Najica Hiiragi is leading a double life. The public knows her as a very wealthy businesswoman, and one of CRI Cosmetic’s foremost perfume designers. What they don’t know is that she also operates as a secret agent, utilizing her years of training, clever tactics and borderline superhuman sense of smell to serve CRI's Intelligence Agency. For her most recent assignment, she’s been tasked with rounding up a number of rogue humilites, which are biologically engineered android homunculi possessing various levels of artificial intelligence. Paired with her own humilite partner, a young looking redhead named Lila, Najica has been tasked with training her new assistant as an agent while the two combine their efforts to navigate the intricate scenarios that their targets have constructed for themselves, and bring them back alive at all costs, all while uncovering the capabilities, true origins, and complex psychological layers of their targets, as the lines between humanity and artificial intelligence begin to blur.

Najica Blitz Tactics does not have a very promising pedigree behind it. I’m going to set aside the primary reason most people know about this anime for just a moment, to instead look at the creators behind it, pretty much none of which I’ve discussed in a review before. Najica was produced by Studio Fantasia, a now defunct anime studio that never really managed to make a strong mark on the world. During their existence from the early eighties to the mid twenty-tens, ignoring all the anime productions they helped out with and just looking at the anime they produced by themselves, they mostly put out low budget OVAs and ONAs that I’ve personally never seen, but most of which is probably some degree of hentai? Beyond that, they’ve only produced a handful of well known titles, including Aika, Strain and Rumbling Hearts, which should tell you all you need to know about the visuals in Najica, especially since all these titles share the same director.

Katsuhiko Nishijima is a very interesting figure in the anime production field, as a good amount of the anime he has worked on have been borderline hentai, and almost all of his main directorial jobs have been under the employ of Studio Fantasia. I don’t know if he worked FOR Fantasia, or if they just kept hiring him because they really liked his work, but it genuinely seemed like he and Fantasia were a good fit for each other, so it could be either one. Out of the titles I mentioned before... Aika, Strain, Rumbling Hearts and Najica... They’re all fairly low budget titles that at least attempted to have serious stories, while at the same time delivering indulgent amounts of fanservice that usually take the form of frequent panty shots, and nudity that’s either conveniently censored, or uncensored but in some way badly drawn or just presented in a way that undermines the tone of the series, we’ll talk about that later.

One thing I definitely admire about Nishijima’s work, at least out of what I’ve seen, is that while he usually isn’t working with a ton of resources, he at least makes an effort to not let that issue get in the way of the visuals. If you’ve been reading my reviews for a long time, you’re probably aware that one of my favorite anime trends is when a director is really smart in the way of budgt management, finding ways around their limitations, or even using clever tactics and corner cutting techniques to their advantage, and to his credit, Nishijima really, really tries to do this. The effort is appreciated, but I’ve seen it pulled off way better. Najica is, more than anything else, a secret agent action show, so there pretty much has to be a good amount of well animated and exciting action scenes, which there definitely are, but in between them, it’s just a little too obvious that the cheaper moments exist to compensate for them.

Well, the animation isn’t perfect, the budget could have been managed a little better, but the soundtrack is fucking sick. There are only three purely instrumental anime openings I never skip, those being Trigun’s, Baccano’s, and this one, and you better believe this one gets stuck in my head just as hard as the other two. The whole OST has a really cool jazzy, big band type of feel to it. If this series had been popular enough to garner a stateside soundtrack release, I would buy a copy in a heartbeat. The English dub was an early ADV effort, making this dub yet another vintage ADV time capsule, and it’s also really strong. Kira Vincent Davis plays one of her most grounded roles to date, keeping within a low register to play the strong yet sultry title character Najica, and while multiple classic ADV actors have to play humilites in various stages of self-actualization and social development, growing while dealing with human nuances they can’t understand, Monica Rial plays her character throughout an entire series of a similar developmental path, and she pulls it off beautifully.

All right, we’ve gotten this far, I guess it’s time to address the elephant in the room. If you knew about this series before today, it's probably because of this AMV Hell 4 clip.

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Look, I like fanservice. Going back to my teenage years, the ability of manga and anime to show the kind of content you could never get away with in American comics and cartoons was one of the main reasons I started getting into this particular medium. Having said that, it is entirely possible for fanservice to be detrimental to a series. One of my favorite examples of this is Sankarea, where the story makes you feel REALLY fucking bad for the female lead, since she has an abusive father who exploits her body for forced nudity, and then the series abruptly turns around and shows her frolicking in the shower, inadvertently putting the audience in the shoes of her insidiously perverted and narcissistic father. That’s an admittedly extreme example, but there are plenty of other anime out there that had some serious or poignant point to make, but the parade of fanservice they used to keep the audience’s attention made it hard to take them seriously. So you may be thinking, okay, then this is probably the case with Najica, right?

