Anime has always had its overused genres or genre clusters. Right now the cluster you hear the most complaints about is the Isekai-Videogame sort of space, consisting of Isekai animes (whether or not they actually use video game interfaces for their powers) and fantasies whether high or urban (and whether isekai or not) that use video game conceits like stats and level as the core of their fantastical system. But, that hasn’t always been the fad. In days gone by, supernatural battlers were king. As attested by 2021’s Kemono Jihen, the genre isn’t dead and will probably never truly die, but no matter what the future holds it’s easy to say that at least a heyday for these kind of things is in the past.
I’ve addressed plenty of these battlers before such as 2013’s Beyond the Boundary, 2005’s Shakugan no Shana with its sequels in 2007 and 2011, and 2008’s Ga-Rei Zero. Well, the very same season as Ga-Rei Zero, in Fall ’08, there was yet another of these Urban Fantasy battle shows. Actually, there were a few of them, including A Certain Magical Index and the target of today’s review, Yozakura Quartet.
This is not, technically, the only version of Yozakura Quartet. It got a remake in 2013 subtitled Hana no Uta, as well as a couple of OVAs. But, for this review, I’m only going to be concerned with the first anime outing.
Yozakura Quartet takes place, as a front-loaded exposition monologue tells us, in the town of Sakurashin, where humans and Yokai (or Demons, as the subtitles prefer. I’m going to stick with Yokai) live together, since this is the place prepared in ancient days where Yokai can actually return to their homeworld.
Here, we meet Hime Yarizakura, the high-school-girl mayor of Sakurashin, who is clearly a badass because she perches in tall places and leaps from rooftop to rooftop with no regard for her perilously short skirt.
Give the animators some credit: This came out the same season as the second run of Rosario + Vampire and they had the restraint to not turn Hime’s acrobatics into panty shots.
She’s joined by her butler-like um… henchman, Kyousuke Kishi, who doesn’t count as part of the quartet presumably for reasons of actually being an adult, and said other members, who come off as two eccentric goofballs and the normal guy you expect to be our male lead and maybe a love interest for Hime since she can show a little dork mode around him rather than being perpetually set to “badass who never smiles”.
We see the quartet plus extra respond to a Yokai-possessed individual causing trouble by threatening women with guns, which is an intro bad guy to let everybody show up against. So, what’s our cast like?
Starting with the also ran, Kishi it turns out is an Oni, with super-strength to match. Cat-eared Ao Namani is a Satori Yokai, which the two Touhou fans in the room know means she has the power to read minds. Lazy oddball Kotoha can conjure things just by focusing on saying the right words as a “Kotodama-user” letting her freeze over a block by calling Ice or literally summon more dakka. And that seemingly normal boy? This is Akina Hiizumi. He’s a human, but not exactly normal since he’s got the ability to perform Tuning, making Yokai return forthwith to their place of origin or to the nearest convenient parallel dimension (or just kills them, the show is kind of unclear on that).
As for Hime, she’s called the descendant of a Dragon. What does that mean? Well it seems like if all the others have awesome powers, she just plain is awesome, swatting away bullets with her bare hands, doing all that rooftop jumping, brooding in cool poses where her scarf can flap in the wind, and yet somehow not managing to skewer a dude right in front of her with her spear.
The first episode also vaguely mentions a character known as Enjin, and the next few are better at defining our villain apparent. Not that much better, though. We’re told he’s a Kitsune and that the protective barrier of the town currently keeps him out, but other than that? He’s just an evil jerk. We aren’t told why everybody expects or fears him, we just get it: he’s wearing a long black coat and acting amused by things, he must be puppy-killing evil.
Actually, I mean that literally. There’s an episode where Hime adopts a puppy and, after she scolds it for biting Akina in his sleep, it runs off and runs into this guy at the edge of town, who uses his magical powers to corrupt it into a demonic dog-beast that has to be put down. No real reason given or hint that it has anything to do with his grand plan of overcoming the barrier for evil endgame not announced, petty acts of spite are just things he apparently likes to do.
We also eventually find out he’s currently snatching the body of an old friend of Akina and Hime, Gin, so there’s that. Why we had to spend an entire episode on him inserting himself and his henchman through the barrier only for them to bugger off without doing anything aside taunting Akina and acting vaguely menacing, I don’t really know.
He does at least let slip to the audience that his plan seems to involve blooming a special cherry blossom tree – presumably one of the ones (or all of the ones) doing stone pillar impressions at the edge of town. Why is this evil? What does he hope to accomplish through this? Not explained. I guess he’s just going to make me reference Touhou again to say he’s apparently Yuyuko without any of the depth, complexity, or likability that Yuyuko had. Different power set too, but his taciturn minion is a half-yokai so I guess that counts for something even if said underling is maybe a tenth as cool as Youmu.
I’m sorry to anyone who doesn’t know Touhou lore, but as the meme goes, if I had a nickel for every franchise where a major antagonist wants to bloom an unblooming magic cherry blossom tree and there’s an otherwise uncommon Satori Yokai as a major character, I’d have two nickels, but it’s still weird that it’s happened twice. I’ll try to keep any further references to a minimum.
