Back when I reviewed Omamori Himari, I may have mentioned that there was certainly room for a show that was similar to Shakugan no Shana, but significantly steamier, with a stronger lean towards the romance and possibly even a greater helping of ecchi fanservice to go along with it. Omamori Himari was a disgustingly incompetent show, failing any attempt it made to be just that. Isuca, on the other hand, at least comes a little bit closer.
At its core, Isuca uses the same Urban Fantasy formula that Shana did: Seemingly normal boy is rescued from supernatural danger by a badass supernatural tsundere, he gets drawn into the world of magic and monsters largely due to that encounter, discovers he’s actually fit for that world even if in a role that doesn’t let him outshine his short-fused love interest… you get the idea. To give you a better idea of how Isuca lenses this fairly generic template, I’ll go into more detail than usual on the very first scene.
The show starts with main character Shinichirou Asano walking at night. He encounters a strange woman in a trench coat who flashes him, and then doffs the coat entirely to approach, during which he feels terrified and yet seems to be frozen, almost rooted to the ground. She’s laughing in a dangerous way and has something of a predatory cast to her, and he seems to know that something unnatural and evil is going on despite being unable to stop it. This is revealed in a loud manner when the woman’s naked chest explodes outward in a shower of gore, revealing insect legs and claws. Holding Shinichirou in her claws, she continues to morph into a giant centipede monster, ripping away her false human skin in a gruesome fashion, telling him only that she’ll be claiming his life “in exchange for the ultimate pleasure”.
Before the centipede can really do anything like that, though, she’s shot with an arrow. The archer, a blonde girl seen only in the distance as she snipes, takes another shot, this one finishing off the monster in a decidedly not clean and pretty destruction. At this point, the opening song kicks in, which is full of some extremely fanservicey imagery (though after actual nudity, it’s more just setting up that as not being a one-off), and you’ve started Isuca proper.
So, for one, this tells you we’re dancing on the line of what can still be considered “just” Ecchi. On the other hand, we’re also kind of addressing sexuality the way a B-movie monster flick would, melding it with gore and horror, particularly body horror. This can be really effective as a technique when used well, but can also backfire big time if you don’t know how and when to go all the way with it. I’ll just come out and say it, but Isuca manages to get it right… sometimes. The opening here is one of those times, in which the titillation makes the horror more shocking and effective. Other situations may not be as good; there’s a lot of clothing damage for the sake of clothing damage in this, and female characters are often allowed to get through things stripped but unscathed, which can kind of defang the threatening and creepy atmosphere that the show is otherwise good at crafting for situations of supernatural hostility. It’s never quite as bad about this as Omamori Himari, but that’s a bar so low that ants struggle to limbo under it.
The next day, we get some puttering around school where we find out that the blond girl is a classmate named Sakuya Shimazu, that Shinichirou is in need of a part-time job, that his chemistry teacher is a teasing troll (in an eerily familiar sort of way), and that the show really likes awkward fanservice shots even when the girls are clothed. That last fact mercifully calms down after the first couple of episodes, but episode 1 in particular really overkills it.
Of course, it turns out that the school is not safe, as the main character runs into a mauled girl and sees the hint of a monstrous beast. Sakuya shows up and demands Shinichirou help her track it down as payback for saving him, and he goes along with it until he finds a strange young woman arrow-pinned to a tree, begging for help. He of course frees her, and this displeases Sakuya who has ID’d the girl as the demon cat that is her quarry. The cat protests that she’s innocent, Shinichirou protects her, and Sakuya gets really mad – enough to explain things after putting our lead on the ground and then stomping him for good measure once she realized she offered up an upskirt angle. You know, standard tsundere reactions in the unlikable tsun phase.
Sakuya, it turns out, is the current head-of-house for a family of Specter-hunters with a long line of doing the monster-destroying dirty work. At first this sounds a lot like Omamori Himari, but the degree to which drama related to the extended family gets woven into the show ultimately means that it feels more like Kaze no Stigma, which ends up really being Isuca’s closest competition. Since I didn’t like Kaze no Stigma very much, I welcome anybody trying to take it down.
We hear from Sakuya that specters need human energy to stay manifested, so they ultimately turn to consuming humans, usually via the “drain your life in exchange for ultimate pleasure” thing that the centipede lady was on about. Eventually they track down the cat, but in doing so encounter the real problem spirit, a big lightning dog monster. The battle that follows is mostly pretty decent, though it (like most battles in this show) takes a lot of advantage of the fact that most audiences will allow time to not really pass while people are talking and hostiles are out of frame.
Eventually the big bad lightning wolf huffs and puffs and zaps all of Sakuya’s clothes off and starts to forcibly drain her energy as she writhes in agony/ecstasy from being electrocuted. The cat helps out, interrupting the beast, and contrived coincidences result in Sakuya and Shinichirou touching lips in a fall, him receiving a brief vision of her past, and her glowing and powering up in a massive way that lets her shoot down and seal away the lightning beast.
Sakuya then immediately turns on the cat, despite the fact that she helped out against the greater evil, and the cat ends up taking Shinichirou hostage. She’s not really hostile towards him, and as Sakuya laments that she doesn’t know the cat’s True Name to be able to bind her, the cat gives Shinichirou a thank-you kiss for standing up for her and, willingly or not, letting her escape. This causes Shinichirou to have a vision of the cat’s mortal life, in which he learns her true name: Tama. He identifies her by this name, which results (with Shinichirou stepping up to protect her as she still protests having never hurt anyone) in her being allowed to continued to exist, now magically bound with Shinichirou as her “master”.
