Last time, we looked at Shakugan no
Shana Second and I talked a little about what it means to make a
sequel. I contended that, with an episodic premise (like Shakugan no
Shana kind of had, infinitely extendable through encountering and
battling a stream of new Denizens) you could pretty much make an
acceptable sequel by continuing to do the same thing you’d been doing
so far. I also contended that it could be stronger if you went above
and beyond, but at least in some cases it wouldn’t be strictly
necessary. Shakugan no Shana Second fell flat (well, flatter)
because it didn’t manage to do that much, largely scaling back and
taking away from the ante compared to season one of Shakugan no
Shana.
Shakugan no Shana Final doesn’t fall
for that trap. Nor does Shana Final just content itself extruding
more editions of the Shakugan no Shana material we already liked.
Shana Final goes above and beyond, transforming the narrative and
becoming its own thing that’s grand and new. And it kicks ass.
First of all, we catch up with where we
left off at the end of season 2. It turns out, when we never see
Yuji in that ending… he disappeared. As in, no one mundane
remembers him just like a torch that burned out. That shouldn’t be
possible, since he reclaimed the artifact that was keeping him alive,
but it’s what appears to have happened. Some evidence remains, so
Shana and Yoshida hold out hope, but the other Crimson World sort of
people would tell them that it’s a long shot.
And then we, the audience, catch up
with Yuji. Yuji’s the leader of the Bal Masque now.
This is a turn that Shana Final does
brilliantly, but that I would not recommend attempting to imitate.
There are so many ways in which this could have been a disaster.
Making a character like Yuji Sakai, who had deep determination and an
uncompromisingly good nature, the new leader of the villain faction?
On one side, if he changes too much, it seems like the character we
knew, in some respects our main character, has died and been replaced
by an impostor. If he doesn’t change enough, the villains look like
idiots for suddenly following this guy who ruined their plans a
million times. Pretty much all the metrics are like that, tight-rope
walks where tipping too far in either direction would result in
disaster.
Shana Final manages all the tight-rope
walks with flying colors. We see Yuji take formal command of the Bal
Masque, both paling it up with the Denizens he previously would have
been fairly terrified of and displaying a new confidence and power
when he effortlessly defends his position against an agitated
challenger. So there’s no doubt he’s the proper leader of the Bal
Masque now. But we also see him return to his home city and
reminisce about the events of his life (mostly the show’s first two
seasons) and contend with his human emotions, so we really do
understand that the Yuji we know is in there somewhere, and not just
hidden or sealed deep down but somewhere in charge of Yuji as we see
him now. There’s a palpable sense that he has some long-reaching
plan or goal that’s something Yuji always would have supported, and
that this new means to that end is the product of Yuji’s
determination.
And, despite juggling a few extra side
plots, Shana Final gets to understand this very quickly, before Yuji
confronts Shana again and gives us something of an explanation. The
explanation, though, is pretty good: Yuji has become host to/one with
an entity known as The Snake of the Festival, one of the gods of the
Crimson World (Alastor is another) who had been sealed away ages ago,
nearly believed destroyed. Specifically, The Snake of the Festival
is the God of Desire, seemingly existing to grant wishes,
particularly those of his beloved fellow denizens. The Snake of the
Festival is very good at his job, because he’s going to spend a lot
of this season granting the audience’s wish for an amazing final
season.
In this first engagement, though,
Yuji’s old friends don’t take his being an ancient sealed evil god
very well and a fight is made of it. Yuji breaks Margery Daw’s brain
rather completely by telling her the truth about the incident that
made her a Flame Haze – the Silver denizen that kill-stole everyone
Margery wanted to be done with, the hatred of which kept her going
for hundreds of years? It was a fragment of the Snake, and simply
responding to her own desire for violence. There was never any
reason for her hatred in the first place.
If you think that kind of revelation
would be cathartic, you’re not Flame Haze material. The loss of her
reason for being, dark though it was, sends Margery into a coma and
nearly kills her.
Yuji also manages to get the better of
Shana in the engagement, and ends up capturing her and carrying her
off to the Bal Masque’s invisible flying castle, the Palace of the
Stars (which is looking much more impressive and expansive since its
appearance in the end of season 1), where she ends up spending a
large chunk of episodes with her powers sealed. The dynamic in the
scenes between Yuji and Shana while she’s a prisoner are pretty
dynamite, showing both the depths of their positive connection and
the immense strain that being stood on opposite sides of a
world-shaking conflict in the making is putting on that. The Snake
also casually drops in no uncertain terms that Yuji loves Shana,
taking the will-they-or-won’t-they dynamic that was getting really
stale into season 2 and throwing it out the window in favor of
focusing on whether the two of them even can get together despite
this rift that’s come between them, which by this point is vastly
more dynamic and interesting. I’ll just go ahead and add that to the
“wishes granted” tally.
