Here I go with the Card Game anime again. Don’t worry, though: unlike last week’s entry, this isn’t one that’s about playing card games, but rather an entry that takes the same route as Luck & Logic and tries to present what I guess is the story behind the card game.
To that… I know basically nothing about Z/X. I know it’s a game, and that its branded merch like sleeves and deck boxes have often been on clearance, but I don’t know the first thing about how it plays or what its cards are like. Instead, I’m going into this anime basically sight unseen.
The story jumps around a bit, but goes something like this: in the storied year of 20XX, dimensional rifts appeared and started disgorging monsters, screwing up the world in a big way. These monsters become known as the titular Z/X (for “Zillions of enemy X”, which is only a slightly less forced shortening than BETA), pronounced “Zecks”. Three years later, the city of Kobe is mostly back on its feet when we jump into random combat between a number of Z/X entities and their human compatriots.
Not much is explained, but evidently the Z/X come from differently-colored worlds, and the Red World is launching an attack on Kobe, which appears to be primarily White World territory. There’s not really a consistent theme to any of the creatures; the Reds we see include period soldiers and a giant mecha T-Rex. The whites display a few angels, but also some kind of android girl? And the defenders are joined by a pair where the Z/X is a flying crowned panther monster, which doesn’t seem to fit the “White World” color scheme but might still be aligned? At least, that’s how it comes off at the start
Anyway, we very quickly meet the humans and Z/X involved. The master of the angel girl Z/X is Asuka Tennouji, who gets a late start on the battle scene because he’s busy working as a waiter. Eventually he goes and summons his angel to join the battle, which ends up revealing a massive invasion of Red World forces.
Flash back to three weeks earlier (for multiple episodes), and we see Asuka get the mysterious “Card Device” that basically functions as a Z/X Pokeball from a strange “shrine maiden”. He ignores it at first in favor of missing that his coworker and fellow high school student has a crush on him, but then the angel girl, Fierte, pretty much literally falls into his arms, bleeding and unconscious, pursued by the girl who was a friend in the future (Ayase) and her onyx panther monster, Sieger.
In order to keep her from being killed, Asuka goes ahead and catches himself an angel, which leads to some comedy hijinx before we return to battle. Over the course of this we get that while Kobe is White World territory, Ayase and Sieger are, as their aesthetics would indicate, aligned with the Black World, and that Ayase in particular has a bitter grudge against all angel-kind compelling her to hunt them down and slaughter them. The other pair from the opening, small girl Azumi and her Gynoid/Battle Suit Girl (it’s hard to tell if she’s a bot or not), Rigel, are aligned with the Blue World, though they’re kinda-sorta defecting rather than fight in a Blue World Civil War. They make their presence known springing to Fierte’s defense when Asuka can’t, at one day on the job, figure out how to do his card-master things, forcing Rigel to aid Fierte against Sieger.
From there, Asuka does a good job of befriending Azumi. We also, in this phase, get the long and short of what the card-holders do for Z/X: they provide a lifeline of magical energy (called “resources”) without which strong Z/X can’t exist far away from the dimensional rifts. Thus, we have characters like Azumi herself, who was recruited by the Blue World authorities to act for them, in exchange for providing a cure for her fatal degenerative disease which modern Earth medicine couldn’t understand.
From this, we do get some sense of different aesthetics to the worlds: White is Angels and Blue is Tech, so presumably the others have some degree of theme to them as well. We also have ourselves the situation where the non-combat human is given an excuse to be somehow important to the battle of supernatural powerhouses. I guess Fate/Stay Night did it about the same way and it worked pretty well, but the combat in that was interesting and dynamic and took advantage of the Masters in a way that even other Fate properties sometimes don’t live up to.
Over the next episodes, we get these three on the same page as Asuka saves Ayase from an angel hit-squad. Fierte is oddly okay with this, as she has deep problems with the current angelic leadership and how they control humans in the White World almost like puppets. Since Azumi and Rigel helped out, they’re friends too. All these various dimensional refugees want to protect the peace of Kobe, even if they still also have other motivations, like Ayase’s hope to kill the angel that killed her family.
Speaking of dead families, remember that coworker of Asuka’s? The cute girl with a crush on him? Her name is Aina. While the show has kept her involved, it’s now her time to step up. It turns out the day after everyone becoming friends is her birthday. Asuka tries to arrange a party with a cake, but while everyone is out to buy ingredients, Aina is lured away by a Z/X using a balloon like it’s bloody Pennywise to bring her to an isolated tunnel. The crew busts in to save her, but this reveals their natures in the process. Aina doesn’t take it well, since a Z/X killed her parents (very bloodily, right in front of her) and so she has deep-seated trauma about the otherworldly beings. Just as it looks like Asuka might be able to patch over at least his relationship with her by delivering the finished cake from everyone, Aina is once again accosted by the thing from earlier, speaking to her hatred of the Z/X and impelling her to take up a weird evil mask. Since she was fine in the first half of episode one that we have still not caught up to, I’m going to go out on a limb and say anything bad that happens here is reversible.