So, about True Names. They’re a somewhat old magical concept used with moderate frequency and mixed results in Western fantasy, and since no two sources can quite agree on the rules regarding them, it’s probably best to spell out what they mean in Isuca before continuing.
In Isuca, a True Name is a secret name that magical entities, including both spirits and human magic-users possess. In the case of the humans, this isn’t their given birth name, but rather a name that they secretly chose for themselves as the name “most important to them”. In either case, if someone else learns the True Name of an entity that has one, they are able to invoke that True Name to bind the entity to their will, forcing the spirit or spellcaster to do their bidding.
Since we learn the True Names of multiple characters, this also means that there is a hodgepodge of ways to refer to different characters. In general, I’ll be defaulting to each character’s Use-name, what other regular people call them, but since the True Names are kind of relevant to character arcs when we find out about them, I’ll of course have to mention them in specific when the time comes.
Now that Shinichirou has a pet catgirl (who also happens to adore him – fair giving the multiple savings of her life from a royally pissed Sakuya), we get the last step of the show’s general setup: the trolling chem teacher, knowing about Shinichirou’s need for a part-time job and being in the know as to the magical world, sets it up so that he and Tama (given the use-name Tamako later on) become Sakuya’s live-in housekeepers. To be fair, Sakuya needs the help, since she lives totally alone in a giant mansion and it is an absolute pig sty.
Another incident then occurs at school, with a rat spirit (which can take the form of a swarm of rats or a rat-person Plague Doctor) attacks some girls in the locker room, shunting their minds into an illusion where they experience that spirit-draining “ultimate pleasure” even as they perceive themselves being eaten alive by rats, a brief moment that spares neither the sexuality nor the gore, even if the latter is later seen to have not actually happened.
If you’re getting worried about the whole “every enemy fights like a succubus/incubus” deal, I guess the writers also realized that it would get pretty old if every monster had to get to the mind rape as its finishing move, because this is actually the last time we see it.
While chasing the rat monster, Tamako starts to fade away – since she’s never attacked a human since manifesting, she’s running out of juice, and while Shinichirou says that she can have a taste of him if that keeps her in this world, Sakuya both points out that wouldn’t be sustainable and suggests the alternate method of having her consume hostile spirits. Given that she’s a cat and the episode enemy is a rat, I guess that’s fairly natural.
However, because Sakuya is phobic of rats and can’t fight the swarm properly, Tamako ends up being needed in fighting shape to take it on, resulting in her powering up with a big kiss with Shinichirou. She wins pretty handily after that, and in the aftermath it turns out that while Shinichirou should have taken months to recover from the amount of energy Tamako needed to take, he’s fine in a few hours. Combined with the effect the accidental kiss had on Sakuya, we reach the conclusion that he’s some kind of special that lets him act as a battery of spirit energy. Again, this does take a lot of notes from Shakugan no Shana.
We also get a glimpse of an evil-seeming blonde young woman, just to give us the idea that the main villain of the show is actually in the show before we introduce her.
The trolling chem teacher also calls in a new character, one Suseri Shimazu, who to an extent introduces us to more of what Isuca is really about. Suseri is Sakuya’s cousin (though they call each other sisters)… and her rival for leadership of the Shimazu family. You see, it turns out that Sakyua is only a provisional head of household, presumably due to the notable absence of her parents, and there are a number of forces within the extended family who would prefer that, when the two come of age and a final decision is made by their grandmother (who is not head for reasons that are unclear until the last episode or possibly not even then) as to which will lead the Shimazu going forward, the pair are in a competition that neither can tolerate the idea of losing. The family drama of the Shimazu, one way or another, informs every conflict that will happen for the rest of this show.
As for Suseri herself, she’s a bit of an oddball character. If you took Wilhelmina Carmel’s flat affect (including the fact that she has plenty of emotions right underneath) and welded it to Meiya Mitsurugi’s staggering lack of comprehension of how ordinary people operate, you would come up with Suseri Shimazu. She’s not mean or even actually cold, but she’s very laconic and blunt and has a nature where you’re not sure sometimes whether you should laugh at how little she ‘gets it’ or pity the incredibly deprived life she’s led training to be head of the family. The show ultimately leans more towards the latter, giving her isolation a real pathos, but it does go ahead and milk the fact that she doesn’t “human” very well for a little comedy in the meantime.
The main reason Suseri is showing herself is that she’s been let in on the potential value that Shinichirou represents. Unlike Sakuya, she’s not an archer, she’s more of a summoner-type mage which means her fighting style burns a lot more spiritual energy, and having a friendly battery on her side could help her prove herself the better demon hunter and therefore candidate for leadership.
