If you’ve never had someone look you dead in the eye and tell you with no sense of irony that they were a ninja, then you have no idea just how awkwardly hilarious this situation can be. No matter how much parkour they’re able to do, the very existence of ninjas in history is highly debatable. For Recca Hanabishi, however, this claim is more than just some chuuni delusion... Now living in the present day as a devious delinquent, Recca was once a newborn of the Hokage clan, a great band of fire-wielding ninjas who were put to the sword by Ota Nobunaga 400 years ago. Several members of this clan were sent into the future to preserve the legacy of the Hokage, including baby Recca, who would be found as an infant and raised by a single fireworks manufacturer. It isn’t until Recca risks his life to save a mysterious female classmate that his past begins to unfold before him, baring both a gift of power and a curse of dire responsibility. With a motley crew of his fellow punks by his side, he’ll have to battle the remnants of his family and worse to protect the girl to whom he owes his life.

Flame of Recca was produced by Studio Pierrot, a very old and prolific anime producer who sadly do not have the most celebrated reputation of all time. While they may date back to the era where cheap looking and stiff anime were the norm, they never fully grew out of that trend, only very sparsely pumping out anime that can stand alongside their contemporaries. The budget for Recca was obviously paper thin, and the animation is extremely limited as a result, but not to the point that I’d call it an eye sore. I’ve always maintained that a well directed and budgeted anime can transcend limited resources, and while Recca is by no means a bastion of clever direction, it does fine. There are very few moments in the series that feature impressive on-screen action, normally either immediately followed or preceded by a dip in quality to compensate, but the visuals are never bad enough to be distracting. Honestly, for a shonen action series from around the turn of the millennium, I’ve seen a lot worse than this.

The aspect ratio doesn’t do it any favors... I would have definitely preferred if there were a wide screen version available... But what can you do, a lot of older anime have that problem. The action is normally pretty fast paced, splitting the budget between actual motion, speedline manipulation and extended soliloquies about how the fight can possibly be won, and it’s a fairly competent approach. Of course the drawback is that some of the more casual action scenes existing outside the major story arcs tend to look a lot worse, but there’s precious little downtime between arcs, so it’s not a frequent issue. The character designs are generic, but they're effective enough. The heroes look like your standard shonen fare... A spiky haired spitfire, a big tough galoot, a bishie badass, one pure girl and one tough girl... They all look as good as they need to be, but it’s the villains where the design really shines. It’s kind of expected when an action show features a tournament arc that there are going to be a diverse array of baddies, and they delivered hardcore on that front.

The music is barely noticeable, a mix of tense action jams and more traditional sounding Japanese ambiance, but if you played any random track and told me it was from some other shonen series, I’d have no reason not to believe you. The English dub is rough, but considering the source, you should expect as much. Recca has a Canadian dub that was produced by Ocean Group, and while Ocean has been responsible for some bangers in the past, they also have a deep, deep barrel of quality with no apparent bottom. The best I’ve been able to gather from my research is that Ocean Group have a sort of voice actor D-squad that they assemble whenever working on a project they don’t want to spend too much money on, and while that probably sounds really rude of me, well, look up the resumes of these actors, there’s a ton of crossovers between them. This appears to be the stable of actors they turn to whenever they’re casting an anime based on some Yugioh clone game, like Cardfight Vanguard, B-daman or Future Card Buddy Fight. These actors are so low on the totem pole that about half of them were cast in the Ocean Dragonball dub, and they didn’t even play important characters.

Before Recca, I’ve only seen two anime that literally anyone from this group were involved in, those being Strawberry Marshmallow and Gregory Horror Show. Wouldn’t you know it, Judgement Boy actually pops up as one of the better acted villains. Obscure as these actors are, and as little faith as their collective resumes inspires in me, they’re fine. I can’t really call the majority of them good actors, but I can say that they’re putting in the maximum amount of effort, and considering how over-the-top and melodramatic a shonen action show can get, I appreciate actors who are able to give it their all. You don't have to be a good actor to sound sincere, and damn it does this cast sound sincere, shouting and grunting in a fight, hollering as loud as they can whenever a friend is in danger, and most important of all, knowing exactly what kind of character archetypes they’re supposed to be playing. I can’t in good conscience recommend the English dub to everyone, as the Japanese version with subtitles is objectively superior, but the English dub has some attributes that transcend objective quality, at least in my opinion.