Because, yeah, this is now six episodes in and we’re still sort of getting to the Red World attack. Look, I can understand the desire to do a flash forward in order to lead with some action, but to the end of the show? I don’t think it was needed, and it ends up sucking the drama out of what would otherwise have been a fair if basic sort of urban fantasy action story.
We don’t even follow straight through with Aina, getting an episode off on the backstory of the girl with the Green World samurai and the Red World Invasion Force she was aligned with, seeing them from the inside. It seems like Mikado (the human leader) is doing something to bring back the dead, like that has ever worked, while Alexander (his Z/X partner) is just an arrogant meathead interested in conquest with the power to back it up. The girl is a defense force defector, and the Samurai a Z/X who came to her willingly seeing as she was willing to shed tears for another of his kind. They join up with Mikado because his realm of Kyushu has Z/X and humans living together in harmony, and the idea of spreading that sounds better to them than the idea of doing nothing in the screwed-up world they’re in. Good, great, that’s fine, can we get back to the possessed girlfriend?
At least the answer to that is “Yes”. We follow up with her seeming largely normal, but actually being the host to a Z/X called Audium, which is apparently Hate Incarnate and can drain power from other Z/X. Contrary to expectations, this issue isn’t resolved, and we catch up with the first episode. Only this time, we see with some understanding that a stray attack from Alexander leaves Aina in a rubble-strewn war zone that triggers her PTSD… which in turn summons Audium at Kaiju-size rather than mortal.
So after that we obviously have a grand… anticlimax. Kaiju Audium fades out after no-selling a few attacks, leaving the Red World occupying forces spooked as the show transitions into doing lower-deck character episodes.
The first is for Sera, the girl who controls the T-Rex, as we get her full backstory, how she ended up where she did, and the fact that it’s the search for a missing mom that drives her. Fine material but… now?
The second is a little more germane, detailing Ayase’s past, how her whole village was slaughtered by angels and, when she meets the White World Z/X who saved her from that fate, why – a cover-up of misconduct involving lesser White World Z/X by killing everyone who might have known. Said Z/X, now an exile for defying his superiors and turning on the angels to save Ayase, is able to identify that the true target of her revenge is Gambiel, a jerk of an angel we saw earlier working for the jerk boss of the angels that Fierte had a beef with.
The third is focused on the Blue World and, oddly enough, more Rigel than Azumi. We get some interesting facts, like how Rigel and others like her seem to be at least part biological (DNA and cloning are called out) and part artificial (reformatting is also mentioned). The Blue World seems to be playing a very complex game, with one of their Administrators at one point horrifying Rigel by telling her the Blue World was responsible for Azumi’s “disease” and threatening to break her bond with Azumi, and as soon as Rigel is out of earshot rooting for her to take care of Azumi.
Apparently, Azumi is something extremely important and valuable to the Blue World, but we don’t really have time to explore that as Rigel has the more pressing matter of being hunted down by the “original” of her series, Type II. (For the record, Rigel is briefly identified as II-3). She tries to take the fight far away from Azumi in order to protect her, even knowing she’ll be beaten without resource flow from her partner, but sure enough the cavalry arrives to teach Rigel an important lesson about friendship and in so doing allow Rigel (with help) to teach Type II a lesson in pain and snipe her Master.
Just when you’re thinking this episode would be a good two or three episodes from another (more fanservicey, but stylish) show, Giant Audium appears to snare and devour the fleeing Type II. It’s probably a good thing, since the Red World forces were going to start trashing the city to draw it out otherwise (the general search pattern our main characters were helping with having been a wash), but it does seem all set to kickstart an actual endgame.
After getting knocked down briefly causes Audium to revert to Aina, letting the characters know what’s going on, she redoubles her attack and swallows up Askua and Ayase. Asuka is spat out pretty quickly, but it turns out Aina’s hatred is too weak for Audium’s taste, so it intends to switch over to Ayase-based power instead. It does this, entering an indestrictible chrysalis form while the remaining characters debate what to do. Asuka gets leave to go rescuing, just in time for Audium to disgorge a badly clothing-damaged Aina, having now taken Ayase as its core.
Audium does a really silly somersault transformation sequence, takes on its final form that still mostly hits random notes with its mouth hanging open, and starts firing off doom lasers at nothing in particular to let you know it’s serious.
The last episode gives ups a flying action scene trying to get a hit in on Audium’s mask, which after Seiger weakens Audium by being able to speak to Ayase inside it, is ultimately managed by Asuka, retrieving Ayase from the weird flesh wall mind space inside Audium and destroying the monster in the process. All’s well that ends well, right?