This being Isuca, her introduction gets a little steamier – Shinichirou takes a bath and Suseri (by her words, on the advice of the trolling chem teacher) arrives to “wash his back” to the tune of a good rubdown with soapy boobs, and she’s not taking no for an answer. About when she asks him to turn around so she can do his front as well, the stimulation and shame max out and our MC passes out. This oddly enough goes a long way to establishing her “doesn’t get it” trait since there’s some degree of indication that she doesn’t see the sexual connotations and is just blindly following what the troll suggested she do. More than that, though, it’s a nice cop-out to bring us to our next scene, in which Shinichirou comes to (dressed, courtesy of Suseri and that much to his shame) in Suseri’s limo, driving with her away from Sakuya’s house. They talk a little, but are then intercepted by a spirit that takes the car to a warped dimension.
There, they fight a bunch of possessed demon cars, which Suseri’s driver really does a number on with a shotgun, and then the boss demon-possessed car, which is our first enemy to not go for the slow, rapey attack when it simply chomps said driver, with a lot of blood spatter because demon cars are, evidently, messy eaters. Suseri’s basic Kamaitachi summon can’t really do damage to a monster of this things magic level that’s also made of steel, so in the face of imminent and bloody death, she requests that Shinichirou kiss her in order to let her power up and take out the enemy.
And this is a moment that I’m willing to bring the review to a halt to talk about. Not just because it brings the entire episode of Isuca to a halt, but because it is something that’s hardly unique to Isuca and needs to be called out: Shinichirou hesitates, dithers, and even nearly refuses to give Suseri a kiss in the face of that being the alternative to death and for non-romantic reasons. I get it – a normal person in a normal situation would see a kiss as a big deal, so there’s this incentive to go for the long comedy routine where we have stuttering objections, false starts, a request for Suseri to close her eyes to make it less awkward, and so on. It might make Shinichirou seem more normal and relatable if he’s not gung-ho about matters… if the magnitude of the problem he’s getting caught on wasn’t so utterly outclassed by the magnitude of the problem that should be consuming his thoughts.
In the end, we waste a good deal of time with a fairly lame comedy routine, coming to the result that they don’t manage to get it on before the situation changes with the arrival of Sakuya, when this whole thing could have flowed a lot better if Sakuya made her entrance a beat or two after Suseri’s request, and would seem a lot less stupid for it.
So, problem number one is the fairly basic “Kiss or death?” issue, but this is the most frequently repeated one so it deserves to be gone over. Again, hesitation or even refusal would be understandable in another environment, but here it just makes Shinichirou look like an idiot. Problem number two, demon car. I mentioned that we got some “turn based problems” in the fight with the lightning beast, but this is one of two other places where that issue is really pronounced. It’s right there and pretty deadly, but we just go through this whole routine like we have all the time in the world. Problem three, this comes after Suseri, in the nude, joined Shinichirou in the bath, rubbed him down with her boobs to the point where the arousal was too much for him, and then no doubt had to get quite familiar with his body to dry him off, dress him nicely, and haul him to her car. Kid, you are well past the point of worrying about the propriety of a kiss. And, lastly, the sequence makes Suseri look like an idiot because for all that she’s a ruthless combat mage with no understanding of normal people mores, she somehow never thinks to just snog him while he’s dithering. I strongly recommend against that approach in anything resembling real life but I think within the context of the fiction of Isuca, Suseri could be forgiven for ignoring consent for a kiss like she did for the bath scene and going for it despite protest.
Anyway, Sakuya shows up, shoots the demon car, meets up with everybody, and then it does a “not quite dead” routine, chasing everyone into Suseri’s limo and then splitting in half to sandwich and begin to crush said limo with everyone inside. As the folks are wedged into the limo, Shinichirou has no mouth-to-mouth access with Suseri, but is face to face with Sakuya, which after a shorter dithering routine while being compacted, gets her the powerup kiss that destroys the demon possessed car for good and frees everybody. Again Shinichirou gets a flash of Sakuya’s past, and again we’re shown a hint of some blonde lady who seems to be evil and behind things.
We get something of a breather episode after that where (in addition to some teen drama puttering around as Suseri transfers into school) what’s taken to be a samurai ghost is killing people, so team Shimazu is on the hunt for it. Naturally, this ends up with Shinichirou and Sakuya facing the creature. After dithering over the idea of a power-up kiss we actually get to skip it, as the monster is revealed to be a golem, “Emeth” engraved on the inside of its helmet, rather than a ghost, which means the pair are able to tag team and defeat it by knocking its block off and then scratching out that first E before it recovers. Really, classic.
The fact that it was a golem means, however, that there’s a human spellcaster behind the mayhem rather than “natural” spirit breaches, and said caster, the blonde woman who keeps being hinted at, also left an extra present, as when Sakuya picks up the golem’s sword, it turns out to be a cursed possessed ghost sword. After falling for the kind of dumb trap, Sakuya ends up, in no particular order, clothing damaged down to her panties for no particular reason and driven to make berserk attacks against her allies. Eventually, Shinichirou, up close, manages to glimpse the haunted sword’s true name and invoke it to bring the thing under control. All is well that ends well, except nothing was done about the blonde girl.
The next episode sees us get an answer for what kind of special Shinichirou is. Apparently his massive spiritual energy and odd ability to get glimpses of True Names both come from the “Eye of Truth”, a once-a-generation-if-that rare special ability, of which the battery status is just a handy rider to being able to casually identify True Names. It manifests a little differently in all very few bearers, and in Shinichirou’s case it seems that a kiss would be the easiest way for him to get that True Name insight.
