One of the things I love about anime is that, despite having it’s own hellishly overused setups, the medium in general doesn’t seem to be afraid to turn out the occasional piece with an absolutely insane concept. Nothing is too specific or too stupid… and with creativity and effort, a lot of studios can make it work. We’ve seen shows where clothing is an evil alien plot, a show where teenagers body swap via kiss, a show where Earth is overrun by gribbly black monsters that can only be fought by incarnate musical scores, a show that somehow manages twelve episodes of a kidnapped princess trying to get better sleep, and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.
But just because way more crazy ideas do work than some folks would expect doesn’t mean that they all work; that creativity and effort are key; throwing some bland idiot into a fantasy universe with a modern smartphone adapted to the setting? That didn’t pan out. Super-teenagers who power up by getting horny to fight lust-eating bug monsters? About as awkward as it sounds and somehow even less amusing. Stuffing a tecnophobe’s brain into a weird black-box ultratech device, giving him super hacking powers? Worst. Anime. Ever. And I don’t think I can even summarize half the madness that went into Penguindrum, but suffice to say it didn’t stick the landing in my eyes.
What I’m getting at here is that Hand Shakers – a show that forces our lead pair to have mystical death battles while also forcing them to continuously hold hands – was not, I repeat not, dead on arrival. No, Hand Shakers was murdered. Let’s try to find the culprit, shall we?
The most obvious injury is the blunt force trauma of blending classical animation, conspicuous CGI, ultra-detailed rotoscope environments, and oddly time-lapse skies. There constant motion of weird tracking shots and an evident unhealthy interest in bouncing boobs seem to be related to delivering the injury, but some damage was certainly inflicted with a fish-eye lens. However, this visual damage is not necessarily fatal; Coppelion didn’t have to deal with literally all of that, but it goes a long way towards showing that these injuries were survivable. No, to find the true culprit, we have to go deeper.
… Okay, that’s enough mock detective work out of me, let’s get on with the show.
It’s actually hard to place where we begin, because the intro is told out of order and disjointed. We get some CGI imagery with a voice-over from our main character about how he doesn’t understand anything about this world of constant battle, in which the CGI assails us.
Then we cut to some punk dude with the power of chains, in a strange and colorful otherworld, both attacking our leads (both the guy who was talking in the voice over and a weird little girl with him, who have the power of gears) and verbally and physically abusing his partner, presumably so we can admire said partner’s heaving breasts accentuated by chains writhing around her.
Then we cut to our male lead at school, fixing some sort of mechanical device (an MP3 player, so I don’t know where half those parts on the table came from) for the pretty student council president, partially to establish that our lead here does machines but mostly so we can, presumably, admire the student council president’s heaving breasts.
Then we cut to the lead fixing somebody’s car on impulse. I think this is after the scene at school, but at least it leans into the next one where he’s late to meet with some teacher and discovers a hospital ICU room in said teacher’s house, which mysteriously opens up for him to find his mysterious waif in the hospital bed. He gets some flashbacks of his dead little sister when said dead little sister was dying in the hospital, and the waif takes his hand. This summons Ukyo-e art to paint the entire scene like the weird leap range wallpaper from Blue Reflection Ray was somehow fused with a Japanese art textbook.
In this state, a mysterious voice addresses our lead as someone who has “Received the Revelation of Babel” and a “Hand Shaker” who would challenge… um… said speaking voice. It doesn’t finish its sentence about what it wanted to say to said person before our lead passes out and wakes up back in the normal world version of the room
Well, I say normal, but we’re now joined by an eccentric lab-coat wearing freak who introduces himself with about the same level of over-the-top excited exuberance as Doctor West but a fraction the fun in the end. He spins, he twirls, he collapses, he breaks down in tears, he spews random bits of the setting’s jargon that we haven’t gotten the tutorial on, and mercifully he also explains that now that the girl, Koyori, has awakened, if our lead, Tazuna, ever lets go of her hand, she will die.
