Random Review: Hitsugi no Chaika [Overall Thoughts]

Overall thoughts. First season and Avenging Battle. Mainly latter.

Full of spoilers. Includes today’s finale, shocking truth!

“I am tool. Purpose served. No reason to live.” (White Chaika, No. 357)

Hitsugi no Chaika

So Hitsugi no Chaika’s finale aired earlier today, bringing our adventure with the most adorable corpse collector ever to an end! I’ve been following it quite earnestly since its first season debuted back in Spring 2014, and as neither that nor Avenging Battle was picked up for blogging, I thought I should give it a bit of a send-off at the very least. It’s definitely been a very fun ride despite its flaws, and to an extent, I’d even say that its ability to hold my interest through its characters and plot development made me overlook many of these flaws. I’m not a fan of doing spoiler-free overall reviews, especially right after a finale, so this will really play out more like an elongated impressions post except for the entire series instead of a single episode. I also wish I could write the entire thing while speaking like Chaika, but it might take quite a while. And it might not be readable.

Gathering the Remains

It really was a fairly straightforward premise, at least at first – with the help of hired saboteurs Tooru and Akari, a girl named Chaika is going around gathering the eight remains of her dead father in order to ‘give him a burial’. It promised a structured, fantasy-shounen romp with lots of potential with magic and action scenes. Then came the reveal that there were other young girls searching for the remains as well… and that they also called themselves Chaika. Not only that, each Chaika looked exactly the same, all down to the thin horizontal scar on their necks – to the point that both the fandom and the characters themselves started telling them apart by colour association. Each were obsessed with, and purely driven by their sole desire to collect the remains, even though they all had supposedly different reasons for doing so. This was the point where it really began to kick off for me (and no, not the exploding Fayla scene from the first episode) and it turned the plot into something far more mysterious – which was the real Chaika? Was there even a real Chaika to begin with? And what exactly would gathering all the remains do?

With Arthur Gaz having held such a prominent, off-screen role in the story thus far, it would be almost incomplete if he didn’t show up in at least some form by the end – and alongside the obvious, it wasn’t all too surprising that he would end up resurrected and alive eventually, although the specific circumstances in which he did so were rather… icky. God, I think these final few episodes in general has put me off the blatantly sexier Chaikas for life. Not that they’re even alive any more, nor was I ever a Slut Chaika (sorry, Layla) fan to begin with. What wasn’t so obvious was that he’d practically end up being Guy, that little bastard who did end up being evil even though I didn’t want to believe it for the longest time. Presumably all the Guys stemmed from Gaz to begin with, and so by extension that makes Gaz the biggest bastard of them all, which was sort of the case. How dare he do all those mean things to White Chaika! But yeah, the sole argument behind not bringing back Gaz as the last boss was highlighted by the end of Episode 9 – he’s just so incredibly strong to the point that it would be very, very difficult to kill him, especially with only a single episode to go by that point.

The Eight Heroes

In reality, most of these guys were either pushovers or were absolute wrecks in the aftermath of the war – they were the hardly memorable ones, back in the days when there wasn’t really a clear ‘big bad’ and the greatest threats came from competing forces like Red Chaika. The ones which did have an impact were probably Dominica (i.e. Fredrica), Claudia and of course Hartgen. The latter being the last boss as the ‘new Arthur Gaz’ was something that I genuinely thought might happen, but it turns out his three Chaikas were bigger cunts than he ended up being himself. It’s a bit of a pity he was treated as cannon fodder by Gaz really, especially as he would have been the most loyal fodder Gaz could have ever wanted.

‘Chaika Gaz’

My favourite Chaika is White Chaika, and my favourite Chaika interaction is the one between Red and White as they escape imprisonment on the hidden island. Vivi is Vivi, and I don’t think I’d consider her a ‘real’ Chaika – she probably wouldn’t appreciate it anyway. But really, White, Red and Niva ascend the very concept of moe to greater heights. I mean, they’re just talking, but holy shit are they adorable. Especially that confused ‘mwee’ noise. Yeah, initially I didn’t recognize it either until I tried saying it. Then I understood. Seriously, if White Chaika is not your best Chaika then you must be a Vivi fan, though Vivi isn’t bad either. Actually, I think there’s also a sizeable fanbase for Red Chaika because she’s a hotter Chaika with a whip sword and bigger boobs, but screw that.

