date(s): December 23, 2017 – November 30, 2018

Originally Published: May 20, 2019 (12:00 AM)

It’s more Drifters. Nothing has changed. Tonal whiplash with the awful gag segments is at an all-time high in episode 13, historical figures are mischaracterized to the point where they may as well be original isekai characters, frame transitions are still chaotic and rarely establish a realistic sense of space that allows you to envision the area in full.

Literally the exact same problems but without all of the strengths. Drifters showed promise in the suspense-filled plotting of its longer action sequences, but these bonus episodes are of little consequence. No huge gambits are made here, either due to a lack of episodes or to justify a lack of availability to the audience since these episodes weren’t aired on TV. It doesn’t seem like someone jumping into future material would be too lost from skipping these episodes if brief explanations of the events were provided.

This is strange to say, considering the episodes certainly aren’t filler. They’re generally focused on Drifters’ political side as the world is expanded with more forces entering the conflict. This is by and large a character introduction and also works as establishing motivations of various parties. The Black King’s justifications in episode 13 might sound interesting, but it’s also exactly the kind of cynical “humans are the true evil” diatribe you would’ve expected, further cementing that little of this info is truly essential. At least the art quality is still great.

Also, when I watched this in May of 2019, the available subs were all horrible ESL drivel, which could be more motivation to not watch these. At least for a while. To think I used revised subs is scary. Given the lack of subs for episode 15 months after it was released, it would seem fan response to these episodes was probably as enthusiastic as my own.