In a world where we have a truly absurd number of Urban Fantasy supernatural battle shows, indulging in a world under Masquerade where inhuman threats exist just out of sight for normals, Beyond the Boundary is… one of them.
Specifically, Beyond the Boundary is concerned with Spirit World Warriors and the Yomu they hunt. Its main characters are Akihito, an immortal half-Yomu under the protection of a clan of such warriors and Mirai, his shy kouhai who happens to also be a Spirit World Warrior, in her case descended from a cursed clan with their own seemingly dark power.
Oddly enough, we spend a lot of time in this show just dealing with the daily lives of these characters, all of whom other than Mirai (who still has her moments) are either deadpan snarkers, pervy loons, or both.
The show starts promisingly enough with an episode 0 set a couple years before the meat of the plot, focused largely on Hiroomi Nase – member of the respected and powerful Nase clan of Spirit World Warriors and one of Akihito’s keepers. We see how they meet, with Hiroomi initially being dispatched to eliminate Akihito for the crime of being an abomination against reality, a mission that his little sister Mitsuki tags along with quite against his wishes. They fight some, have it hammered home that Akihito isn’t a bad dude most of the time, and then find out that when he’s pushed far too far he has a superpowered evil side that their real mission is to keep in check. They reach a weird sort of understanding, and thus we have the setup for the show proper.
In the proper time, Akihito meets Mirai with the inauspicious start of trying to talk her down from what he believes to be suicidal intent by going on about how she fits his glasses fetish, and getting stabbed through the heart with a magic blood sword for his trouble. We then cut to some time later where we find out that Mirai, as mousy and inept as she seems most of the time, has been aggressively hunting down Akihito ever since, and he really wishes she would stop. Mitsuki (evolved to full snarker) and Hiroomi (now played for laughs as a siscon) are there too, and would also like to remind Akihito that nothing good would come of getting involved with Mirai
Naturally, Akihito immediately and inexorably gets involved with Mirai, helping the dead broke girl start to make something approaching a living as a Spirit World Warrior, and getting across that repeatedly killing him still stings and that he’d rather she stop. He also tries to get her to join the literature club, but for the duration of the first arc the flag for that has not been raised.
The first arc’s nemesis turns out to be a powerful Yomu called the Hollow Shadow. A collection of malice with little to nothing in the way of a physical form, it’s also a monstrosity that Mirai has a history with, leaving her unwilling to go with the plan the elder Spirit World Warriors have of simply diverting it away from the city.
The conflict over the Hollow Shadow, which at its climax takes place in a cursed mental realm created by the Shadow from the memories of those caught, gets Akihito and Mirai to know the facts about each other: Mirai has “cursed blood” as her clan’s power. Her shed blood will kill and/or decay basically everything, the other members of her family were all wiped out, and while she was happily adopted for a time the Shadow possessed her loving adoptive sister, who Mirai then killed, causing her to see herself as a murderer even though it’s strongly implied there wasn’t going to be any way out for said sister.
On Akihito’s side, after they fight their way out of the Shadow and seemingly kill it, he’s in a bad enough state to enter berserk mode, now far more powerful so that even a large collection of his wardens can’t seem to quite contain him. Mirai realizes that just maybe he wasn’t kidding when he said he could understand her pain and isolation, and throws herself in the ring to hug him into submission (which, given that she’s drenched in her own blood by this point, damages down his insane health bar, I guess)
Thus, the second arc begins with Mirai joining the literature club, despite its members being a deadpan snarker, her siscon older brother, and glasses-fetishist Akihito. We have some relative downtime episodes, and then have to face up with a character briefly encountered at the end of the first arc, Sakura. Sakura is the biological sister of the adoptive sister Mirai killed, and she seems to have both become far more powerful than she should have and consumed by a desire for vengeance against Mirai. She attacked in the Hollow Shadow, but was fought off, and now there’s the question of reckoning with her.
This is handled fairly quickly. Sakura, it seems, has her power-up from a dubious chainsaw-polearm-gun given to her by an unknown figure, along with the task to kill Mirai in order to keep it. To have it gain power, she’s been feeding it the cores of the Yomu she’s killed, which people in the know find quite sinister. Mirai chooses to accept a confrontation with Sakura, revealing that she wasn’t fighting at 100% before. When the weapon is damaged by Mirai’s blood, it goes berserk and tries to eat Sakura. Mirai fights it off, letting her rebuild a bridge with her kinda-sister, so the two of them seem to be square. However, it seems she didn’t or couldn’t finish the thing off and its true master, a sketchy guy who had shown up briefly before, retrieves it and talks some about the Hollow Shadow.
This leads into the introduction of the next Big Bad Thing – The Calm, a period of stagnation related somehow to the titular Beyond the Boundary. Briefly put, we learn in short order that the Calm is a period where Yomu powers are weakened drastically, making it open season for Spirit World Warriors to hunt strong ones, and a time when Akihito needs to be careful as he might not be as immortal as he is accustomed to. Beyond the Boundary, meanwhile, refers to Yomu so vast and terrible that when they act they become the source of plagues, wars, natural disasters, and so on, with a fragment of one that’s been tracked for some time starting to well up from wherever it lurks at normal times. Both Mr. Sketchy and Izumi (the elder sister of Hiroomi and Mitsuki) seem to have somewhat sinister plans for this time.
