Dear lord, you have no idea how much I wanted to like this show. I really wanted to like this. I really did. More so than Demon Slayer, even. When Crunchyroll decided they wanted to try their hand at producing their own anime, a lot of people had mixed emotions, excitement and trepidation. Unfortunately, the latter wound up being more justified, as the majority of Crunchyroll's self-produced anime usually wound up being either mediocre (Tower of God and God of High School) or outright bad (Gibiate and Ex-Arm). The only one I was even remotely looking forward to was Fena: Pirate Princess, which promised to be a rip-roaring adventure series in the vein of stuff like Future Boy Conan and Mysterious Cities of Gold. So you'd think after the disasters that were their previous shows, that Crunchyroll would finally step up and make something that would actually be genuinely good, right? Well...at first, Fena seemed like it would go that way, but...it crashed and burned at the end. Not nearly as bad as, say, Wonder Egg Priority, but seriously, Fena: Pirate Princess as a whole is a massive disappointment on every level.

As a young girl, Fena Houtman was forced to watch as her family was slaughtered before her eyes. A friend of hers, Yukimaru, only managed to save her by sending her out to sea before her family's killers could pursue her. She winds up on an island called Shangri-La, and is forced to live in a brothel. The only thing she really remembers is her father's message: "Go to Eden." Years later, she's still there, and is considered at the age where she is expected to partake in sex work against her will. When an attempt to escape goes awry, a band of pirates manages to take her away from Shangri-La, Yukimaru being one of them. But her father's final message is still a mystery to her, and she and the pirates decide to try and find Eden in order to piece together Fena's lost memories and unlock the many secrets surrounding her life.

I wanted to be much more generous, especially with my rating for it, but the more I watched it and got closer to the finale, the more I began to realize that Fena, as a show, has really stupid writing. For one, it always seems to jump from one plot point to another without really bothering to either flesh them out or follow up on it. Fena's older retainers are taken hostage? Don't pay attention to them, we've got to find out who commissioned Fena's crystal! We find out who made the crystal? Oh, pish posh! We've got to find the coordinates for El Dorado! Wait, what's El Dorado? Who gives a shit! We need to have Fena be kidnapped by a group of female pirates and their crazy boss! A character's been sent to go after our group because they went against their main mission? Nope, we don't give a shit! Yukimaru needs to save Fena! What's this thing you call character development? You need to care that these characters are going from place to place even though they're being given no time to show what they're like outside of trying to save the world! Do you see what the problem is here? With the show being only 12 episodes long, it's given literally no time to really flesh out all the ideas it has or even follow up on them. It's like ten different writers are being called to write the script, but they can't seem to decide which ideas they want to focus on, so they just throw them all into a blender without considering if the end result will even work or not. As a result, the characters only act based on what's convenient to advance the plot and make really bizarre leaps in logic. Add to that, the story is just full of underutilized ideas, Deus Ex Machinas, and inconsequential philosophical bullcrap that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. This is a pretty clear case of too many cooks spoiling the soup.

As a result of this show's messy writing decisions, none of the characters are really all that interesting. The show tries to make us care for the band of pirates that Fena joins up with, but they're all so one-note and cliche that they feel more like props to move the story forward than three-dimensional people. We're never shown what their lives are like outside of the adventure they're on, save for a few short flashbacks that don't really do much of anything, and instead, the show makes the case that we, the audience, should care about them just because it says so, rather than, y'know, making the effort to make its own case for why we should. If you're going to make a rip-roaring adventure show, caring about the characters and their plight should be paramount, right?! Speaking of characters I can't bring myself to give a shit about, Yukimaru. Honestly, I never liked this guy. He always came off to me like an overly angsty emo edgelord who acts needlessly dickish towards Fena because the writers think it'll demean his masculinity if he doesn't. I honestly could not believe that this guy could ever have any friendly feelings towards Fena because of the way he treats her when he first appears. For one, he legitimately calls Fena a coward because she can't remember how to get to Eden, implying that she is somehow a bad person for her memories being blocked due to the trauma she experienced, even though there is absolutely nothing that says Fena did it out of malicious intent. The fuck?! Secondly, when Fena tries to learn how to use a weapon in order to help the pirates, Yukimaru shoots her down because he thinks she'll only cause trouble and says that she should just sit and do nothing. We're seriously supposed to like this guy?! Granted, the show seems to have realized how bad his first impression came across and tried to tone down his jackass behavior in the second half, thank God, but it still did nothing to really make me care about him as a person. Out of all the characters who never seemed to get any development at all, Tsubaki and the band of antagonistic female pirates are the more egregious examples, as we learn nothing about Tsubaki other than that he's often exasperated by everyone's antics, and...literally absolutely nothing about the female pirates. They just pursue the main group, kidnap Fena, with one lady being unnecessarily jealous of Fena for reasons that are literally out of her control, and getting killed when their ship gets hit with a cannon

