Review for Hakkenden - Eight Dogs Of The East: Season 1

Introduction

A few months ago, I had the chance to review Fusé: Memoirs of a Huntress for All the Anime, a historical fantasy adventure based on a traditional Japanese myth, and epic novel series Nansō Satomi Hakkenden. If there’s one thing I’ve noticed, these historical adaptations are rarely made in isolation. If it’s a good idea for one, you can bet that someone else will be taking a different crack at the same story. It’s not just a Japanese thing, as Truman Capote movies, discovery of America movies and Robin Hood movies can attest to. The last few years have seen a veritable Nobunaga Oda bandwagon, and now MVM get another look at the Hakkenden legend, with the first season of Hakkenden: Eight Dogs of the East. We get Season 1 now, and Season 2 will be released next month.


Five years previously, the village of Otsuka was destroyed in a fire following a plague, with only three survivors, a girl named Hamaji, and two boys, Sosuke Inukawa, and Shino Inuzuka. They now live in a church on the outskirts of a neighbouring village, shunned by the villagers as carrying the curse of Otsuka. Normally you’d put that down to superstition, but in this case, such fears may be warranted. To survive the disaster they had to make a deal which drastically changed them, and they are now prone to supernatural attention. Even the more kindly of the local villagers are liable to be targeted by a demon or something if they stay too close to the children. And they aren’t the only ones with an interest in the survivors of Otsuka. When Hamaji is kidnapped, while Shino and Sosuke are dealing with a demon in the forest, they wind up travelling after her to the Imperial Capital. It turns out that she’s a guest of the church there, and one of the deans, Rio Satomi has a mission for Shino and Sosuke, to find six others just like them.


Thirteen episodes of Hakkenden: Eight Dogs of the East Season 1 are presented across 3 DVDs from MVM, while the series is also being released on Blu-ray.

Disc 1
1. Borders
2. Humans and Demons
3. The Approaching Demon
4. Homecoming

Disc 2
5. Divine Blessing
6. Stashed
7. A Promise
8. Encounter

Disc 3
9. Guard
10. A Lonely Figure
11. True Self
12. Compensation
13. Karma

Picture

Hakkenden gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic NTSC transfer on these discs, which Sentai in the US have encoded progressively for compatible equipment (MVM use the Sentai masters for the Region 2 release). The image is clear and sharp throughout, with no significant issues with compression or banding. It’s a fantasy mish-mash of several periods, a little bit modern, a little bit Edo, a little bit steampunk, but the production design never really sparkles or inspires. It’s a fairly standard supernatural show with plenty of pretty boy character designs. You only need one look to guess which audience demographic this show is aimed at (not mine).

Sound

You have the choice between DD 2.0 English and Japanese stereo, with optional subtitles and a signs only track. I went with the Japanese audio as always, and was satisfied with the usual generic character voices for the usual character stereotypes, although credit is due for the voice actor who voiced both Sosukes, as he managed to create two different characters who are superficially the same person. The action comes across adequately, the music suits the show well, even if it doesn’t stick in the mind (except for the overused ‘No Place Like Home’) and there are no issues with glitches or dropouts. I gave the dub a quick try, and had to turn it off again. It seems as if all the characters except Shino speak with the US equivalent of Received Pronunciation. It sounds silly to me.

Extras

The discs present their content with static menus and jacket pictures. Each episode is followed by a translated English credit scroll. We also get more than the usual extra features on a Sentai sourced release.

Certainly Disc 1 comes with the usual Sentai trailers, this time for From the New World, The Book of Bantorra, Hakuoki: Demon of the Fleeting Blossom, Persona 4 The Animation, Maoyu Mao Yusha, and Intrigue in the Bakumatsu.

We get two audio commentaries as well, the first on episode 1, featuring voice actors Satoshi Hino (Sosuke), Tetsuya Kakihara (Shino), Ayahi Takagaki (Hamaji), and Nobuhiko Okamoto (Murasame). The second is on episode 4 and features Satoshi Hino and Tetsuya Kakihara again, this time with Tomoaki Maeno (Genpachi), and Takumi Terashima (Kobungo) As you might expect, these are in Japanese and with English subtitles.