We move on with character episodes for Ao and Kotoha, and a festival episode at the end of which Enjin kidnaps Ao. This leads to the gang fighting Enjin and… mostly getting their butts kicked. Eventually, Akina is forced to open the way to the roots of the sacred cherry tree with Hime as a hostage, and Enjin begins the process of blooming it, finally telling us that if the seven trees bloom, the world of humans and yokai will overlap and every Yokai that’s ever been banished will return to overrun the world.
To forestall this, Hime takes up the sacred special spear she used for a festival ritual and smites the tree that’s beginning to bloom. After an entire episode of the fallout from this, the town’s high council decides that the best way to stop Enjin’s evil plot is to cut down all the giant guardian pillar trees – which, in the context of this show, is clearly both fairly extreme and a case of desperate times invoking desperate measures.
Even this isn’t triggered fast enough, as Enjin remotely begins to corrupt/bloom the trees. Hime gets thrashed by a random monster, has one fairly good crying scene, and then the gang decides to roll out and, with “sacrifice the town for the world” off the table, they’re going to try to save everything there is to be saved.
The group splits into teams, with Ao and Kotoha trying to find where Enjin is sending his power from (Tokyo Tower, which Kotoha snipes with a conjured rail cannon) while Akina and Kishi defend the town as Hime convalesces. Of course, as she tries to get out of bed for the millionth time, Hime is offered the true dragon spear her grandmother wielded along with some wisdom, so she can re-enter the fray with power and purpose alike renewed.
Shooting Enjin draws him into Sakurashin for the final battle. It takes a few phases, but finally Enjin and Hime have their duel under the falling cherry blossoms. In the intense battle, Enjin manages to kill her scarf, after which Hime gets really mad.
To be fair, they did establish an emotional connection as that was a gift from both Gin and Akina when she was really little
She summons vast impossible dragon power through her spear, instantly wilting all the blossoming trees and smiting Enjin down to the ground where Akina can Tune him away. Enjin rages impotently, and sadly whatever’s left of Gin has to go too. Peace is restored to the city and all is well that ends well with little in the way of emotional payoffs for our leads. That’s Yozakura Quartet.
In my mind, Yozakura Quartet is a weak show that didn’t have to be weak. For me, the characters are forgettable. We’re supposed to have this core quartet but the only one who really got work was Hime, with a kind of also-ran bonus for Akina having to learn to not wimp out on his duty to banish Yokai that need banishing, even if one is wearing an old friend’s face. Or driving said friend’s body around with said friend’s soul still trapped in living hell. It would be better if there was actually a sense of progression from the last point where Akina can’t pull the trigger to the time where he actually does, but those are both in the final episode so it’s really abrupt. I don’t think he even really has any lines between those two scenes other than shouting Hime’s name.
We got some nice also-ran characters. Kishi, his little sister who seems to be kind of sweet on Akina, the Jiangshi girl who was a minor antagonist in the first episode, the ramen man, the local gods… but none of them get the time and development they need to be much more than background color.
All that said, the core of the story is decent. Taken down to its skeleton there could have been a really great pathos with Gin, the lower-key interactions between the cast are the start of a nice thing, and while Akina and Hime don’t go anywhere in the show they do have a nice chemistry as leads, whether they’re meant to ultimately go romantic or not, where it’s clear that they’ve been friends forever without them having to say it all the time. Yozakura Quartet has the makings of a really good urban fantasy battle outing, but it just can’t quite come into bloom (pun intended). From what I hear, the anime changed a lot of things from the manga, so there’s a part of me that wants to check the source material –or the other versions of the show – out in order to see what more is done with the characters and the premise.
Tales like this, protecting something that ought to be protected (whether humanity or “the balance”, or in this case the latter of those and the town) with cool mystic powers, have been done a million times before and will be done a million times again. But any given one could be somebody’s first. For me, who has seen this story done before, there’s not much in Yozakura Quartet to recommend it, and so I clearly can’t pass any recommendations on in strong favor of the show – I’d personally much rather engage with Touhou, Ga Rei Zero, A Certain Magical Index… really most of the other properties I mentioned over the course of this review, among others. If this was somebody’s first take on the pattern, though, I could see finding things to latch onto, and it wouldn’t surprise me if someone or something in this was somebody’s favorite. And you know what? That’s fine.
To an extent, so is the show. It’s fine. It’s not memorable, but it was engaging. Its creativity was mediocre, its action was passable, its drama was unremarkable, its comedy was… honestly kind of nonexistent, with only a few moments to lighten the mood at important points, mostly either to do with Kotoha or the sister Oni. But the slice of life was moderately on-point. I have to give the show some credit that I was as invested in Ao trying to deal with a sulky little orphan as much as with any of the episodic enemies that needed to be pummeled.
For all that, I feel inclined to give Yozakura Quartet a C. There simply isn’t enough stand-out material to either like or hate in this for it to get any other rating. So if you want one more urban fantasy battle show to heap onto the pile, go ahead and throw in Yozakura Quartet. Just don’t expect much of it.