Nabari no Ou (The Hidden King) Episode 1 - The Awakened
One

OP - CRAWL (VELTPUNCH) - good CG grass! The song is fairly uninteresting rock, but pleasant enough.

ED - Hikari (ELISA) - sappy song, sappy animation. Bad guy in foetal position, people with blood and bandages, blah blah blah.

In the past, a small child and his father are attacked by a clan of ninjas - however, the small child awakens special powers and vast plants tear through the ground to attack them, as a woman cries out to him to forget…

Present day. Miharu Rokojou is a fairly withdrawn young man, prone to disappearing without warning, who lives with his aunt and their family in a okonomiyaki restaurant that he expects to inherit when he is older. His classmate, Koichi Aizawa, and teacher, Kumohira-sensei, attempt to convince him to join the “ninja” club - at first for innocuous reasons, but Kumohira makes an appearance at the restaurant and warns Miharu that he is being targeted for assassination. Miharu brushes this off as a joke; however, a substitute teacher at school is actually after the “hijitsu” that Miharu apparently possesses, making him powerful enough to be “the ruler of Nabari”, the hidden world that ninjas still inhabit.

Aizawa reveals himself to also be a ninja, with elemental powers allowing him to teleport short distances; at first, he is ambushed by the ninjas after Miharu, but Miharu is called by a strange female voice and Koichi has to protect him. However, when the mysterious female voice tells him to kill them all, Miharu’s powers re-awaken, and it’s uncontrolled vegetation a-go-go once more. Koichi tries to seal his powers by stabbing Miharu to weaken him, but this merely causes him to go further out of control until Kumohira manages to remove the sword again.

Miharu is taken to the school hospital, where after some chunks of exposition he is attacked again by the substitute teacher and his minions - unwilling to defend himself (unwilling, in fact, to do anything, he is so withdrawn), Kumohira comes to the rescue once again and swears fealty to Miharu as the ruler of Nabari; he’s still not particularly keen on joining the ninja club, though…

Oh, and Joji Nakata is plotting something evil. Who’d have guessed?

Whew, that was a big long chunk of plot summary, but this was a fairly packed first episode. I don’t know if it was faithful to the manga or whatever, and I don’t really care; Nabari no Ou surprisingly managed to live up to my expectations. It’s hardly revolutionary or anything like that, but it’s surprisingly well produced and intriguingly set up.

First up - as I thought, the visual design is very reminiscent of Loveless, although the background art isn’t quite as polished; instead we have an almost underdrawn, watercolour look, like Erementar Gerad but pretty. The use of colour for the fight sequences is very effective, and the digital effects such as Aizawa’s swirling teleportation leaves are very well integrated. There’s also a surprising amount of rather good action animation - perhaps not that surprising given some of JC Staff’s past work but the ninja fights are fluid and well choreographed (if brief) and the giant plants that Miharu summons are very Jyu-Oh-Sei esque.

Most pleasingly, the show has great central characters. Miharu, although perhaps a little “dull”, is pleasantly demonic when turning Kumohira into a figure of yaoi fun, and Aizawa somehow manages to avoid being annoying by proving surprisingly useful in a fight; Kumohira, meanwhile embodies the dumbass/kickass dichotomy of characters like Vash and so forth, but entertainingly so.

I’m very pleased with the first episode of Nabari no Ou; there’s enough mystery in the plot to keep me interested if the quality of the action diminishes slightly, and the overall look of the show is exactly what I thought it was going to be which pleases me enormously. Let’s hope it remains entertaining!

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