Disc 2 offers the textless credit sequences.

Conclusion

The words are in my head, but the temperature is in the high eighties, the humidity is climbing, and I can barely work up the effort to get those words onto the review. I wish I could think at the screen and have the review magically appear. Hakkenden: Eight Dogs of the East just isn’t a show to inspire any fervour or enthusiasm, or excitement. It’s just an utterly bland and generic show, which does what it sets out to do, and nothing more.


If you’re wondering, this is one of those shows, like Free Iwatobi Swim Club, that is aimed at a female demographic, specifically the female demographic that invests in, and fantasizes about male relationships. The majority of the cast, other than Hamaji is male in this show, and all of them are devastatingly handsome or in the case of Shino, terminally cute, and it’s all about how they relate to each other. Lingering gazes will occur, and platonic bed sharing is going to happen. Nothing, but nothing ever happens on screen, but enough is implied to get those female fantasies ticking over. Shino’s even got a supernatural trick up his sleeve, in that he spends most of his life in the aforementioned cute body of a pre-teen, but in a stressful situation, his body transforms into that of his natural eighteen years.


So what Hakkenden is really about is getting the fujoshi squee-ing in their droves. But there is a story to be had somewhere beneath the visual aesthetic, although I’m hard pressed to relate just what it is. This is also one of those shows which I watch, and at the end of each episode, I will have forgotten what occurred in the previous twenty five minutes; it is that bland and uninspiring. The story is there, it is told competently enough, the characters hit their marks, and the visuals are perfectly fine, but there is no draw to the story, no hook that grabs and makes me want to watch more. I had the same issue with a couple of the Hakuoki series, another female oriented show that MVM released.


The problem with Hakkenden is that it constantly underplays its premise. The setup of the show, the three orphans that survived Otsuka village through supernatural means really needed that aspect to be emphasised, the sacrifice that Sosuke made to survive, the deal with the ‘devil’ Murasame that Shino made, which has since kept him forever young, But these details were never fleshed out until the final episodes of this collection, and even then as throwaway comments. There’s never the sense of urgency or drama that the story is trying to sell. The second thing is that once they get to the capital, and come under the care of the church, Shino and Sosuke get a mission to find six other sacred bead owners, six other people just like them, and over the course of the next ten episodes, they just bump into them on the street. Coincidence is the way that this story unfolds, and nothing could be less inspiring or dramatic. The show then becomes about the little stories that happen on the way, a man being held captive by a temple, tortured to bring out his inner demon, making friends with a girl with a snake spirit for a guardian, going to a mountain for some reason which I can’t recall, but has something to do with a giant monkey, Hamaji going to school with a ghost for a roommate, it all feels so trivial.


It’s only in the last four episodes that Hakkenden comes to life, reveals some of the promise that it has. Through the show, one of the accidentally discovered characters, Keno has been seeking the man who took his heart (literally, not figuratively), intent on vengeance. He first mistakes Sosuke for the attacker and the reason becomes clear in the final arc of this collection. Shino makes friends with a prostitute who has also come to the attention of this collector of body parts, and it’s a story that leads to a tragic end. The thing is that when Shino encounters this shadow killer as he is known, it shakes up everything he thought he knew about his past, and what he thought he knew about Sosuke, leaving him questioning everything. It’s a story development that finally got me interested in Hakkenden: Eight Dogs of the East, but really it’s too little, too late. We revert back to type for this collection’s final episode, with a revelation about the Church, and its interest in Shino that really should have been built up earlier on, not just dropped in the final episode. Incidentally, why do nuns in anime always have great cleavage?


The second series of Hakkenden: Eight Dogs of the East comes out the following month, and the first series, despite its countless flaws, has done enough of a job building the story up to where it might just be interesting. It will need the second series to put the BL aspects of the show on the back-burner, and change its story-telling style to emphasise the drama and the suspense, and quite frankly I don’t see that happening. Hakkenden is a wholly average anime, one of those that get put together by committees primarily to tick boxes off a target audience checklist rather than tell a story.