Personally though, Fena herself, the main character, is yet another victim of the show's bad writing decisions. At first, it seemed like she was going to be a plucky girl who'd join up with the pirates and learn to be more self-sufficient, kind of like Yona from Yona of the Dawn, or Shirayuki from Snow White With the Red Hair. After all, who doesn't like watching a character grow from being weak and helpless to stronger and more proactive, even if she decides to learn fighting skills or more practical skills like medicine or strategy? But here's the thing: Fena is never allowed to do anything on her own throughout the entire show. All she ever does is get kidnapped or have the plot explained to her, and the show seems to go out of its way to make sure Fena herself is never allowed any agency or autonomy. That time she led the pirates into the cave where the coordinates to El Dorado/Eden were? Fena didn't find out on her own, it's because a magic voice told her where to go to find it! And Fena never actively seeks answers out on her own. It's either always in her repressed memories, or someone else just hands them to her, and she always gets dragged around by the other characters, so she's literally little more than a prop. To me, it just felt like Fena was just there to be a macguffin damsel in distress, which is really sad, because she actually does have a personality and a lot of potential as a character that goes completely unutilized! If the show wanted to, they didn't have to necessarily make her some action girl who kicks ass and takes names by killing people. She could have just as easily become their captain or maybe become a tactician and led the pirates through her own efforts. Instead, she's just pushed around and only made to act whenever the story calls for it, and...if you ask me, it kind of reeks of sexism here. And no, the dumbass revelation in the final two episodes absolutely does not justify this at all, no matter how much it tries to.

In all honesty, the only good things Fena has going for it are the animation, done by Production IG, and to a lesser extent, the soundtrack. I say to a lesser extent because while I've always admired Yuki Kajiura's music, her work here doesn't sound as good as her previous stuff. It doesn't have a whole lot of oomph to it like her soundtracks for .Hack//Sign, Pandora Hearts, Madoka Magica, and Demon Slayer did, or even Sword Art Online, for that matter! Tl;dr, Fena is a show with a lot of potential that got squandered by trying to do way too much, and not enough with elements that could have worked had it actually gave a damn about them. Seriously, I could write a better version of this story! Fena is basically a knock-off of much better adventure shows, like Future Boy Conan, which was the first of its kind and laid the groundwork for the entire premise, and The Mysterious Cities of Gold, which is revered by all who saw it because of how much care and effort that was put into it, and is pretty much everything an adventure series should be. Fena tries to be like both shows, but completely lacking in the things that made the two I mentioned above so good, and there are reasons why those two anime are revered to this day.

And yet, having said all that...out of all the shows Crunchyroll has made, I have to begrudgingly say that this is actually the best one they've made. Tower of God and God of High School are just compressed adaptations of longer Korean webtoons, Gibiate was just a complete mess of a show that suffered from a lot of the same problems Fena did, I haven't seen Tonikawa, Onyx Equinox, or Spider Isekai, and I don't think I need to mention what an absolute trainwreck Ex-Arm turned out to be. But all in all, Fena: Pirate Princess is just a cheap cash grab that tries to emulate previous adventure anime while failing to execute any of its ideas in any meaningful ways. I'm just glad to finally be done with this and move on to something else. I'm gonna wait for High Guardian Spice to come out and see how that fares now that it's finally going to be released.