Flame of Recca – Series Review

Becoming a ninja is just a childhood dream for sixteen-year-old Recca, until a fateful encounter reveals he has inherited ninja powers, including the ability to wield fire! As Recca learns to master the ancient ways of his ancestors, he is drawn to protect a mysterious girl named Yanagi …

The story is simple, even getting simpler if you could imagine that, as it turns into nothing more than 30 episodes of arena style fighting. Yes, you read correctly, 30 episodes devoted to a single fighting tournament. Sure there is character development here and there and once in a while an actual legit story about old feuding clans leading to present day events, but overall you really don’t care, for all you want to see is great fighting.

As for the bigger story, some old dude with crazy looking eyes wants to become immortal, so he sets up some half-assed roundabout way (a fighting tournament) into getting what he wants.

Flame of Recca’s animation is all over the place as it usually looks like your standard 90s anime. Nothing much to complain about with some nicely drawn fight scenes, but I started to notice severe deformation with the character designs as if a whole new set of animators had been hired. It didn’t seem like a money issue, but in some scenes you swear you were looking at a completely new Recca design straight out of Fatal Fury, and no it wasn’t an improvement.

One huge peeve I had with the show was that the main characters were able to take a beating well beyond their capabilities. This is especially true with Recca, who quite frankly should have died at the mid point of the series. In one episode he takes a ridiculous beating that within all logic and sense he should not have gotten up from, and there is no reasonable explanation about why he can take such a punishment, for it is clear he does not have any healing powers.

Also another thing that sticks out like a thorn is the fact that Recca’s voice actor is not a very good screamer. He’s screaming for five minutes straight by the later half of the series and it’s not pleasant to listen too.

I know I’ve done a lot of bitching so far, but the fighting has to make up for all the other mediocre traits of the anime right? Well, yes and no. Everyone but Recca’s fights are enjoyable to watch because his gets boring awfully fast. His matches simply revolve around obtaining a new Dragon Flame, which in turn gives him a new ability to defeat his opponent. His fights are very predictable, usually after the standard getting beaten to a pulp of his life for the entire match but at the end coming back because he obtained a new power out of pure will power. It’s boring and coupled with the fact that you know he cannot-ever-lose it usually fails to hold your interest for very long. What makes it worse is that the individual Dragon Flames Recca obtains aren’t very interesting and he will use the same Flame Dragons over and over again.

As for everyone else, including their different opponents, they are much more fun to watch as I always liked finding out the quirky and unique abilities these types of anime are known for coming up with.

Overall Flame of Recca was a nice time killer. I’ll give it that, but I wouldn’t suggest it to anyone looking for a good fighting anime because there are better to choose from.

Rating: 2.5/5