When I read the pitch for Engage Kiss, I felt something nagging at me. It promised to be a supernatural urban fantasy battle anime, with the oddly-overused “unique” setting of a mega-float city in the Pacific, with a solid love polygon theme, skewing Harem of course. Seems harmless enough, so why is there creeping dread running down my spine?
… If anyone says “This is our fight” at a climax as their big line, I’m going to crack.
Anyway, we might as well start the show off right, introducing us to main character and broke choosing beggar problem solver Shuu Ogata. He’s got girl problems off the bat thanks to a certain overbearingly affectionate pink-haired schoolgirl, Kisara (actually a demon), and his stern but caring ex who seems to pretty clearly still have feelings for him, Ayano.
Kisara is also… kind of unwell. After being terrified into eating her cooking and hiding that he saw Ayano, Shuu dodges her insistence that a double suicide “together forever” is the only way out of their penniless state by getting invited to a cyber-conference of folks associated with anti-demon affairs.
This allows him to massively undercut a low-bid contract to take out a demon, with the semi-hired help of Ayano and her mom’s company where he used to work. When the going gets tough, Kisara arrives, showing off her true nature. When the enemy proves tougher, she demands a make-out session to power up and turn the tables, verbally and literally fighting with Ayano as they both fight the monster.
Kisara basically spends the fight confirming her yandere nature, being entirely focused on romantic prospects like extorting a spare key to Shu’s apartment over defeating the enemy, but the job gets done, albeit for a miserable pittance going to Shu.
Moving ahead, we fight some demon possessed folks and get the picture that Shu exists for revenge based on something demon-related that happened to his family, that the city is covering up everything because somehow knowledge of demons would be bad for their unobtanium monopoly, and that snogging Kisara comes with a cost of Shu’s memories, burned up as fuel for her super fighting power that’s the only thing that really keeps the city safe.
The biggest takeaway from this is that Shu is slowly forgetting Ayano, and that Kisara confirms that he’s pushing her away like that because he still loves her and wants her to be safe. I’m reminded somewhat of Valvrave, if the mecha itself had been a member of the love triangle. But where that pulled the trigger a bit late, this one seems to fire a little early. Ayano even gets looped in as of episode four. But at least this way there’s a chance to use things well.
We get an arc having to do with a demon-possessed with a hit-list of revenge, including Ayano. Both she and the audience hear about Shu’s past, where his family died in a demon incident and dad was blamed, and Shu even gets a cop willing to help him find the true malefactor and clear his father’s name, which sounds a bit good to be true. Later, he takes up bodyguarding Ayano, they talk about their past and feelings, and Shu reveals that dream sendings have told him that his sister is still alive, hence his ferocity to get things done right now. They also have themselves an H-scene (not on camera), but of course Kisara needs memories to fuel her up when the demon comes knocking, so it seems Shu won’t be aware how good a time he had with his ex.
He also has a certain line on taking up the fight from Ayano.
NOOOOOOOOO!!!
The next act concerns a psycho exorcist nun named Sharon Holygrail (her proper family name, I’m sure) coming to town in order to murder Kisara. She beats the crud out of pretty much all the demon hunters she can find and comes off as a real nasty piece of work.
She also spars with Ayano, displaying a fighting style of “kicks so high she flashes panty shots even with a real nun habit”
After beating Shu into the ground mostly for not remembering her when they had a little backstabbing fling around his original acquisition of Kisara, and failing to axe Kisara, she gets away and gets some support from the church. The support comes in the form of a demon-flesh power armor that gives her Gatling cannons and tentacles of doom that can actually harm demons. She lures Kisara out and ambushes her with the new fit, which goes pretty well for Sharon until Shu leaves the hospital to go help, sacrificing Haruhi knows what memories to heal Kisara’s wounds and power her up enough to shatter the armor and leave Sharon in an arrestable state.
This ends up dovetailing into a plot that’s been on the back burner for a while: finding Shu’s informant who knows far too much and is thus probably in league with the demon manipulating things from behind the scenes. The informant and the traitor turn out to be different people; the informant in an annoying stain of a rich kid we saw briefly earlier, who evidently has a secret surveillance network that allows him to watch the entire city in real time (down to his sisters’ bathrooms if desired), while the demonic agent is revealed to be the cool mature black guy who seemed to have Shu’s back, and this only after he kills the friendly cop who was too good to be true.
Sharon, in prison, also spouts ominous talk about a true demonic mastermind behind all the possession incidents, called Asmodeus. That’s not ominous at all.
Anyway, back to the point where the sagey mentor not important enough to mention before now is a traitor. He takes his contract to full demon mode after a long talk with Shu, and Shu gives up all his memories of the guy to grant Kisara the power to fight him.
I’ll say it’s a bit interesting that Kisara doesn’t seem able to refuse what Shu offers. The dude was basically his father figure for the last twelve years, so losing those memories leaves Shu in a pretty bad mental state, where the rest of his mind threatens to collapse.