He’s then jump-cut out of existence, which is when CGI chains start attacking everything. This, as you might expect, gets us to that second orphaned scene where we’re fighting the chain punk and his abused busty babe, for which Tazuna suddenly realizes he has his gear superpowers
Giant impossible gear sword beats spinning chain drill fists, and the jerk is esoterically run through with said giant gear sword, exploding in a massive fireball a couple seconds after Tazuna charges past him.
If this was a more clever show, asking how you even do that with a person would be a funny nod to a cool yet kinda dumb action trope, but here it’s just played straight.
So, before I go any further, the lexicon. Pairs who engage in supernatural battle for the stake of some day meeting (or possibly fighting) God and having a wish granted? “Hand Shakers”. Simple enough, it’s the title and the pair aspect seems important. The supernatural mirror world where Hand Shaker battles take place? That’s called “The Ziggurat”. The superpowers/weapons that are conjured by the pairs? Those are called “Nimrods”. There’s also “The Revelation of Babel”, which is not really explained at the start but seems to be what Hand Shakers are supposed to experience that clues them into the rules of this nonsense.
While we’re on rules, if you die in the Ziggurat (so we’re told at the outset, and shown with the punk and his BDSM girlfriend), you don’t die in real life, but do lose your abilities as a Hand Shaker. So, basically the same rules as the ones we were originally told in Granbelm before that started deleting people, but with the victory stakes of the Holy Grail War. It’s a little worse for our main couple though; Koyori’s “Waste away and die if you don’t hold hands” is related to Hand Shaker powers, so she’ll probably die for real if they lose.
This all takes through episode two to get out. We then spend the next two episodes puttering around (during which Koyori’s condition improves to the level where they can release hands for brief periods) and getting to know a mild-mannered guy and his tiny grade-school-looking boss. They are, you guessed it, another pair of Hand Shakers. They fight our main pair and force Tazuna to level up his combat skills in order to win. In the aftermath, they find out about Koyori’s condition and are very sorry to have basically if unknowingly tried to kill her, offering to help out in the future before going on to lick their own wounds.
It’s worth noting throughout all of this that Koyori appears to be a mute. She indicates that she understands what others are saying, but she seems incapable of speaking herself. This is something on which I’m of two minds. On one hand, actions speak louder than words, and without vocal equivocation to distract from Koyori, you find yourself paying more attention to her smaller cues. On the other hand, the scenes that actually utilize this are few and far between. After one big battle we see how the pair sleep, with some sort of sock or such linking their hands. Koyori, waking up in the night, examines the rapidly-healing wounds Tazuna has, looks pained, and then begins to struggle with their linkage. In that moment, you can get a wealth of what she’s thinking and feeling that would be difficult to discuss from dialogue. You know she’s considering the cost the battles have on Tazuna, and in a low moment is tested such that she thinks, at least briefly, that her own life is not worth the pain being endured for her sake. That if her hand just slipped out and she ran out of juice while everybody was asleep, maybe that would be the best outcome. That is, honestly, a really good scene.
The problem is that for every one scene in which Koyori expresses anything of value, there are probably ten scenes or more where she stares blankly at things and is led around by the hand while betraying no emotions, thoughts, or feelings. It makes her condition feel less like an interesting note to explore a character around, and more like the excessive conclusion of the conceptual offspring of Rei Ayanami. We know you like these understated, unemotive, extra-submissive cuties so how about one who literally can’t talk back or express herself and thus exists purely to be projected upon?
I think if a mute character is going to work in a show like this, especially in a critical role, said character needs to actually be given more personality than her counterparts, not less. Thinking of this reminded me of Neopolitan, the mute minor villain from RWBY. I’ll set my differences with RWBY aside for a moment to say that Neo was actually pretty well done. She was theatrical, even bombastic, so she “communicated” quite a lot even if she never spoke. Heck, for somebody who doesn’t talk, I might even go so far as to say she comes off as sassy. She had a clear persona, a lot of agency, and was someone you could understand pretty well. This, despite being essentially a henchwoman to a warm-up act bad guy.