This makes Sakuya freak out and start avoiding the hell out of Shinichirou, since she doesn’t want to risk her True Name becoming known. While they’re on the rocks thanks to that, there’s also work being done around the school, since it seems like the number of spirit breaches is decidedly unnatural. All the Shimazu-aligned extras are fairly neatly dealt with by being web wrapped and yanked offscreen behind their oblivious compatriots or pulled into walls where the limbs of the victims give out (with plenty of blood) before they can be pulled free. Eventually this nonsense catches up to Sakuya and Shinichirou on the roof, where they come face to face with the evil blonde lady and her Western-style magic. She baits Sakuya into attacking her wall spirit over some hostages, only for it to be revealed that killing the monster just gruesomely merges them with the once-again-normal concrete instead of freeing them, so she starts to stagger and shut down on realizing that she just killed some of her friends.
The rooftop conflict is a push overall though, which leads to Sakuya and team being baited to the gym where their antagonist has more hostages, these cocooned in webbing. Since no one has peripheral vision in this show, the obvious trap once again gets everybody without a hitch, leading the blonde mage gloating about how she’s going to destroy the Shimazu and make Sakuya suffer while her pet Jorogumo torments Sakuya (stripped to her panties, naturally) and Shinichirou, who were of course standing close enough together to get wrapped in one web.
This leads to a scene that would have played better without the botched “oh no, a kiss” scene earlier, where Shinichirou recognizes that Sakuya could use a power-up and they’re all going to die without it, while Sakuya is still terrified of the prospect. Unlike that earlier scene, though, this isn’t being played for extremely poorly timed laughs, but rather fully for drama, suggesting that the secrecy of her true name might be something that Sakuya ultimately values more than her life.
Eventually, the kiss does go through, and we get a less fragmentary glimpse of Sakuya’s past. It shows that as a little kid she was extremely sick, and many members of her family already hated her for having “tainted blood”. Her father (face not shown), however, still cared for her, and gave her a plushie he said would make her feel better, a little crooked-beaked penguin doll she still has and treasures and the name of which she’s taken as her own True Name: Isuca. With the power transfer and an invocation of this true name, Sakuya quite handily mops the floor with the spider, but there’s the distinct feeling that while she won the battle, she might have lost the war, so to speak.
This is addressed more going forward, as it seems that it’s normally the rule of the Shimazu that any family member whose True Name becomes known is to be exiled, since that means that outside parties can compel that person’s actions (in this case, Shinichirou could command Sakuya, and she’d be unable to refuse). However, the Grandma matriarch seems more content to see where this all goes, much to the chagrin of Suseri’s mother.
Oddly enough, Suseri still seems quite interested in Shinichirou, and almost more oddly Shinichirou seems quite attached to Sakuya. This isn’t something I’ve largely addressed, but up until this episode, Sakuya and Shinichirou have had extremely little chemistry. I called her a tsundere, and that is the archetype she ultimately sorts out into, but for the first half of the show it’s almost 100% tsun, with Sakuya showing little if any sweetness to Shinichirou. It’s totally unclear what, if anything he sees in her or why he would favor her over Suseri except possibly a slight professional loyalty, which doesn’t translate well to interpersonal affection. Similarly, it’s hard to believe up until this episode that Sakuya has any care for Shinichirou as a person. Suseri is transparent about the fact that he’s an asset to her (though it becomes, oddly enough, more quickly evident for flat affect Suseri that her interest isn’t totally professional than for emotional Sakuya), but Sakuya hardly seems to see him as even that much, and while genre conventions insist that her shrill attitude is covering for or will morph into actual affection, it’s been very delayed in its arrival.
That, at least, changes after Shinichirou learns her True Name – or, more importantly, after he learns more about her past. The Shimazu apparently normally marry within the clan, but Sakuya’s father was an outsider, a western mage who it’s implied her mother married primarily for love. This saw her parents, despite being at the top of the food chain, shunned and scorned by the rest of the family. The conservative wing of the Shimazu family always hated her father, and they took it out on Sakuya and her mother as well. Her parents then went missing on the hunt, presumed dead but maybe just lost, leaving Sakuya alone, totally isolated for most of her life, with only her own dedication driving her forward as it became forbidden among the family to even acknowledge that her parents existed. She wants to gain full leadership over the Shimazu so she can force the extended family who scorned her and made her immediate family’s lives hell acknowledge her, and so she can find the truth of what happened to her parents.
This is more of what I meant when I said this show was fairly similar to Kaze no Stigma. Both shows are concerned with the high families of magic users and star an individual who, while initially outcast from their family to some degree, now has the possibility to have great influence on said family, having to balance the positive bonds with their relatives against the bitterness and spite that their mistreatment has left them with. Except where Kaze no Stigma was a fairly juvenile revenge fantasy, the most interesting parts of which shamefully took place off screen, the struggle in Isuca is one that’s more deeply conflicted and where we’re seeing the bit that we actually want to see. Sakuya has more on the line, because neither she nor her hopes for the future are totally self-sufficient, meaning that she’s still tied to her family even as much as she might resent them, and the outcome of her struggle has yet to be determined
This comes out in part thanks to the trolly chemistry teacher being helpful and cluing Shinichirou into what he’s done, and in part through the second half of the episode, where Sakuya once again falls for a really stupid trap, opening a strange package and just going ahead and inspecting the weird ancient mirror that was shipped to her from an unknown sender, resulting in her and Shinichirou (who was standing nearby) being sucked into the mirror.
