|
Digital
|
|
Wednesday, 21 December 2011 00:00 |
|
Page 1 of 2
 Part historical drama and part super-powered agents series, Night Raid 1931 is a rather strange beast, that mixes historical fact and the fantastical in a way that undeniably has potential. In practice, though, it doesn't quite live up to its promise...
Shanghai, 1931: The Settlement, an area of the city set aside for foreigners, attracts many people from the world over, all bringing their money to the city and contributing to its growth, and their backgrounds are as often as not illegal. The Sakurai Agency is a Japanese covert agency based in the city whose operatives possess abilities far beyond those of normal humans, with their current assignment being to rescue a Japanese businessman from the Chinese military - but their operation isn't quite going according to plan...
The Sakurai Agency is named after the man in charge of it, and they tend to get work from the Japanese military and intelligence services that they're reluctant to do themselves - the dirty jobs, if you like. But it's well-suited to dealing with that sort of work, as apart from Sakurai himself, its members are each possessed with unusual abilities: female member Yukina is a telepath; her aide Natsume possesses unique visual skills; fiery young man Aoi has telekinetic abilities, while the reticent Kazura can teleport short distances. Between the four of them, it's difficult to find a mission that they can't find a way to crack - but when the political & military objectives of one Isao Sonogi become to focus of their investigations, things get a little more complex, not least as Isao is Yukina's elder brother.
Events coincide with the pre-WW2 period in Asia, when Japan had set up its own puppet state in the Manchuria region of China; and with other upheavals on the horizon as well, Isao has decided that now is the time for the Asian nations, at that time still mostly under European domination, to cast off the yoke of their colonial overlords and seek their own destiny. He has a detailed - and highly destructive - plan for how to achieve this, plans that break the unity of the Sakurai Agency team and eventually seem them divided and set against each other.
The series starts off with a few stand-alone tales, to give you a chance to get to know the main characters and see how they tick, and those episodes are pretty good - they're focussed more on the investigative and action sides of things, they don't take a lot of thought to follow, and they give the characters a chance to show off a little. When Isao appears mid-season and the show shifts focus to follow his plans, though, things start to get a little more complex, as the story begins to rely more on the politics of the world at the time, and Isao's aims on the world scale - which is a slower, more deliberate story, and because of its roots in real history it's a little harder to get into, and a little harder to care about what Isao is trying to do, regardless of the merits of it.
It's all ultimately quite disappointing. The earlier episodes, with their quick action fix, build up an expectation that that's what the show is going to be like; the shift into the later episodes dashes that expectation, and the slower pace then just isn't as enjoyable. If it had been pitched as a straight alternate-history tale without the superpowers, it would probably have worked better, I think, but the superpowers and historical setting don't gel together well enough for it to work in the way that it's presented here.
Could have been better, then. There are some good ideas here, but I can't help but feel that some of them would have been better served split out into another series. As it is, Night Raid doesn't brings its ideas together well enough to really pull it off.
<< Start < Prev 1 2 Next > End >>
|
Reviews Archive 