Koyori has none of that. She does eventually talk, but we’ll get to how that goes when we get to it. And when Tazuna is a one-quirk wonder (he does machines. Congratulations, you’ve got only slightly less personality than one of the Ninja Turtles is given in their opening) with motivations ranging from nonexistent to extremely basic (he sees no reason to have any sort of wish or meet god, but doesn’t want this cutie who is dependent on him to up and croak like his sister in the past), you can bet that the lead characters are prime suspects in the grim fate of Hand Shakers.
Moving on, our next encounter starts properly (after an out of place flash forward plugging the TCG Precious Memories and a brief scene with the main pair and their recently defeated new friends) as Koyori slips Tazuna’s distracted grip and gets lost with shocking rapidity. This doesn’t seem to really be intentional on her part. As Tazuna panics trying to find her inside the now two-hour timer for her survival, she’s found by the nice student council president girl and her little brother who is introduced holding hands with her so you know they’re another Hand Shaker pair if you’re paying attention.
They take her to the local card game tournament while failing to raise Tazuna on his cell. If this were at all realistic, she’d evaporate into the aether somewhere in Round 1, but in this universe less than two hours is enough time for little brother to make the finals and defeat the world’s most stereotypical buck-toothed nerd in an over the top Yugioh parody, big sis bouncing for the benefit of the audience all the way.
They then take her to a private room where they can teach Koyori to play Precious Memories, which again would probably take more than two hours on its own to get to the bit we saw in the opening where Koyori is able to take on the busty girl and win to little brother’s narration.
What’s Tazuna doing through all this? Having a conversation with a needlessly cryptic guy who appeared for no reason and who seems to know everything about him, the weird lab coat guy, and so on. That can’t have taken more than a couple minutes, so maybe it was two hours his time that she had, and not in whatever time dilation our card games were experiencing.
As we get the reunion, we find out that big sis seems to have the hots for her little brother. Tazuna’s arrival also means both pairs are holding hands in about the same place, triggering the Ziggurat and a required battle where the Tarot-loving big sis and card-game-master little brother obviously have the power of cards.
Specifically, he uses his Precious Memories deck verbatim, with Sister’s tarot cards fixing his draws and… well, I get the idea behind the flow of this episode: Koyori learned to play from little bro, and his play pattern is evidently extremely predictable, so despite city-burning explosions, she can nudge Tazuna along the right path (because she can’t just tell him for reason of mute) to dodge the attacks and outspeed the entire deck of cards.
On the other hand, even compared to the previous battles the action is badly choreographed and the fire effects… are not as bad as Fire.gif from Ex-Arm, but they’re closer than any real production should be. I give credit to Hand Shakers for at least dreaming big, but in terms of being able to put on a visual spectacle with this idea, its reach far exceeded its grasp leaving us with lots of lame fireballs that were fairly undersold. On the emotional end, we at least get to understand Big Sister’s wish: She wants the same thing as Yuzuki from Selector… and as the pair are defeated it looks like she can have it about as easily. The only difference is that Yuzuki was a deep, complex, tormented character who evolved over a season and change while Big Sis… she gets an episode. This one. In the middle of a battle to have her flashbacks and confession.
So, they seem to have their incest cake and eat it too, with the shotacon frosting when you remember the age gap. But their parents are getting divorced so that’s good?. You know, I’m not going to count any of this against Hand Shakers. Some people really like to scream about shows transgressing mores, even the mores of cultures other than the fiction’s home culture, but for me… look, you can get weird and creepy and hard to watch without being transgressive and you can be watchable while being transgressive either for my home culture or for yours, they’re fundamentally unrelated concepts. The brother-sister pair here are such a nothing that my first thought is to be glad that we actually have a reason for somebody in this show to go for the prize, even if they get knocked out of the running. My second thought is how much I’d rather be watching Selector again. And somewhere, deep down, as an also ran is “Ya know, these characters are kind of messed up.”