Wilhelmina, along with Khamsin (who we
met in Season 1) and some other pretty cool Flame Hazes we run into
along the way here put together a daring raid on the Palace of the
Stars to get Shana back. Meanwhile, other Flame Hazes, lead by some
fairly impressive folks (there are LOADS of new characters this
season), muster an entire army to take on the Palace of the Stars and
the Bal Masque’s legions to stop the Snake of the Festival’s schemes
under the assumption that those schemes are probably bad news. In
their defense, the Bal Masque had been getting really aggressive
about pushing over the Flame Haze support network in preparation for
their master’s grand plan.
What is the grand plan? Well, it takes a while to hear it. Episodes eight through fifteen are basically one big battle, the war over the Palace of the Stars from the commando raid to the battle in the field to the attempt to hunt down Yuji and the head trinity of the Bal Masque as they enter a rift between worlds to recover the Snake’s original body. You’d think this would get old, I mean it’s nearly four hours of material largely dedicated to fighting. But Shana Final manages to sustain the momentum and tension through all of that because none of it is wasted. The battle for the Palace of the Stars is, for me, one of the great battle sequences in anime, operating on a lot of levels with a lot of separate movements woven together into a glorious tapestry of bloodshed and determination, martial arts and magic. Shana breaks out of her confinement, recovering both her strength and her shattered will to kick ass. Wilhelmina and friends wreak havoc throughout the Palace of the Stars, crashing it and breaking its invisible field. Armies clash with massive back and forth, Flame Hazes and Denizens hatching and executing plan and counter-plan, one after another. Shana follows Yuji into the rift between worlds and duels him on top of the back of a giant flying snake (kind of flirting as they fight) while a bemused trio of Bal Masque leaders just have to watch. We meet and lose characters Samuel Demantius (a Flame Haze with the skill of conjuring walls and fortifications out of the ground and an appearance and demeanor that seems the very definition of grizzled soldier) and Decarabia (a giant leviathan-eel denizen and master tactician. Possibly my favorite Denizen despite his brief role just because he’s such an out-there design, though Seeker Dantalion is just too much fun). The entire thing might be close to four hours of fighting, but on the other hand it’s close to four hours of some of the best action you’ll see laced with breathers and critical moments that provide some of the best character you’ll see emerge from combat.
And then Snake Yuji emerges from the rift onto the battlefield, and declares his intention to all: The Snake of the Festival will grant the wish of his Denizens… but the prayers he’s heard are no longer just for full bellies, but for a world like the current one they enjoy save that they can be permanently satiated. The Denizens will leave the current world for this new one, in which they won’t need external sources of Power of Existence. Flame Hazes, rejoice! The long war is over, there’s no reason to fight any more!
You might remember how well having no
reason to fight went over for Margery Daw. The Flame Haze army is
completely routed, their morale shattered, and most of the rank and
file are run down by the emboldened denizens fighting in the presence
of their god. As the battle ends, we get a chance to breathe, and
set the stakes for the final arc.
What more is worth fighting for? Well,
Shana personally needs to take on Yuji face to face, for the sake of
their love… and the wise among the Flame Hazes see a potential flaw
in the Snake’s plan: if, in this new world, Denizens still consume
humans despite not strictly needing to (because, you know, they’re
gluttonous jerks who are quite used to such bad behavior), the
disruption of Existence will eventually ripple back and possibly
destroy all space-time. It’s far from guaranteed, but the Flame
Hazes that remain don’t want to take that chance.
It’s actually an interesting
juxtaposition. The ultimate conflict in Shana Final isn’t one
between good and evil, but rather between Hope and Fear… and the
technical heroes are the ones aligned with Fear. The Flame Hazes
(led by Shana and the others), are ruled by their concerns about the
danger, while the Denizens (led by Snake Yuji) are driven by their
hope for a better future. This is why Yuji works as the antagonist
for Shana Final – his motivation is, ultimately, to free his
beloved Shana from the sad fate that awaits all Flame Hazes, to some
day die in a senseless and endless war and be forgotten by the world.
To that end, he’s creating a world where she could live without
that. It’s not something Shana ever asked for, but it’s rooted deep
in Yuji’s empathy and determination. It’s absolutely something Yuji
would always have wanted… and also absolutely something teaming up
with The Snake of the Festival and Bal Masque can bring about.
And so we come to the final arc, one
last insanely complicated running battle back in the city where this
all started, over the creation of the new world that the Snake of the
Festival means to enact.