In the mirror space, Sakuya is confronted with reflections of her darkest thoughts. The spirit of the mirror, appearing as her doppelganger, confronts her with all her hatred and resentment, trying to make her give in to cruelty and despair. Via some sort of astral projection, the blonde western mage lady also appears, and appeals to that same dark side in Sakuya, revealing that she was also wronged (even killed, she says, suggesting that she’s not conventionally mortal) by the Shimazu family, insisting that they’re not so different and that the two of them should work together to take revenge on the clan that is the source of all their woes. Sakuya’s will is beaten down through a series of these encounters, and her attempts to defy what might be lurking inside herself become weaker and more desperate, turning from resolute anger to fear.
As she’s about to break, Shinichirou manages to give her a top-notch friendship speech, breaking through the isolation and alienation she feels by telling her that she’s not alone any more, that she has people who care about her, and that he’ll help her find her parents no matter what else happens to her. This gives Sakuya the will to power through, defeat the doppelganger, and brush off the villain’s recruitment attempt. They even exit the mirror with her clothing intact for once. This sequence has both good emotions and story and some pretty decent action as Sakuya takes on her literal mirror match. If the entire show had been on this level, it would have been significantly better than what we actually got.
And, while nothing else goes for quite the high notes we get here, the sequence does, as I mention before, transition Sakyua from being just a shrill shrieker to being more of a classic tsundere. She still shouts a lot, and tends to hide her softer moments under a prickly shell, but you can really tell that, at this point, that’s what’s going on. Fairly abruptly, Sakuya and Shinichirou go from having no chemistry to speak of to having actually surprisingly good chemistry for the rest of the show. It’s jut a pity that over half of the show has already elapsed.
We catch up with our face villain as she meets with another villain who I will simply refer to as Father. I do this because the character is never named, our current mage lady refers to him as her father, and while he wears a mask in all of his appearances, few though they are, it’s easy to believe from the rest of his design and western alchemical theme that an Elric’s face is underneath said mask.
Father is also an extremely obvious villain in that by the time he’s uttered one line, saying that blonde lady villain (who I haven’t given a punchy name to because we’ll get one for her) is still not permitted to kill Sakuya, it’s fairly easy to guess what his story is: this is Sakuya’s father, who was scorned and nearly killed by the Shimazu, and who is out for the blood of the orthodox family because he has suffered and his wife, Sakuya’s mom, is presumably actually dead in whatever incident – incited by Shimazu forces – caused the two of them to “disappear”. I give even odds that he’s also trying to resurrect said dead wife. This is never fully confirmed in the run of Isuca, in large part because Isuca isn’t a complete story and he stays in the shadows and background for the entire act that is put to the screen, but every further detail we go get lines up with this interpretation.
This is one of the cases where being savvy to genre conventions or storytelling techniques changes how you relate to a story. If you’re looking for it and applying critical knowledge, it’s clear that there’s really only one and a half ways they could go with Father – either he’s Sakuya’s dad or he’s a really good pretender to the title, in character, and still somehow related. Not much else would really make sense. However, I imagine a lot of viewers who aren’t me or someone like me would be left with deep questions regarding this villain being so enigmatic, since he only gets a couple lines and a couple scenes in the entire show, none of which actually explain his presence or his motivation. There’s a huge difference in how you’re going to approach Father based on whether you’re sticking to the “text” or reading between the lines.
In other news, Shinichirou gets geared up to actually help fight these constant attacks, being granted that possessed sword he uttered the True Name of in the earlier episode. Since he named it, he’s able to control it, and it’s a powerful magic weapon that should let him hold his own against the kind of foes Team Shimazu (at this point consisting of Shinichirou, Sakuya, Suseri, Suseri’s healer assistant, Tamako, and sometimes the chem teacher) is facing.
Sure enough, an opportunity comes to test that out when there’s a spirit attack on a subway. The passengers are heavily drained but alive, and then the team runs into what did it, a smoke spirit with a tragically lame design that exposes their general weakness of not being able to reliably deal damage to an incorporeal enemy. Even though there are a few better ways I can think of on the field, Shinichirou ultimately makes a dash for the emergency vent of the subway (you know, that protects it from mundane smoke), slashing the smoke monster out of the way with his sword, which doesn’t damage it but does disperse it momentarily. He manages to get the button, but not before getting caught by the smoke, leaving Sakuya do do the rescue breathing of useless fanservice CPR while the healer does, presumably, real work getting Shinichirou breathing again and Suseri heads topside to finish off the vented smoke spirit.
Suseri encounters the smoke and takes it down fairly trivially with her Kamaitachi (which didn’t work underground for reasons), but of course our blonde foe is there to make a mess of things. She overpowers Suseri fairly easily, meaning that Suseri is a hostage (and topless) by the time Sakuya, a revived Shinichirou, and the rest catch up.