At least he wasn’t playing one of my M:tG decks. As entertaining as paralyzing everyone and sending all players slowly sliding towards a bottomless pit, with the winner being whoever can move two fingers to arrest their descent by inches the best, is on the tabletop it would adapt even worse to cinema than CGI fireballs.
We then get a horribly slow school festival episode about Koyori looking cute and cooking, in which Tazuna pulls in all his two contacts made so far in the show in order to solve various crisis situations that arise for his class. Even the chain duo cameo, albeit as guests of the festival. It’s just a pity the show wasted all its budget on really weird shots and didn’t have any left for crowd scenes or incidental close-ups to actually move in this one.
We then cold open our next episode with an idol girl who is a Hand Shaker (partner: her manager) with the power of… um… singing her opponents into submission like we’re in Macross 7 or Delta. Well, in the first scene. Once she’s fighting our leads she uses a respectable sonic sword that her manager can amp the blasts from. She also does some acrobatic kicks and strikes, if mostly show off a lot of leg because even though she’s not exactly poorly endowed, she’s not quite bouncy enough for this show’s taste. But there’s this whole conjured stage angle we see in the opening that appears to be her main thing. And she loves to quote historical figures because… quirk? She does this with obnoxious frequency.
To be fair, other than her spamming quotes, she’s a good character by this show’s admittedly low standards.
We start in the middle of the battle, flash back to the start of the battle (which is pointless because it doesn’t take long) and continue straight through to what seems like the end as our main couple are constructively beaten but not quite killed enough to be “out”, putting enough distance between themselves and the idol to cancel Ziggurat time. That’s the meat of an episode right there, with Koyori angsting over the fact that Tazuna came away hurt.
Since Tazuna is an idiot, he takes being as maimed as the Ziggurat will allow with a high fever as “Must rush out for the rematch right now” and we face off against the Idol once again. He has one vaguely sound idea, trying to get rid of the manager’s support first, but Manager is surprisingly capable and the idol turns on “song and dance” mode rather than going with sword strikes and kicks. His spontaneous suicidal zeal goes so far as to provoke Koyori to speak, and in so doing manifest her own Nimrod.
This gives Koyori an outright magical girl transformation (if a really slow and awkward one) and lets her and Tazuna summon an even more massive gear sword to smite their foes with. Against such plot relevance, in the words of the 30th U.S. President, Calvin Coolidge: “You lose.”
After perhaps a bit much follow-up, we get another slow, draggy downtime episode, ending with the reappearance of that random sketchy guy Tazuna met earlier… and his Hand Shaker partner, who appears to be Koyori’s twin. He acts weird and menacing and promises to explain things before going Final Boss on us.
Thus we get a long flashback to when weirdo and mad scientist were lab-coat-wearing students and a Hand Shaker pair, working under their professor and his wife, who were also Hand Shakers researching the phenomenon. Eventually, the wife ended up with child, and was even pulled into the Ziggurat during birth, which the students protected. This resulted in Koyori and her twin Mayumi being born in the Ziggurat, and thus born Hand Shakers (initially, it seems, paired with each other). However, their condition was already in place meaning that as they grew they were constantly targeted as prey by other Hand Shakers, doomed to die in the event of a loss.
Things went steadily sour, like their dad resorting to murdering potential rivals outside the Ziggurat, desperate now to reach God. The parents then vanished by winning enough battles. Hopefully, they were not turned into trading cards like in Selector, but nobody actually knows what happened to them and they’re declared dead. In the wake of that it seems that the sisters have their bond broken… and thus can’t charge up from each other. They almost died (saved from their bodies giving out by donor organs, so I will credit the show some restraint in not making it explicit that’s Tazuna’s dead little sister) and had to be put into comas to keep them alive. Sketchy guy stole Mayumi and fled hoping to go kill God, ending his partnership with our more positive mad scientist.