Kisara retrieves the data from the dying guy after he’s beaten, which gets us the truth that Asmodeus (a shapeshifter) impersonated Shu’s mother between his birth and that of his sister. Sister, as a half-demon, is indeed alive to function as a ritual component for swarming the world with demons. Kisara teams up with Sharon (who was let out of prison by Shu) to go after the sister, while Shu teams up with Ayano for basically the same reason, despite his moderate case of severe brain damage. The government (represented by the little annoyance with the creeper surveillance) has their own plan to keep the demon ritual from going off, which wouldn’t be very good for anyone.
Government shoots their shot with a laser death ray satellite, but a giant demon arm erupts from the back of Shu’s sister, catches it, and then starts to fight Kisara and Sharon with all sorts of body horror bull.
Shu arrives, now totally focused on Kisara since I guess she’s more recent, and tries to feed her literally every memory he has left, but as Kisara protests, she gets run through. By who or what? Not the naughty nun (who could use the same treatment), but rather by Shu’s little sister, coming out of a dimensional rift and her twelve-year demon-coma. Before we can get a line out of her, the government fires a couple more space lasers, leaving her to plummet into the ocean like Kisara before her.
The two turn out to be only mostly dead, sister Kanna on the sea floor and Kisara taken to the hospital. Kisara wakes up later, and when Shu tries to feed himself to her, she pulls her reverse card and returns all his memories. She even gives him her memories and ones she glimpsed from Kanna when the latter stabbed her. This gets us some extended flashback, including the revelation that Kisara is special because she’s actually a half-demon sired by one of Shu’s distant ancestors, essentially the same deal as Kanna but different generations.
Speaking of Kanna, she gets active and comes to town. What’s her motivation? She’s Yandere for Shu, and meaning to take out his love interests. With Kisara kind of out of the picture for the moment, that puts Ayano on top of the hit list. This is said to be because she’s been living vicariously through Shu’s dreams but still has the emotional intelligence of a three-year-old. To be fair, she mostly just screams.
The final battle has about as many cavalry arrivals and stuff blowing up moments as you’d want, until Kisara (having left a message for herself as she had often done for Shu) rejoins the fight. Eventually, we get to our triumphant… something.
End sum? Kanna is sealed and under city control, but Shu hopes to be able to raise her right. Kisara is back in action, but starting from a clean slate rather than getting her old memories and feelings back. Ayano and Shu seem to be “it’s complicated” ever after (though Kisara seems to have more emotional investment from Shu and to be a more balanced person this time). Sharon exits stage left, good riddance. And I guess the adventure kind of continues since Kanna still exists and is the gate to the demon realm?
Well, not really, as in one last bit of comedy to play us out, Kanna escapes containment to go to Shu’s apartment, eat all the food, and cockblock Kisara. Evidently, this has become a regular occurrence. She’s even sprouted a proper bratty possessive little sister personality. Even Ayano gets to show up, guns blazing, for the battle to be between the missus, the ex, and the sister.
And that was Engage Kiss. Other than mercifully not causing too much in the way of Strike the Blood flashbacks, how was it?
Well, as somebody who may have crafted a story following demon-hunters in a futuristic city, naturally I have to shill my effort by saying that I think I’ve got the stronger product, at least by the time I get the unreleased volumes to print. But honestly that’s just an obligatory plug; the two stories really have little in common.
Instead, Engage Kiss comes off as the love child of Strike the Blood and Black Bullet. I may make fun of the former for its annoying catchphrase, but it honestly wasn’t that bad, and I ended up finding Black Bullet to be better than it really had any right to be.
To the credit of Engage Kiss, it is trying. Even early on when we were indulging in monster of the week and romcom antics, they were at least setting up facts and characters that would be used later. Later on (for the sake of comedy, I’ll say after Shu and Ayano bang) there’s a well-structured meta plot and decent drama. Even the memory loss, that I thought was deployed too early, was actually used pretty well. I like that while they did a somewhat genre-necessary reversal for Shu, it wasn’t a total get-out-of-jail-free card and instead reformatted Kisara, meaning there was a purpose to the arc and a real cost to reaching the ending.
That said, not every effort is rewarded… or necessarily pushing in the right direction. There are times when the emotions really fall through, especially around the comedy elements. They’re distinctly weaker than the show as a whole, and feel like they were included because a producer said there have to be these very standard bickering or slapstick ecchi harem style jokes that don’t otherwise fit. Black Bullet had some of that too, but it was worked in to a much more organic-feeling result. On the other side, some of the drama felt a little forced, particularly around the agent being that guy who was like a father to Shu. They did set up that he was existed, that he and Shu were close, all the facts… but the way they related to each other didn’t feel that warm or important until the post-reveal flashbacks kicked in, so it wasn’t exactly shocking as the viewer to learn he was the traitor.
In the end, the grade ends up naturally falling between those two, with my final rank for the show being a B-. It’s worth watching, I suppose. Actually, I’d say it was better than I expected, but it still seems like a memory that would be pretty safe to give up.