Here there’s a brief argument between Sakuya and the villain, in which the villain finally lets us in on the name that she clarifies was given to her by Father – Isuca, the same name as Sakuya’s True Name. This makes Sakuya go berserk, and she puts enough mystic power into a shot to smash through Isuca’s shields and take her arm off, at the cost of nearly killing herself and immediately passing out in the process. Isuca flees, and everybody else recovers Sakuya (and Suseri, who is fine)
The next episode starts with getting Sakuya back on her feet in a fully acceptable version of the bit I complained about earlier where Shinichirou asks for a little privacy to restore the unconscious Sakuya’s spirit energy. Note that here it’s important but not urgent, and he’s not objecting to doing it just to being watched when that’s not necessary. However, the real meat of the episode all belongs to Suseri. This is both because Sakuya still isn’t fighting fit, and because Suseri has a big task ahead of her.
For one, we see Suseri get permission from grandma Shimazu to perform some sort of special ritual, which is a big deal, while also standing up somewhat for Sakuya despite the antipathy we’d previously seen between them. She ends up spending an afternoon after school with Shinichirou, during which we see more of how isolated Suseri has been – she doesn’t know what a date is, or what soft serve is. She’s never shopped for or even picked out her own clothes, and clearly feels sad that she hasn’t been allowed to live the normal life that an afternoon with her crush (who her sister-cousin-rival has dibs on) shows her a glimpse of. She then goes off to the dangerous ritual of attempting to subdue the sealed lightning beast from Episode 1 and make it a new summon for her, and this first attempt results in her being dragged back to Sakuya’s manor pretty badly hurt.
While Suseri is recovering, we also see more of her backstory, largely focused on how her scheming mother has been pushing her since she was an extremely small child to claim the leadership of the Shimazu from Sakuya. Her entire existence was training, competition, and never being good enough for her shrill, horrible, conniving mother. The experience is why she’s got no sense of normalcy, and also why she has a deep-seated envy of Sakuya, who was always held up as the mark to beat, and always by her mom’s methods. For instance, we see that Suseri trained with a bow when she was little, but that when she didn’t immediately measure up to Sakuya, her mother immediately declared that Suseri had “no talent” for archery and pushed her into hellish, painful training in magic instead. At no point do we see any indication that Suseri has ever been loved or shown kindness, rather than being treated as a pawn in her mother’s game of family authority chess.
For the second attempt against the lightning beast, which Suseri is determined to take rather than give up because she needs more power to feel confident standing on her own and rising to the top for herself rather than as her mom’s puppet, Shinichirou offers to help. He won’t be allowed to do all that much, but since he’s not a mage or member of the family, he can at least act as something of a bodyguard. The battle is fairly fierce, and even when Suseri tells Shinichirou to save himself, he ends up taking a hit for her instead, knocking him out. Suseri (for all the reasons) steals a kiss from the unconscious Shinichirou, powering her up and giving the audience a glimpse of Suseri’s True Name. Here we see her learn from her mother that a True Name represents what you value most, or even what you want to become, and the (unconscious, so it doesn’t matter from a mystic perspective and doesn’t leave him knowing anything) Shinichirou mutters the True Name that Suseri took up that day: Sakuya.
So, just to be clear, in the show named Isuca our female lead is Sakuya Shimazu, who has the true name of Isuca. Our main villain, who may be Sakuya’s sister or half-sister, is named Isuca, and Sakuya’s cousin who is referred to as her sister is Suseri Shimazu, but has the true name of Sakuya.
Empowered, Suseri manages to land a good hit on the lightning beast, which is enough to convince it to hear her out despite the fact she had help. Thus, she pulls it into contract as her familiar with the interesting proposal that the arrangement only last for the next three years, the time until both Suseri and Sakuya are of age and the leadership of the Shimazu clan is decided. The lightning beast (which ultimately comes to be granted the use-name of Shiro) is amused by this, and agrees to serve Suseri.
That resolved, we’re ready to jump into the climax. Sakuya is still benched for reasons of nearly killed herself and messed up her bow so it would probably happen again, and she tries to bench Shinichirou as well, at first going for the tsundere harshness but ultimately admitting that she’s afraid he’d get hurt or killed. On the side of team villain, Isuca gets her arm regenerated by Father, and swears vengeance for that indignity. This seems to begin as all the important magical sites around the city, which keep the barrier between worlds strong, are being tipped over, leaving the city defenseless on a larger scale. At the last place standing, Isuca clashes briefly with the heroes, giving Shinichirou something of a love bite on her way out, which is weirdly focused on so you have to know she cursed or infected him or something.
The dire situation causes Sakuya and Suseri’s grandmother to come out. She looks like a grade school girl, but she does seem to have magical wisdom and less of a stick up her rear than most of the orthodox members of the family, greeting Shinichriou nicely (if in a slightly trolling way), repairing Sakuya’s magic bow with the dire warning that unsealing it again could cost Sakuya her life, and then taking a little walk to have a chat with Shinichirou.
Granny briefly mentions that Shinichirou reminds her of Sakuya’s father and seems to approve of this, but before the talk can go much farther, Isuca bursts out of Shinichirou’s chest and impales granny to death faster than you can ask what the hell is going on, because apparently falling for obvious traps runs in the family.
As Isuca (identified as a homunculus, thanks to her arm being regenerated) runs off to mug at everyone and summon a giant monster snake that wouldn’t be able to enter the mortal world if not for all those protective magic sites being taken out, it turns out that she’s not terribly bright either, and forgot to check before pulling her assassination whether or not her assassination target was mortal: Granny is some kind of spirit possessing a magical doll body, and can just have another made, but Isuca and her giant snake are still set up to be trouble.