Now, it seems, he’s used brainwashing and drugs to turn Mayumi into his partner (because there needs to be a positive emotional connection to get Hand Shakers. Sure.). For some reason, refusing to put Koyori back to sleep while he gears up for the God fight means they must battle, even though he’d be killing one of the little girls he’s supposedly acting to save.
Thus, we engage in our final battle where the enemies have the power of poorly rendered floor ick, as represented by explosive kimono patterns spreading either from paths set down by the guy or bouncy balls projected by Mayumi which are somehow even more tragic in their CG.
As Koyori and Tazuna win, Mayumi prepares to sacrifice herself for her partner, which horrifies him even as earlier he heartlessly demanded she flirt with self-destruction to try to score the win. I guess this guy plays black decks in Magic, where the only point of life that matters is the last. I can respect that.
Of course, this show is too harmless to actually poof Mayumi, so Koyori steps up and takes her sister’s hand, reviving her despite their current status as enemies and sapping the real baddie of his will to fight. Mayumi seems to have recovered her personality and emotions and it’s revealed that our last-minute antagonist was being antagonizing because he has a terminal disease, and everyone parts ways as friends.
Thus, the show plays us out with an overly long ending where we see that all the defeated pairs are happy together (even including the chain couple, acting lovey-dovey rather than BDSM) and it’s implied that our main pair will go on to give the God of this game a kick in the pants. The end.
So, Hand Shakers is… pretty bad. It’s a very watchable bad, that I think could be pretty fun for a “So bad it’s good” experience with friends, but it’s still a crime scene of a show when you get down to it. I said at the start that if Hand Shakers wasn’t dead on arrival, it was murdered, and I hold to that. So, what is the culprit in the end?
I’ve already mentioned the animation giving the show a serious working over, and the blandness of the main characters represents some serious blunt-force trauma. There are more minor injuries as well; the absolute weight of the technical jargon that tried to crush this show, and the repetitive strain of so many lines and catch phrases that are hammered to death. “Think positively” says the mad scientist, along with like three other catchphrases. “(Because) we’re together” say Tazuna and Koyori after Koyori learns to speak. The idol’s constant quotes. And the big speech that’s originally from “God” and frequently quoted by others: I really want to highlight this one and pick it apart because it shows up way too much.
“You who have received the Revelation of Babel. You who will overcome many trials and battles. You who received the Revelation. You who would challenge me. Yes, you, the Hand Shaker…”
That’s it. It’s pretty long and usually delivered in a pretty slow manner so it grinds scenes to a halt when somebody has to recite it and… it’s neither good, nor does it say anything. First of all, that’s not an error on my part, it really does mention the Revelation twice, once with “of Babel” and once without. Second, the entire thing is not even one complete sentence. It’s a series of addresses; each line is a noun phrase disambiguating “You”. There is, implied by the grammar, then something that should be said to the “You” that the speech is addressing. At least a verb and maybe a subject and/or object apart from this address phrase? As it is, it’s empty, wasteful noise.
In the grand things, this is a tiny, scalpel-like incision along with the more major and obvious trauma that Hand Shakers suffered, but it’s very telling for how the show died.
It died as empty, wasteful noise. And there’s no one element that is responsible for killing it. Like a certain classic mystery novel (if you know, you know), all the potential culprits lined up and took their shots. Larger or smaller, with whatever weapon, with what strength they had, all of them worked together to kill this show.
While some of the art quality is unforgivable, the bizarre cinematography might have paid off if it were in service to something. There’s a time and a place for weird tracking shots. There’s even a time and a place for using a fish-eye lens effect to extremely noticeably distort an image, though that certainly isn’t called for often. But here, it’s in service of nothing. It’s like somebody was just playing with the settings to see what their equipment or software could, technically, do. And that shouldn’t make it into the finished thing.