It’s pretty much a cliche at this point for me to say this, but it’s just as true now as it has been in every other instance... I do not, as a rule, have anything against rip-offs. There are very few original ideas left in entertainment, and new stories will almost inevitably steal from old ones. What matters isn’t so much what you steal, but how you use it... Can you repurpose what you stole so its usage is justified, or are you just mimicking a story element to try and capture a piece of it’s previous popularity? My go-to example of this is usually that my favorite season of Rozen Maiden was the one that blatantly ripped off Chobits, mainly for how these stolen elements helped the story to evolve and mature. This is my usual example, but you’d be surprised how many modern anime contain stolen templates from previous classics. Sword Art Online stole from Berserk. Your Lie in April stole from Clannad. Guilty Crown stole everything that wasn’t nailed down and/or on fire. But even moving aside from individual examples, there are plenty of anime that were so successful and genre defining, they just became really popular to rip off. From Haruhi Suzumiya to Madoka Magika, from Gundam to early Gainax, but most importantly of all, to Yuyu Hakusho.

Right off the bat, when I was watching Recca’s delinquent antics against Domon in the first episode, I could feel that I was watching a low-grade Yuyu Hakusho rip-off, and when Recca sacrificed himself to save Yanagi, I knew for certain that I wasn’t judging it unfairly. Having said that, I could also tell from the way she revived him and he pledged his loyalty to her, that they weren’t just going the lazy route, and that they had some original ideas to add to the concept. Basing the story around ninjas and the four elements was an inspired replacement for the whole spirit detective thing, and focusing on actual Japanese history was admittedly a pretty tasteful coat of paint. On top of that, while Recca and his friends weren’t terribly deep, they were likeable enough, and I was entertained to the point that I wasn’t questioning the absurd premise behind all of this. As much as I usually hate to make excuses for a series by going the route of “you really shouldn’t expect high quality entertainment from this specific genre,” I do feel like shonen action shows like this one don’t really need to be well written to be enjoyable, as long as they’re not being openly insulting to the audience or crossing any serious moral lines.

Still, there are things about being a Yuyu Hakusho clone that came back to bite Recca in the ass. The biggest example is probably the fact that Recca has a much shorter run time, clocking in at 42 episodes compared to Yuyu Hakusho’s 112. On the one hand, you could make the argument that it shouldn’t be too hard to condense the story and plot of Yuyu Hakusho into a smaller run time. There are ways to do this, but Flame of Recca’s primary focus is explicitly on its action scenes. Everything else it does is in service to them, to try and make them as fun and exciting as possible. Unfortunately, these fight scenes are extended, with the average length of an individual battle lasting one to two episodes apiece. And when I say battle, I mean every single fight in every single story arc. The fight scenes themselves are a lot of fun. They’re well paced, rarely ever repetitive, and they often pit one character at a time against one villain at a time, which is great for shining a spotlight on those characters, but not so great for managing their time and resources. With so much time dedicated to combat, it leaves precious little time for anything else... There’s barely any downtime between the three major story arcs, and almost every single scrap of plot development is delivered in some kind of exposition dump.