Well, probably not as we still have most of the episode’s run time. The jerk angel who masterminded Ayase’s backstory (Gambiel) shows up, but then gets called to task by one of the nicer archangels (Michael) as apparently the chief nice archangel, Uriel, who was missing presumed couped by the jerk archangel (Gabriel), returned off-screen to promise a harmonic existence with humans. Gambiel goes home, and Michael confronts Ayase, calling her sister and being recognized as “Sakura” for one line. Michael leaves Fierte in Asuka’s care, while in the White World Gabriel seethes at Uriel’s return but lays sequel hooks about the shards of Audium’s mask brought to him by Gambiel. That’s a lot of story to get out in just a couple minutes.
The Red World forces, meanwhile, withdraw from Kobe despite the fact that they were clearly in control a day earlier. Sera decides to go onward instead of back on her subplot. Blue World crew leaves with Green World crew since they might be able to find a medicine that could truly cure Azumi, and staying away from the Blue World Admins is a priority for Rigel right now since she doesn’t know at least one of them seems to have her back.
Aina also leaves Kobe for undisclosed reasons. Before she does she manages to confess her feelings, but the fact that “I like you” means more than friendly bounces off a dense wall of idiot. Ayase tries the same thing, but goes tsundere at the last minute, rides off on Seiger, and calls back to finish her sentence “thank you” instead.
Finally, amid some other puttering scenes, the unexplained priestess who gave Asuka his card device reappears to chat with the nice Blue World Administrator about how all the color worlds are on the path to destruction and Asuka might be instrumental to finding a sixth way that won’t be absolutely ruined. And, for some reason, the show plays us out with Fierte taking a part-time cafe job to replace Aina. The end.
So, aside from the final episode screaming “We have like five more arcs of this stuff that we’re not going to get to bring to screen”, how was Z/X Ignition?
Well, sometimes I will admit it could be hard to follow. Not so much that I was necessarily thankful for the fact that the show chooses to caption the first appearance of each and every character each episode with their name, but enough that I wasn’t really sure what we were rooting for or what kind of show we were in. At first it looked like a very typical Urban Fantasy action-battler, like a Fate or a Shakugan no Shana, but there’s really no overarching big bad to deal with and fairly few conflicts are actually resolved via violence. The Red World Invasion Force kind of goes nowhere in terms of being enemies, and Audium only really makes itself properly known in the final arc, and spends most of its screen time standing in place scream-singing. Instead we get some light (very light) mystery and a fair amount of character building where most episodes are about somebody’s personal problem rather than a threat or monster of the week. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is quite different.
Add in the fact that the first half of episode one is very weird setup for the show and probably should have been cut, and you have a piece that’s… bizarre. It feels like it was constructed from some good parts, in as much as any one of the major arcs probably could have carried a show. Ayase’s myopic devotion to hunting down angels playing against Asuka’s desire to save her from herself? Good, that could be your main drama, but it’s not here. Azumi as the MacGuffin for the Blue World, with the administrators scheming to keep her on or free her from a leash in order to bring about some grand vision for the future, addressing the question of humanity in a world ruled by tech as seen through Rigel? Good, great, that could be a show’s main drama, but it’s not. An attempted occupation of peaceful Kobe by well-intentioned extremists led by a meathead king and his advisor with a secret agenda? That could be your main drama, but it’s not.
I even have a soft spot for Aina in this. She’s the Yoshida-style “normal girl mostly locked out of the loop” but unlike the annoying Yoshida-types she is actually inhabiting the same world, and shows that she can move and operate in it. And she’s a decently personable and non-annoying character in her own right, that helps too. If given just a little more agency, the idea of her having this dual persona as the shy girlfriend and the fiend of hatred hunting down Z/X could have been some seriously good drama, especially if Audium still had a lot of Aina rather than being a screaming kaiju woman. If she’d been given the proper role of main thread, she could have turned into a really compelling anti-hero or the like. But that’s not what the show did.
You could even blend some of these… but Z/X Ignition does all of them in twelve episodes, and there’s just not enough time to do them well and get a main thread in there too. So a lot of things get left by the wayside. Blue World Civil War? The Administrator’s Plans? Background noise. White World oppression? Missing Archangels? Handled off-screen or deferred. Whatever the deal was with the priestess and the future? Just a teaser. Alexander’s world conquest? Sidelined. The whole “resurrect my dead little sister” thing Mikado had going? Just a mention, ever. And even the parts that are in here feel more like a sampler platter of what might have been.
On the whole, though, Z/X Ignition is still worth a C. In the pantheon of Card Game Anime, it’s no Selector… but it’s also markedly better than the mess that was Luck & Logic, the latter being in general the most comparable show to Z/X Ignition. It’s quite forgettable, with nothing that really stands out to distinct it from the pack of shows with similar looks and feels about being in a modern-esque setting with some kind of magic, but by the same token I can’t say there’s much of anything weighing it down. If for whatever reason you’d choose to watch this thing, I think it will entertain most folks for the 20-ish minutes per episode it runs, but it’s not going to leave any real lasting impact or impress at any point: it’s pretty much the definition of bog-standard. As such, I won’t recommend it or recommend against it; you now know what you’re getting into, take it or leave it.