A better show, one that had a healthy core and wasn’t being assaulted from all angles, could have leaned on some heavily repeated words and catchphrases, even a conspicuous big speech if it had some meat to it.
A stronger show could carry the weight of dull and disappointing leads. I actually think the side characters in Hand Shakers, for the most part, do what they need to do, but if they were going to pick up the slack they did have to be better.
The pacing… actually, I think the pacing is the one thing that at least partially chickened out of the “Kill Hand Shakers” scheme. The macro pacing of the show, that is how the twelve episodes together are paced, is actually pretty solid. Through the first half, I would go so far as to call the pacing in general good. We fought three enemy pairs, and we took two episodes for each of them so that we could really meet them and have an impressive fight (or a fight that would have been impressive if the animation and choreography could cover its end). This is much better than, say, Magical Girl Raising Project where there are more characters than episodes and the show suffers from having no time to actually get to know most of them.
But the pacing in individual episodes, especially in the back half that also suffers from having a pair of filler check-up episodes (one might have sufficed), does wield its slow blade to penetrate the shield.
The most comparable shows to Hand Shakers are Granbelm, Unlimited Blade Works, and Selector. The first of those three I didn’t really care for, while the latter has been freakishly comparable. Against this, Hand Shakers has… well, it does 2v2 matches instead of solo or free-for-all battles, and unlike Fate the 2v2 is meant to be balanced.
Compared to UBW, Hand Shakers has a theoretically unbounded list of competitors and an equal relationship between its fighter pairs. The prize is… similar enough. Technically, in Hand Shakers you’re meant to meet/fight God, but most of the folks wandering around worry about having some kind of wish granted, so that’s basically the same as the explicit wish granting of the Holy Grail in UBW. I think a big thing that’s lacking in Hand Shakers is feeling the weight of any of those wishes. We kind of know what the Student Council President would wish for, and to a lesser extent we understand at least when she’s defeated that the Idol wanted to actually make it as an Idol. But these are pretty petty things overall. Like Selector, they’re wishes that can be granted by a normal person, and in fact we see all the defeated pairs we care about actually working to follow their dreams rather than relying on magic elimination battles after their defeats.
Contrast this with a UBW character like Caster, who in order to truly earn her wish must warp time and space and history, even if her wish is outwardly simple. And the emotional aspect of the wishes held by various characters is powerfully followed up on. There’s drama in UBW that’s lacking in Hand Shakers, not because the characters in Hand Shakers don’t die, but because there’s a degree to which they don’t really seem to care
Compared to Selector (which also kind of has a doubles aspect with the LRIGs, come to think of it) this is also an issue. I called out Yuzuki before and I think she might be the shining example. Yuzuki is a strong, complex character. Even if her wish may technically need no magic to achieve, we understand why she believes that it’s not just a shortcut she’s taking. We also see deeply into her trauma and desire – something we also do for fellow major character Hitoe, as well as twisted antagonists like Urith and Akira. Ru, like our main couple here, is playing defense; she has no wish to start with… and we actually explore what it means for her to continue to fight, to trample on the wishes of others. And of course there’s the neat development where we work with her psyche and how she might actually be more blood-hungry than she’s comfortable with. Here… Nothing from Tazuna. He’s given a waif to protect and befriends pretty much all all his defeated foes, so that’s that.
I could keep going, but I think the writing is on the wall: Hand Shakers gets a Fail. There was an attempt, and I often talk myself up to somewhere in the D ranks in respect of that, but there’s just too much wrong with Hand Shakers. Anime Original with a kind of creative setup or no, it’s a rare anime that gets just about everything wrong, yet somehow got a sequel that I’ll probably have to review some day. My recommendation? Forget about Hand Shakers and go watch Selector.