For the grand climax, Sakuya battles Isuca while everyone else tries to deal with the giant snake. Shinichirou ultimately peels off from the snake-fighting team to go help Sakuya (after giving Tamako a little pick-me-up so she can go all out), and we get the two battles running in parallel. On the snake side, the thing sheds its skin, turning a slightly different black (first form gray, second form jet black, third form swirly oil black) and gaining new resistances and abilities with each stage transition, like any good RPG boss coded to drive you up a wall. Tamako, Susueri plus Shiro, Chemistry Teacher, and Suseri’s helper put up a good fight that is at least mostly competent. Eventually, they manage to get through all its health bars, at the cost of a lot of “how could this be?!” reactions and most of Tamako’s outfit. Surprisingly, the snake fighting action isn’t terrible, but it’s pretty standard.
The battle between Isuca and Sakuya (and later Shinichirou) is a little different. One of the problems this show has is that Sakuya’s fighting is very static and formulaic. She takes a proper archery stance, calls out her attack by name, and then fires the magic arrow that does the thing. She almost always follows the same pattern of magic arrows as well: one strong shot, followed by a shot that splits into three. If she’s feeling frisky she follows that up with a shot that rains blue magic arrows down on the battlefield, which can itself be followed by the single golden magic arrow with the long invocation if it’s time for the battle to end. Part of the reason why the mirror match was decent as a fight is that even though Sakuya followed the same script for her attack order, she at least dodged around and did some cool stuff while doing it. Suseri suffered a little from this as well, clearly having only two summons to start out with, but she’s introduced later and fewer combat scenes hinge around her. Plus, once she gets Shiro she has an extra combatant under her command with a more varied move set.
However, while that’s still a problem here, formulaic attack patterns being punctuated by talking, the bigger problem is that the talking isn’t that good. Isuca rants and raves about how much she hates the Shimazu and how she wants Sakuya to suffer and die, but the only thing of value she actually says during the whole fairly long exchange is that she wasn’t supposed to hurt Sakuya or Shinichirou, but is inclined to go against Father’s orders and try to kill them anyway. She has a lot of opportunities to talk more about her motives, where she comes from, how she was supposedly killed by the Shimazu before, or any of that, but passes it up in favor of more generic mugging about how she evil she is and how much she wants everyone to suffer. The villainous mugging gets particularly grating when it’s obvious sour grapes, with her celebrating the surprising survival of her foes because she “would be disappointed if they died so easily” or some nonsense like that.
Isuca talks a lot, really loves the sound of her own voice, but most of the time both in this episode and throughout the show up to now, she has very little to say that’s actually worth hearing. What’s more, for all her evil speeches, she does tend to miss opportunities to hurt or kill her foes rather than hamming it up. She’d be a much more threatening villain if chewing the scenery didn’t rank higher on her priorities list than harming her foes.
Shinichirou shows up, saving Sakuya while she’s on the ropes, and then gets knocked, with her, into a building that the blast also sets on fire. In the middle of the raging inferno… Sakuya and Shinichirou talk about their feelings. On one side, I mentioned they got chemistry after the mirror incident? This is a pretty good talk about their feelings, how they want to support each other, and how they’re going to work together going forward. It’s got at least a little heartfelt drama and even some sweetness to it, and leaves them well ready to face the world. On the other hand, it’s also a far, far worse case of “talking is a free action” syndrome than any of the others I’ve pointed out in the show so far. When the characters talk while fighting a big monster, the big monster is usually kept out of frame, so it’s not quite so immediately apparent that there’s a mortal peril waiting patiently for everyone to say what they want to say. Here, not only is the talk longer than most of those and focused on very different emotions than the “holy moley we’ve got to do something about this thing we’re talking about!” that most of the combat talks are like… but the fire all around them is in the frame all the time! The room just burns merrily as they talk about their problems, do their relationship upgrade embrace, and so on seemingly ignorant to the fact that they should be roasting alive and/or choking on smoke. Burning buildings are no joke.
In any case, they stride out of the inferno to the tune of more sour grapes from Isuca, only now Sakuya is powered up and quite able to blow her away, hitting Isuca with several attacks, including the finishing move and a new fancy combo attack with Shinichirou, which ultimately reduces her to just a doll head faintly grousing about how the Shimazu clan killed her again before finally going totally inert.
After that, Father teleports in, says nothing important, nabs the head, and vanishes, sticking around for just long enough for Sakuya to spot that, while he’s masked, he’s also wearing a ring that suggests he might be her long-lost father. Like we didn’t guess that some time ago.
We then get a brief denouement where Sakuya and Shinichirou seem to be navigating being more of an item, Sakuya muses that she can’t really know if the mystery man was her father or not, and we see, at the end, Father having recreated Isuca, with dozens of backups waiting in the wings to ensure that his homunculus daughter isn’t going to be out of anyone’s hair for very long.
Thus ends Isuca. How does it fare? Well, on one hand, it absolutely crushes its closest competition.