There is virtually no character development in this show. The only change you ever get is bad guys turning good, and good guys getting stronger, and that’s it. Most shonen action anime can get shallow at times, but they do spend a lot more time exploring their cast and fleshing everyone out than Recca does. So much of the series is a matter of life and death, with the highest stakes imaginable, and yet I rarely ever found myself on the edge of my seat begging for anyone to not die. Not that I hated any of them, but if they’d decided to off somebody for dramatic effect, I would have been cool with it. Hell, this series features an underground death tournament, but throughout the entire story arc there’s maybe a half-dozen deaths? I don’t know, I feel like losing even one ally to the forces of evil would have made Recca’s plight feel way more sympathetic. Domon for certain. Maybe Tokiya. Definitely Kagerou. Even Yanagi, who I did like on the grounds that she’s far more of an active and reciprocal love interest than we usually get in shows like these, often felt like way more of a damsel in distress/Human MacGuffin than she was initially set up to be. As for Ganko, why was she even there? She’s one of two turncoat villains who join Recca’s team, but she never does anything as a protagonist, just warns Recca about how powerful her former allies are, and uses her doll powers to create a series mascot who also does nothing.

And I guess it shouldn’t be surprising at this point that the series is kind of stupid. When I call Recca a dumb action show, I mean it is a duuuuummmmmbbbb action show. I can stretch my suspension of disbelief pretty damn far when I’m thoroughly entertained, and that gets me through a lot of the lackluster writing of the show, but there are some jaw droppingly stupid moments in it. There are fight scenes with hare-brained resolutions, weird turns in logic and straight up abandoned ideas, but the best example by far is probably the tournament arc itself. Recca is informed he must participate, and he has no choice in the matter. When he arrives, he’s told he must put up his love interest as a prize if he loses, otherwise he can’t participate. Oh, so he does have a choice now? After his team wins their first battle(spoilers, but come on) the other team graciously try to leave, being that they’re only at this death tournament to prove they’re not killers(?!) but Recca challenges their leader to one more match, completely against his friends’ wishes, a move that could only just barely be forgiveable if someone as stupid as Luffy pulled it, and when his life is in danger during this particular bout, his mother reassured Yanagi “He’s doing this for you...” No he’s not. He put her in more danger for no fucking reason. Also, the winners of each match are supposed to win the loser’s magical ninja artifacts, but THAT idea goes right out the fucking window after this match.

Still, it all ultimately circles back to the action scenes. They are the main focus of the anime, and if I recommend this anime to anybody, they are the main reason why. The fight scenes are fun and extremely well paced, and depending which character is battling at any given time, the choreography can also be really impressive. As an interesting note, each character tends to bring a different kind of energy to any fight scene they’re in. With Recca, he’s either getting his ass kicked while making snarky remarks, or he’s screaming shonen tropes and learning new deus ex machina techniques from his flame powers. With Domon, it’s all about feats of strength and endurance. Hit it hard, apply pressure, exceed your limits, and overcome everything that’s thrown at you. My favorite of the three, however, is easily Fuuko, as she’s the smartest and most analytical character, who is able to discern an enemy’s weak point and use her superior agility to exploit it. That’s not to say her discoveries always make sense, or aren’t totally obvious a few times, but I’ll take what I can get. Look, what do you want me to say? This show isn’t great, but it’s pretty damn fun.

Flame of Recca is available from Discotek Media in a handy thin pack release that they put out in 2015, so you don’t have to be insane like me and inherit the series in its classic, out of print ten disk release. The original manga is available from Viz Media. Two video games were released for Game Boy Advanced and Playstation 2 in the early 2000’s, but I highly doubt either one was released stateside.

When I first started watching Flame of Recca, I was expecting it to be a low grade Yuyu Hakusho clone. That’s exactly what I wound up getting, but to my surprise, I wasn’t disappointed in the slightest. Recca knows exactly what it is, and it offers a thoroughly entertaining experience despite its many shortcomings. My jaw may have hit the floor a few times over just how little brains went into this story, but I was still engaged by the amount of heart that went into it instead. I was never bored, and for a series that runs for 42 episodes, I feel like it could have held my attention for twice that amount of time(as well as fixing some story and character issues). A lot of this is probably a result of the production team not having enough time to adapt the entire manga... I don’t know that for certain, because I’ve never read the manga, but that is usually the case in instances like these, and the amount of plot threads that are left unresolved in the sudden and very rushed conclusion do make a strong argument for it. All in all, though, for what it is, and for what I was expecting, I had a lot of fun watching this show, and I think you will too.

I give Flame of Recca a 5/10.