Things get amazingly intricate. I
could spend thousands of words going into detail on all the subplots,
minor arcs, and great interactions between tertiary characters that
go on throughout the Final Battle, like Dantalion’s grudge match with
the Flame Haze he created through mad science and Wile E. Coyote
style sendoff. There are probably dozens of minor arcs and grace
notes that are brought up and resolved throughout Shana Final,
especially in this last big arc, giving it an amazingly sprawling and
epic feel as opposed to the former seasons of Shana that had only
been concerned with a small cast and this one city, I just don’t have
the time to get into that rather than sticking to the most important,
the ones that add up to the climax and resolution of the show as a
whole.
Now you might be thinking, back when I
reviewed Shana Second, didn’t I complain about doing heavy exposition
in the middle of a battle? Well, the dynamic in Shana Final is
rather different. In Second, the battle I criticized for that was
still contained, a fight scene where the explaining had to happen
between blows or not at all. The mega-length battles in Final (both
the battle over the Palace of the Stars and the Final Battle) aren’t;
they represent a series of engagements sprawling over both locations
and time, allowing different groups of characters to have more quiet
scenes or take a breath even while combat rages elsewhere. Saying
these arcs are each one big battle is kind of like saying the movie
Mad Max: Fury Road is one big chase scene – there are ways in which
it’s true, but there are enough nuanced little components woven in
that the impression you’d get from such a statement kind of
misrepresents the material. It doesn’t move at one steady pace
throughout, the show still speeds up, slows down, and has notable
beats. In the case of Shana Final, it does have a lot of story and
exposition to deliver, but it knows when and how to do it, what bits
can be tossed out between blows and what needs more time and focus.
Second didn’t handle that nearly as well.
Big plot number one: Snake Yuji is
forming the new world, Xanadu. Hecate is sacrificed for the cause (a
willing offering, as is her role) and the fancy grand spell builds
and builds. Shana fights to reach and sabotage the effort, using
some knowledge Wilhelmina bartered from Lamies (who was also helping
the creation effort). She eventually delivers her interfering spell
into the egg of the new world, not causing it to break down (an
effort that would be largely impossible), but rather changing some of
the paramaters…
Meanwhile, Pheles and a bunch of her
denizen friends show. Her arrival sees Johan appear again from the
Midnight Lost Child and the two lovers undergo some sort of esoteric
ascension, leaving a magic bottle behind in Yoshida’s care and
Yoshida in the care of a colorful crew of neutral-aligned Denizens
including one that’s also a VW minibuss so they can frantically speed
through this war zone of a city…
Speaking of that, the city is a war
zone. Basically every living character with a name is here for the
final battle, and just about every unnamed Denizen as well. The
powerful individuals that represent the remains of the Flame Haze
forces may not be able to stop the Denizens outright, but they sure
can kill a lot of them on their way out…
A few of the Flame Hazes not in the
city, meanwhile, have tracked down a weird bard Denizen who had
formerly been hanging around Snake Yuji’s court despite being seen as
an outsider by the Bal Masque, all the way to being brought along to
the dimensional rift. He hadn’t really done anything up to this
point save make a few cryptic remarks, but we learn his nature when
he’s cornered here: He’s the herald of the God of Guidance, a third
entity on par with Alastor and the Snake of the Festival, who can
speak in such a way that every being touched at all by the Crimson
World (Denizen, Flame Haze, maybe even informed mortal) will hear,
understand, and remember. He can’t be forced to call for the God of
Guidance to speak, but Shana’s allies hope to convince him to see if
she’ll speak in favor of Shana’s plan. He refuses, but uses
clairvoyance to take a look at the Final Battle, and lays eyes on
that magic bottle Pheles and Johan left behind. That, apparently, is
something worthy of having a God offer Guidance on…
The God of Guidance speaks: something
new has been born, an heir to both worlds, the offspring of Human and
Denizen. A miracle, and hope for a new future, so long as it
survives. Shana speaks as well; though it’s without the authority of
the God of Guidance, she reveals her hack: with the changes she made,
Denizens won’t be able to consume humans in the new world. Both the
active spell and the Snake’s backup copies have been messed up, but
that doesn’t matter to the Snake of the Festival. Once midnight
rolls around and Midnight Lost Child does its thing, the Snake of the
Festival will have unlimited power – fixing everything by brute
force would be possible.
Midnight comes. The Denizens turn
their eyes to the sky, and make their wishes known to their god.