For being a much more racy take on the Urban Fantasy Formula, Omamori Himari can’t hold a candle to Isuca. Isuca has better fanservice, better used fanservice, a better controlled tone, better comedy when it goes funny, and worlds better action and story. Compare the water dragon “healing” the lead in Omamori Himari with Suseri washing Shinichirou’s back in Isuca: these are scenes with almost identical “jokes” and almost identical fanservice, but the one here plays much better because there’s non-cardboard character included. Omamori Himari gets crushed in the comparison even where it tried the most, so areas where its efforts were lesser (not that any effort made by that show was good) see it fall even farther behind.
For a story about an outcast from a family of magic users trying to find their place in a threatening urban fantasy world, driven by strife with their relatives, Isuca crushes Kaze no Stigma. Kazuma was the kind of powerful character an angsty teenager writes, given all the advantages, and off screen at that, just so he can thumb his nose at the people who wronged him the way the target audience wishes they could thumb their noses at the people they perceive as wronging them. Sakuya and Suseri are what you get when you have actual writers with actual skill at building character, dimensional individuals with strong desires who are having trouble achieving what they want, creating the conflict that’s the core to most traditional storytelling. They’re not great characters, but they are serviceable characters with at least a little charm. And the conflict, which is rather scattered in Kaze no Stigma, is focused here in Isuca on the stuff that’s actually interesting: the mage family and exactly how their misdeeds may be coming back to bite them. Once again, Isuca beats its competition where its competition was best, meaning that on everything else (except maybe the action choreography, which isn’t a highlight of Isuca), it’s ahead as well.
On the other hand, while I feel that Omamori Himari and Kaze no Stigma are natural comparisons, that is, to an extent, picking on some of the weakest shows that I’ve reviewed. Sure, Isuca beats them with one hand tied behind its back (perhaps in the form of being only ten episodes), but that’s not exactly an achievement. You’d have to be trying to be worse than Omamori Himari, and while Kaze no Stigma had enough redeeming material to be well ahead of that, it’s still not tough to stand as better constructed.
When compared instead against the greater pantheons of Urban Fantasy Anime and Anime in general, Isuca loses a lot of its luster. The action has a lot of problems – now and then something pretty cool to watch will happen, but at other times it has all the flow of turn-based battle in a pen and paper RPG where half the table has been drinking while gaming and is steadily losing the plot. The story is good, but it’s a good setup. The end of the last episode does at least feel like an act end, with Isuca being soundly defeated (for now) and Shinichirou and Sakuya now being a couple (or at least something more like one), but we never delve into Father, where he came from, how he’s alive, what he wants, or why he’s come out of the woodwork to exact his revenge now. The characters are alright, but they take a long time to really come into their own, with the exception of Tamako. The mage family drama works, but we unfortunately only get to delve so far into it in the limited time we’re allowed. The monsters are fairly creative and often gruesome in cases, but in other cases like the smoke monster and giant snake, there are pretty lame or at least standard offerings in there as well. The show doesn’t quite fall prey to as many annoying running jokes as some titles, but there are still bits that wear out their welcome.
And, compared to an actual strong show in the genre, like Shakugan no Shana, Isuca has pretty much nothing going for it. It’s a more human story of revenge and mistreatment than Shana, but I somehow don’t think it has that niche entirely cornered either, and Shana can still weirdly crush Isuca point to point, just because Shana delves into so many different experiences between its high-flying magical stuff, its school-based romance, and the melancholy reality of Torches and Flame Hazes.
All in all, Isuca rates a C-. It is, when you get down to it, a more watchable show than some – enough that it deserves a passing grade if only that. Would I actually recommend watching it? Not really, but you could do worse. And there is one condition which I would actually suggest, to which I can actually give Isuca some sort of a nod: if you’re going to watch it, hunt out the uncensored version.
The broadcast version of Isuca is, given all the nudity in this show, censored to hell. There are black clouds (and occasionally white steam) everywhere, making sure nothing explicit is actually shown despite being on bold display. Tragically, this also gets some of the gore moments as well. When the centipede monster’s chest bursts open, revealing her hideous nature or when Isuca’s arm gets torn off by Sakuya’s arrow, there’s serious work put into the gruesome side of the effect, but the censored version doesn’t let you see it clearly. The home video version, on the other hand, doesn’t have that problem: nipples and mangled limbs alike are 100% on display.
Normally, I’m of the opinion that this kind of censoring can’t “kill” a show. If it’s not worth watching when you cover the boobs, it probably wasn’t worth watching in the first place. This holds true for Isuca – it claws on to the bottom edge of C- by its characters and storyline, not by the existence of a version where you get to see tits. So why do I bring that up? Because the uncensored version is what makes Isuca different and unique. Pretty much every other Urban Fantasy story I can think of that is at all comparable to Isuca exists in what could be generously called a PG-13 sort of band. Maybe some of them don’t precisely adhere to the MPAA’s standards (Omamori Himari would probably be too suggestive, for one), but that’s clearly the look and feel they’re angling for. Even the dark ones aren’t interested in breaching too far past that, or the hotter ones in slipping into erotic territory.
Isuca, by comparison, sees itself as a hard R sort of affair, and while that doesn’t make it any better in abstract, it does make the show a hair more unique, and gives it something that sets it apart from the pack. If you’re going to sit down and watch Isuca, I feel like you owe it to yourself to watch it in the one form that has something, anything, however pointless or prurient, that’s different and special. Otherwise why wouldn’t you just watch something else?