Believe it or not, no. Or at least, I don’t think so, but why not? How does an anime with this much constant fanservice manage to explore some relatively thought provoking subject matter without stabbing itself in the foot? Well, to be honest, I don’t think the fanservice in Najica was ever intended to be sexy. Yes, I know, I’m asexual, most forms of fanservice don’t work on me like they do for most people, but I can usually understand what they’re going for, and why people enjoy it. In Najica, the fanservice feels almost entirely incidental... Not important or essential to the story by any means, and not even really being justified in context, just... Incidental, like it’s just THERE, like the scenery, and the walls of any given room. Like exposed panties are as normal as fucking shoes. It’s kinda hard to explain, so let’s make a quick comparison to another panties-fueled fanservice-fest, Strike Witches.

I love Strike Witches, but that series has this mind-numbingly stupid bit of lore where every female on earth is constantly bottomless... I won’t explain it here... But panty shots are part of that anime’s identity, and they’re so transparent about it that if you were to create an edit where everyone was wearing, say, bike shorts, any casual viewer would be like “What the fuck is with this direction? Why do they keep shoving bike shorts in my face? Does it think I’m turned on by bike shorts or something?” Where if you made the same edit to Najica, barring maybe a few moments, I don’t think anybody would really notice. Now you could explain this by saying ‘okay, well, the director is just really bad at delivering fanservice,’ but I don’t think that’s true either. There’s a moment somewhere around the middle of the series where a humilite takes a girl hostage in a jet, and she’s holding her upside down in a 69 position with the girl’s panties just under her chin, legs spread under her arms, and I swear to whatever God you worship that this entire scene is played completely deadpan straight.

There is no fucking way any of this was accidental. The director had to have known exactly what he was doing, and it feels that way the entire series. I don’t know, maybe I’m off base here, this is entirely speculation on my part so take this with a grain of salt, but I get the impression the fanservice in this show(except the actual nudity, which I think was just sorta awkwardly inserted in to draw an audience) was included entirely as a tongue-in-cheek running gag, like a subtle parody of shows like Dirty Pair and Kiddy Grade, which pretend to take their story and plot seriously while insidiously using fanservice to market to teenage boys, and movies like the James Bond franchise, where sexiness is just about everywhere you look and nobody ever questions it. It’s a shame it doesn’t come off that way from the outside looking in, because Najica’s reputation as “That panties anime” does a huge disservice to the quality of its writing, and the power of some of its storylines.

And yes, this is a pretty damn well written show. Each episode sends Najica and Lila off on a different secret agent adventure full of intrigue, fun action, and some genuinely surprising twists that never feel forced or pulled out of the writer’s ass. That’s not to say there isn’t ANY bullshit on display, but it stays well within the limits that your suspension of disbelief would normally allow for this particular genre. Each episode is self-contained enough to stand on its own, with its own creative ideas and unique scenario to set it apart from the others, but at the same time, each episode contributes to the growing mystery surrounding humilites. There’s a lot of extra effort put into both the writing and the direction... Small character moments and little extra tidbits of animation that give the series and its characters a little extra character.

I’m not going to pretend that this is one of the most profound and deep anime I’ve ever seen... It’s not, not by a long shot... But it does take its subject matter seriously, despite how ridiculous the presentation can be. The humilites are constantly defying what you might have thought you knew about them, both on an individual basis, and with Lila, who’s character development takes her from misunderstandings and imitating her master to feeling conflicted over the very idea of feeling conflicted. Morality is almost never black and white here, and you can’t always tell which direction the story is about to go in or who is on what side. This anime is just really fun. It’s a fun slice of cheese cake with a tongue in cheek sense of humor, pretty inspired writing, and just enough substance to be worthy of holding your attention.

Najica Blitz Tactics is currently out of print from ADV Films, and its manga counterpart is also out of print from ADV manga.

I know I just published a review of an that explored what it meant to be human by following the development of a simple and child-like artificial intelligence humanoid, but I swear that was a coincidence, and besides, Najica takes a different approach to this subject matter than Chobits did. It takes a few generally familiar and commonplace tropes... The dynamic between man and machine, a grizzled veteran being forced to partner up with a frustrating rookie only for the two of them to bond over time, an agent who works by the books being forced into a situation where they have to question their orders, etc... And takes a refreshing, inspired approach to all of them. I know the production values could be better, and the fanservice can seem overwhelming at first, but I do believe it’s worth putting up with this title’s many shortcomings to get to the genuine heart and brain lying beneath them. This series isn’t for everyone, but I enjoyed it.

I give Najica: Blitz Tactics a 7/10