I suppose there’s not all that much choice, really. All the introduced Chaikas apart from the ones already mentioned above were somehow very twisted in their own way, and all ended up dying by the end of the show. I initially did want to like the twin Black Chaikas, but the whole ‘father’ thing they had going on with Hartgen was a bit too creepy, and they ended up being incorrigible bitches either way. Same goes for the ‘true’ Black Chaika (would that make the twins Purple Chaikas?) and her tentacles, who I think managed to be more explicitly erotic than Blue Chaika on the whole. Both of them were 3lewd5me. Amidst the odd mix of intrigue and repulsion, the scene where she ‘consumes’ the dead body parts and ‘gives birth’ to Gaz was actually quite funny – I found it hilarious that Gillette had forgotten to remove his knife from the throat of a Tooru that wasn’t there any more, leaving him holding a knife against nothing in mid-air for a good few seconds. But anyway, the only thing that really interested me about true Black Chaika was that in every scene after the birth, all she could talk about was that she had been the one to fulfil the mission – that she’d succeeded and truly carried out the objective where the others hadn’t. Even though she may be in a ‘queen bee’ role, it’s interesting that the desire to gather the remains to ‘do something’ has been so deeply implanted in her subconscious to the point that she’d gloat about it despite knowing her similar status as a tool – whereas both Red and White eventually found something more important to them than the remains.

Right when I thought that nothing could possibly surprise me more about the whole Chaika situation, the last few episodes of Avenging Battle had several scenes in which multiple, puppet Chaikas appeared under Shin’s command. Now, that surprised me. There were so many colours! And presumably these used to be real, live Chaikas who walked around trying to gather the remains before ending up in Hartgen’s little tournament – only to be killed and used as puppets by true Black Chaika. She did say something along the lines of how ‘three came this year’, implying that there were lots more who turned up before White, Red and Vivi did. The true extent of the entire Chaika project was only really alluded to by Gaz himself though – White Chaika is no. 357?! I thought there’d be around 50 at most… unless Gaz decided to do a Soviet Russia and start counting up from 300 onwards.

Team Tooru

Team Tooru are such a great cast of protagonists. They’re very refreshing, and there’s a lot of banter mixed with gradual character development, albeit primarily for Tooru. He starts off as someone with the mindset of a saboteur, thinking of himself and Akari as mere tools designed to carry out their employer’s desires. Over the course of the story he falls in love with Chaika, and slowly beings to think about what he wants to do. Given a few pushes by Shin, he finally casts off his saboteur ideals in prioritising Chaika herself over the remains, and becomes a long-awaited dragoon cavalier in order to obtain the necessary power-up needed in order to defeat the last boss (never thought ‘necessary power-up’ and ‘dragoon’ would ever be in the same sentence). Besides that, he’s a practical and no-nonsense sort of guy, and his banter with Akari somehow never gets tiring. I have a feeling that Akari’s various proclamations are, although bizarre, all too genuine… although it’s all about the way she says it with her deadpan expressions.

Fredrica gets her own paragraph! I can imagine she’d be the kind of character many people would hate, but I’ve always held a soft spot for her throughout the show. Partially because she gives absolutely no fucks, and partially because she really does deserve a break. Also anyone voiced by Saito Chiwa is an immediate plus in my books. One of the key worries over her joining Team Tooru early on was that she’d be able to curbstomp almost everyone else in the story, but it feels like she ended up being used as transport more than anything else, because in every major battle she ended up either being withheld on purpose or taken out immediately, sometimes even multiple times – I’m thinking of the Layla battle in which she was stabbed clean through the head by this god-awful monster in the ceiling vent right after having healed from a previous stab injury. I definitely thought, “okay, this time she’s really dead” one too many times, the most recent one being after she was apparently dismembered by Gaz in the final battle. Fredrica’s hardly killed enough people on-screen to deserve this much suffering.

Aftermath and Epilogue

The moment Tooru reminded Chaika to only use the capsule-type magic fuel and not her memories to power her Gundo, I suddenly realized how things would end. I didn’t think Niva would return to help her out, but it was pretty much guaranteed that anything powerful enough to get rid of Gaz would most likely obliterate all her memories as well. The positive side to it all is that they weren’t really hers to begin with – they were the fake, implanted memories she herself was traumatized by earlier that episode, and with the loss of those memories supposedly disappeared the impulse to collect remains or anything that remained of her being a Chaika, including the broken speech patterns. Sadly that probably means the loss of any memories related to Tooru too, though they have all the time in the world to build new ones. And it could have been worse – she could have been stuck in a vegetative state for years, god forbid. It’s about as happy as it could reasonably get – Tooru and Akari live peacefully in a cottage with Chaika, and a friendlier Red comes by to visit occasionally.

While definitely rushed, it wasn’t a bad ending at all – I’m not sure why there were only 10 episodes, but it feels like an administrative thing rather than a conscious decision. And a second season is an ambitious project in the first place, given the mediocre BD sales the first season exhibited. Ultimately, I found myself caring more about the ending than the pace at which we got to it, although on that front I would have liked a longer epilogue. Hitsugi no Chaika ended up being a good bit of fun with an intriguing plot, and that’s what I’ll remember it for. Sometimes that’s what matters.

Which Chaika is your favourite Chaika?