Xanadu is formed… and Shana’s new rule is left in place. Not
because the Snake of the Festival couldn’t undo it, but because
between that being presented as an option and the miracle Pheles and
Johan achieved, the assembled Denizens wished it. The numberless
horde of monsters and mayhem, a whole convention of villains from
countless untold stories, in their moment of truth decided deep in
their hearts that if a world could exist where they’d live in harmony
with humans, not needing to eat them… it wouldn’t be so bad if they
couldn’t. That was the paradise they desired in the end. The
ultimate struggle of Shana Final wasn’t won by overwhelming force of
arms, but by winning hearts and minds. The Snake of the Festival, as
it leaves Yuji and ascends to the new world, addresses the Flame
Hazes once more, this time with real good news: all their struggles
and all their sacrifice meant something in the end.
Honestly, I think this ending is
downright beautiful. But it’s not quite the end of the end for
Shakugan no Shana, since we have to tie off some loose ends. The
miracle child, Justus, (a baby now, and not a bottle) is taken in by
Wilhelmina as the Flame Hazes decide whether to go to the new world
themselves or stay behind to keep up the fight against the hostile
denizens that don’t leave. Lamies reveals his (her, actually) true
form and gives Yuji a couple gifts as thanks: some use of an
Unrestricted Method that can restore just about anything, and another
little thing with an unknown trigger. Margery and Sydonay duke it
out one last time in a kaiju-scale fight where Sydonay finally bites
the dust, joining his beloved Hecate in death… and Yuji and Shana
have unfinished business as well, and work out their differences
blade to blade. Yuji intends to atone for all his misdeeds while
working towards the win for as long as it takes, until he can finally
move on to Xanadu and stand by Shana’s side with a clear conscience.
Shana doesn’t care for his intent to punish himself, because how can
she be happy if the man she loves isn’t with her? Eventually she
gets through to Yuji and they kiss… activating Lamies’s gift, which
turns Yuji into… um… I’m going to go with “a real boy” –
something that’s fully existent and alive without the threat of
burning out like the torch he was. The two of them head to Xanadu
and while the mortal world will largely forget them, all’s well that
ends well with the possible exception of whatever adventures they get
themselves into in the new world of Denizens and Humans living
together.
Whew. If you thought this summary was
a marathon, I implore you, try the show on for size. It’s grand and
sweeping, full on depth and weight without losing energy and fun.
Shakugan no Shana Final is, in my opinion, one of the big ones, being
just about everything you could ever hope for out of an action Anime,
primed to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of Fullmetal
Alchemist: Brotherhood. There is so much story, so much going on,
and it manages it all beautifully.
I give Shana Final an A+. You might think that would be without reservation, seeing how I’ve heaped praises on it, but back when I was just casually reviewing the occasional show on MAL, I struggled with whether to give Shana Final a 10/10 or “just” a 9. In the end, I actually went with 9, on the grounds that while Final was, itself, probably worthy of a 10, it wasn’t possible to actually get the 10/10 full experience since you need the weaker experience of Second (and to a lesser extent season 1) in order to watch and appreciate Final at all. In a sense, I knocked it down a peg by looking at it more like an awesome 10/10 final arc to a show that wasn’t a 10 the whole way through. It was just too reliant on outside material. For my rating now, I’m erring the other way because on its own, Final deserves it. This is your reward for making it through Second. Enjoy it.
Shortly after I posted that review, I
received a message telling me in the nicest and most well-worded way
possible (no sarcasm, it was actually a very nice message) that
actually, no, I had it backwards. The problem with Shana Final,
according to the user who saw fit to reach out to me, was not that it
had too much setup, but that it didn’t have enough. The message went
on to cite how this material was handled in the light novels that the
show was based on, lamenting how much was lost to accommodate the
three-season running time, including numerous points where something
in Final should have been better set-up, or given extra weight and
gravitas that the audience could understand because we’d been through
something prior that granted a different and more complete
perspective on the material.
I was… excited. Incredibly excited.
Shakugan no Shana wouldn’t be the first time that something good was
outstripped by its absolutely majestic perfected form (For me, the
most pointed version of that experience is Nausicaa of the Valley of
the Wind; the movie was good, but next to the manga? It’s like
comparing a lantern to the sun. But that’s a topic for another
day.). I went straight away to seek out the Shakugan no Shana light
novels and I found…
They haven’t been localized to English.
Well, actually, they kind of have, but the company doing the English
releases saw fit to drop Shana after two volumes when the whole
series is twenty-two (plus four short story collections) and then let
the rights lapse, so Shana is out of print and up for grabs in
English, and given its age and first go is sadly unlikely to get a
second chance. With such a tantalizing offer as an even better
version of Final, I even searched the Dark Side, but didn’t come up
with anything. It seems like if I’m going to actually experience the
Shakugan no Shana light novels, I’m going to have to learn Japanese.
And I am sorely tempted.
Until then, though, I still have the
Shakugan no Shana anime and its amazing Final chapter.