Back in Summer 2022, I wrote this then belated first impressions post for Lycoris Recoil. While the show really interested me, I ultimately didn’t cover the show beyond this premiere. While I wasn’t knee deep into the show and I didn’t feel I should prioritize this over shows in my episode review backlog, I have on and off considered retroactively covering Lycoris Recoil in its entirety. It ended up being a very popular anime so I’m very curious about it and it will apparently return with a new anime of some kind so covering it would still be topical. Earlier this year, the show started airing on Toonami and I was very tempted to cover the show during that broadcast. I’ve now made significant progress with the backlog and as it happens, I have a couple weekends this month with no episode reviews scheduled in as well as a vacation coming next month. After mulling over my options, I’ve decided to spend my next couple of days off with Lycoris Recoil. This first post is the same one from Summer 2022, just re-dated and re-edited. Everything after this post is entirely new.
As far as I can tell, Lycoris Recoil is a cute girls doing cute things anime where one of the cute things said girls do is a rather violent profession. The show takes place in a fictionalized version of Japan where public safety is monitored by a secret organization called “Direct Attack” or “DA” for short. The agency deploys “Lycoris”, highly trained orphaned teenage girls who fight crime behind the scenes with lethal force. At the start of the show, Lycoris agent Takina Inoue (Shion Wakayama) is transferred out of her team after disobeying orders and acting recklessly during a mission. She now reports to Café LycoReco, one of DA’s front operations. The café consists of owner Mika (Kosuke Sakaki), former DA agent Mizuki Nakahara (Ami Koshimizu), and top-tier Lycoris Chisato Nishikigi (Chika Anzai). Partnered together, Chisato and Takina perform their regular duties as Lycoris while also waitressing for the café and performing community service.
At least with the first episode, the tone of Lycoris Recoil is pretty odd. Obviously, having orphaned teenagers do a government’s dirty work is messed up and it’s not like the show completely skirts around that. There’s a montage at the beginning where you see a bunch of Lycoris ruthlessly murder all sorts of criminals while Chisato explains what they do in narration. Mizuki admits in a conversation with Takina that she left the DA because she got sick of them recruiting orphans for the Lycoris program. Takina feels she messed up during her last mission but Chisato explains that if she really did mess up, the DA would’ve done something more extreme to get rid of her. The show does acknowledge the darker undertones of its plot. Whether or not it fully goes in that direction remains to be seen for me.
Thing is, the first episode is rather lighthearted as it progresses. The middle act has Chisato showing Takina the different things she does outside of her regular Lycoris duties such as assisting various schools and performing deliveries for LycoReco. Along the way, they meet all sorts of folk, including a group of Yakuza whose leader is a regular customer of the café. The third act is where the action kicks back in as it has Chisato and Takina accepting a request from the police to bodyguard a woman from a stalker. Oddly enough, the odd job connects to the main plot as it turns out that the woman just so happened to have taken a picture right around where Takina’s last mission took place, making her stalker a much more serious threat. The fight scene itself comes across as “fun”, what with the upbeat music that plays as Chisato makes short work of the enemy. The overall tone of the first episode is strange but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t help keep me engaged.
What really carries the premiere is the two main characters. Chisato is full of energy while Takina is considerably more reserved by comparison and the show manages to get good chemistry out of these personalities. Chisato is excited to have a new partner and gets a bit overboard with her excitement, leaving the stiffer Takina feeling overwhelmed or awkward. Being a no-nonsense agent, Takina gets puzzled at what her new job entails and is astonished at how much fun someone as top tier as Chisato is having with these tasks. Meanwhile, Chisato is taken aback at how recklessly Takina can act, particularly when the latter deliberately leaves behind the woman they’re protecting to lure out the enemy. The chemistry also works in more dramatic moments. In one scene, Chisato explains to Takina why she deals with the smaller problems in the town and manages to convince her to lend a hand. In another, she converses with the younger Lycoris over her transfer, giving some advice along the way. While joyful around Takina, Chisato does take the role of senior Lycoris seriously.
There’s a lot of intrigue surrounding Chisato. When asked by Takina regarding why she’s assigned to LycoReco, Chisato explains it’s because she’s the DA’s “problem child”. As the episode progresses, you start to see why she refers to herself as such. Despite working as a Lycoris, Chisato seems happier and prouder with the lower stake stuff she does for her community. The fight scene reveals Chisato prefers to use non-lethal methods and that includes the type of ammunition she uses for her gun. Evidently, Chisato follows the beat of her own drum. As to how she came to be this way, that remains a mystery though one bit of backstory mentioned in the episode is a great battle between Chisato and a group of terrorists that took place in a radio tower, the remains of which can seen in the background of several shots. Apparently, the tower’s remains are a symbol of peace but I’m convinced that it may also speak of Chisato’s character, suggesting that she chose to turn a new leaf after what happened in the tower.
This premiere also establishes a couple of overarching plot. The first relates to Takina’s previous mission, the one that gets her transferred to LycoReco. The goal was to stop an arms deal but all the weapons in that transaction has gone missing. Along with that, the DA is also investigating “Walnut”, a hacker that managed to breached their systems during Takina’s mission. At the end of the episode, Walnut gets murdered by the man who hired them. That man then stops by LycoReco and he appears to be acquainted with both Mika and Chisato. I don’t know want to say none of this wasn’t interesting but they surprisingly weren’t where my attention gravitated towards. Perhaps as the show continues and I get better grasp on it, these threads will click for me more.
ED: “Hana no To” by Sayuri
This post was originally published on July 9, 2022
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