Ikki Tousen

You'll die as you lived, in a flash of the panties.

Man, the early 00s were such a weird fucking period in media history. Fresh out of the experimental counter-culture attitude of the 90s and eager to try out all the newly emerging technological advances in CGI, alongside changing attitudes about what should or shouldn't be allowed on television, the 00s certainly brought us some truly strange animated productions. And while I wouldn't call Ikki Tousen the pinnacle of that era's experimentation, or even the pinnacle of anything in particular, watching it with that context in mind made me realize what a bar it must have set for the entire subgenre of anime that would later follow in its footsteps.

I don't know how many Nelsons this hold is comprised of, but I bet all of them are feeling a little hot under the collar about it.

Boob jiggle and panty flashes have been around in anime since forever, tracing at least as far back as 1973's Cutey Honey (and probably even further), but it wasn't until roughly around the 00s when shows built entirely around horny fanservice really became an entire genre. And while Ikki Tousen has enough of a plot to classify it as more of a shounen action series than a softcore porn series, I feel almost beyond a shadow of a doubt that it set a clear standard from which most modern horny fighting anime is still derived to this day.

You can see echoes of Ikki Tousen's masterful money-shot poses in nearly every single "high schoolers fight each other" type anime out there, from Sekirei to Maken-Ki to Kampfer and back again. And although the series honestly gives other hentai classics like Agent Aika a run for their money in terms of sheer pantyshots-per-minute, it still attempts to deliver some semblance of story in the process, which is the one factor many of Ikki Tousen's derivatives don't seem particularly interested in mimicking.

HOT TIP: if you're feeling insecure about your looks, try padding your bra with extra Lore!

That's not to suggest there's a particularly impactful story here - if you've seen one delinquent high school fight club anime, you've kind of seen them all - but the setting and tone of the show make such a bizarre clash together that, even in the face of its now-countless spiritual successors, it culminates in a weird and somewhat difficult to categorize mish-mash of identities. Because while, yes, on the whole it is most definitely an overtly horny menagerie of hotties and slick fight scenes, it's all wrapped up in a setting that can only be described as "high school gangs LARPing war scenarios from Romance of The Three Kingdoms".

Not THAT kind of Romance, but hey, I'm not complaining...

Each character in the show is based on a general or player from one of the thousands in the cast of the 800k-word Chinese epic novel "Romance of The Three Kingdoms" (specifically the Japanese interpretation of the story), introduced as a sort of "reincarnation". Everyone seems to be aware of this status, and many of them are familiar enough with the novel to know what their supposed predestined fates hold in store for them. What makes it interesting is whether or not they seek to break free of that fate.

Speaking as an uneducated American who hasn't read the sprawling epic the show is based on, I did have a bit of a hard time keeping up with certain characters and forgetting their names. People would sometimes appear in a single scene in a single episode, then not appear again with an actual name drop for nearly an entire season, leaving me at the mercy of my own memory and my fervent gif-making escapades. Fortunately, there is just enough visual distinction and characterization to tell them all apart, though sometimes only tenuously.

Then again, there are some names who I would NEVER forget.

Most of the show's major story beats revolve around recreating a specific battle from the novel, told over the course of a season. The question of whether these Fighters are living their own lives or simply fulfilling the destinies of the characters they represent is one that gets posed frequently, with varying answers. Some characters even develop a complex about whether or not they're ever in control of their actions, especially after a sorcerer character shows up in the latter half and starts possessing people's bodies to cause in-fighting and dissension. While the answer is never truly made clear, it becomes the driving force for defining each character's beliefs, and identifying their reasons to keep fighting.

Don't be surprised when you find out many of the characters fight for their definitely-just-friends.

All lack of nuance and context aside though, I found myself strangely enjoying the show for its brazenly unapologetic mix of genre, age rating, and tone. This is exactly the kind of show people who don't watch anime are thinking of when they try to explain why they don't watch anime. The excessive use of comically unrealistic ripped clothes, ogling crotch shots, and sudden splashes of profanity and graphic violence are exactly the sort of thing that make outsiders uneasy, and the show embraces that side of itself with aplomb.

It's really unclear if you're intended to try and take the show seriously or not, but if you don't keep your guard up, you may find yourself pretty unnerved by the sudden directions it takes.

The constant shifts in tone and genre also make it difficult to give the show a specific age rating. Over the course of the main show's four seasons (not including OVAs and spin-offs), the amount of sexual content varies from simple underwear sightings and occasional nipple reveals all the way up to on-screen fucking (minus penetration, anyway). The show also features a few gratuitous close-ups of fear pissing and a pretty gruesome curb stomp by the main character, but these are used pretty sparingly. Even in the later seasons where both the sex and violence get toned down a bit, the dub picks up the slack by spicing up the translation with extra "fucks" for good measure.

The point is, despite the cutesy airhead motif of the main character and some of her friends, this show is very much Unrated, so watch at your own risk!

You know what they say about spaghetti, it's only straight until things get hot and wet.

While the show never really loses its core focus, it does sometimes flounder a bit due to the sheer size of the cast and the seasonal tone shifts. There were times I felt a bit lost, especially when the show would quick-cut to show new characters working on something seemingly unrelated, but any questions I had along the way would eventually get answered by virtue of the cast's "dumb blonde" characters also needing the plot explained to them. Ultimately it wasn't terribly difficult to follow in the first place, but I guess I must have been distracted by something while watching...

Eyes on the prize, kids. It's that simple.

Each season of the show has its own amusingly alliterative subtitle that suggests they're not direct continuations, but there is more or less a general thread running through all of them that demands they be watched in a specific order. The art style changes a bit after season 1 upgrades from fullscreen to widescreen, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, but the characters remain more or less recognizable all the while. The action scenes remain constant and impressive throughout the series, and are fully worth the price of admission if you can keep yourself unfazed by all the underwear.

Life comes at ya fast, just like Ryomou's gorilla grip pussy grapples.

Bottom line is, by virtue of the show's massively varied tone and subject matter, it's a very wacky and unpredictable ride that probably won't jive too well with anyone looking for story or substance. This show really works best as something to put on in the background while under the influence, or for those times you just wanna be entertained by horny antics and cool-ass fight scenes. There could reasonably be some deeper discussion to be had about reincarnation, and whether or not people actually possess their own agency if their entire lives are devoted to fulfilling a destiny or trying to avoid an inevitable fate, or even a discussion about how well the series adapts its source material, but I think the show works best when viewed as a simple spectacle of silliness, and there's nothing wrong with that!

Even if I've never read it, I'm moderately certain there is not a scene in Romance of The Three Kingdoms where a shark gets punched, so it's pretty clear which is the superior story here.

It's pretty easy to make recommendations given how many shows have followed in Ikki Tousen's footsteps since its release. I've already made several listed above. Sekirei and Maken-Ki are easy spiritual successors that follow the same format almost to the letter, crotch shots and all. For something a bit older, a short OVA called Variable Geo provides a neat little spin on the genre. There's virtually nothing like this show in the hyper-puritan world of Western cartoons outside of a few movies, so the closest non-anime show I can think of to recommend would be Stripperella, which has more of a superhero angle, but might still appeal to a similar crowd for obvious reasons.

Nothing more to add here. The show is great at what it does, but only if you already know you'll like that sort of thing, so watch it if you like over-the-top bawdy fight scenes or have a panty fetish. I guarantee you won't find many similar shows that weren't directly inspired by this one, so you may as well start at the source!

There's probably a "don't be a pussy" joke in here somewhere, but given how powerful pussy is in this show, I'd rather not dare to cross it!