This leads in to Akihito being put in a state where his Yomu half, revealed to be Beyond the Boundary itself, emerges. Mirai is sent to hunt him down and kill him, while Hiroomi tries to convince her to save him. It seems like she follows through, but the next episode goes through dream sequences and flashbacks to get us the whole story. In that, Mirai was initially brought to town by Izumi specifically to kill Beyond the Boundary, aka Akihito, but of course wound up liking his human half. Thus, during the Calm episode, she convinced Mirai that there was a way to save him by extracting the Yomu side, at the cost of her own life and/or existence. This is what she did, disappearing from the world while Akihito was plunged into a coma.
As he wakes up, we learn that Mirai is still fighting inside Beyond the Boundary. Sketchy guy does evil things to empower it to defeat her and also reveal its continued presence. This leads to Akihito, guided by his mom (previously only appearing in silly moments) reclaiming a fragment of his power and going to face off against the rest together with her while the remainder of the team takes on Mr. Sketchy.
After a hell of a final battle, the sketchy guy (who is also somehow Yomu-overtaken) is slain, Izumi is outed as having possession-based powers and seemingly forced into exile, and Akihito reabsorbs Beyond the Boundary to seal it away. With nothing left to support her, Mirai crumbles into dust and we get what seems to be a bittersweet ending until Mirai makes an unexplained return to reality in the final scene. There’s not even a halfhearted explanation like in Dusk Maiden of Amnesia (which made sense when you thought about it), she’s just there and okay so we can have a happy last note.
So, what’s the damage on Beyond the Boundary?
Honestly, I rather enjoyed it despite a laundry list of faults. I’ll go into those first.
Nothing is explained in this show, with the material sometimes even rubbing in your face that you’re not given any answers. I don’t need easy answers or clean answers, but the number of times “I have no idea how this happened” or “I will insist on an explanation later” is thrown down, especially in the final arc, is grating.
Nobody seems to really complete their arc other than maybe Mirai (Akihito’s being stolen from him by the status quo reset and freebie happy ending) and the entire thing resets to status quo – a status quo that most of the running time led us to believe was neither good nor sustainable – so it seems like not much was accomplished except for our damaged leads getting together, something that seemed inevitable to the point of sewn up after the whole Hollow Shadow fiasco.
The villains, both the titular Beyond the Boundary (which doesn’t even speak and is, as a Yomu, said to be a collection of human misery and malice) and the sketchy guy who wasn’t quite from the Society, have pretty much no motivation. One’s evil because it’s a concentrated blob of evil and the other one is… the same thing but with a convincing “human jerkwad” disguise.
The characters are… not the most likable cast in Anime. Hiroomi and Akihito in particular play their perv card loud and proud for comedy and it hurts to watch sometimes. The snark responses from the girls are quite to formula: Mitsuki goes for pure deadpan venom with the occasional hint of flirt while Mirai leans heavily on her catchphrase of something being unpleasant in order to react to conversations that aren’t her being in full goofball klutz mode. Mirai makes the most of her cute side and Mitsuki at least gets a couple moments where she shows some real depth, as does Akihito, but the baseline is rather rough.
That’s a lot against this thing. What does it have going for it?
Well, other than maybe a few patches of the finale where it’s possible the budget ran out, the art and animation are gorgeous. There’s some real high detail on the supernatural stuff, and the motions in the fights are smooth, fluid, appealing, and properly sold. It’s almost a shame we spend so much time on comedy, as when this wants to be a legit action show, it really rises to the task.
The characters do grow on you. Or at least grew on me. They’re not so bad to start that it really kills the show, and you come to believe and even root for Mirai and Akihito’s chemistry in particular. Since there’s a strong romantic arc to this show, and the ending that indicates that’s what the creators thought was the point (and thus something that couldn’t be sacrificed), this is actually pretty important and helps lessen the blow of everything being the same or the happy ending being so dang unexplained.
There’s a lot of artful smoke and mirrors when it comes to the world and the broader goings on. In the end, we never get any good answers, and I think it’s pretty clear that the creators didn’t have them, but these characters doing their cloak and dagger spirit world stuff look and sound so cool while they’re not giving any answers that while watching you’re liable to forgive and forget that this is all convoluted behavior as the plot demands. These side characters – Izumi, the sketchy guy, Akihito’s mom, and so on – are absolutely puppets that the creators have do as they need, but they’re puppets where you usually can’t see the strings. I suppose this isn’t a full count for the show, but it’s a hell of a mitigating factor against at least one of the downsides.
Still, while the show is enjoyable as a whole, I can’t say it isn’t marred by its problems. In some stages I think this would be if not a decent gateway than at least an okay second string show for somebody who’s been introduced to anime, but hasn’t yet seen the longer and heavier shows that do it better, specifically because it has that smoke and mirrors artistry and forced happy ending rendering it a fairly accessible piece. It’s a much smaller ask than Shakugan no Shana, even if it’s not as strong.
But, would I really want to do that? To take someone who is still forming their opinions and show them this? I guess it depends on how well I knew the target – some people don’t worry much about motivations if there’s something cool happening, others get more critical. For the latter, Beyond the Boundary would be the very wrong pick. And while the former is the audience for the show, I’m not convinced this is the show for the audience.
On the whole, I’d regard Beyond the Boundary as a C+. I do think of it at least passing well, even as I have to admit it has all those glaring faults I spent my time listing. At worst it’s mostly harmless, so if you just want to see some cool stuff for a few hours, go ahead and check it out.
And yes, technically there is a movie version of this show: one film of recap, and one of sequel. But other than acknowledging they exist to forestall any complaints, they’re beyond the scope of this review.