Anime has a lot of premises that are pretty odd, doesn’t it? Concepts you just sort of have to roll with in order to even start the show, no matter how insane or weird they may appear. The pantheon of weird core ideas includes both epic shows and epic misfires so this is no particular indicator of quality, but Plunderer has got to have one of the strangest setups I’ve seen in quite some time.
This show takes place in a world where everyone has a “Count” – a number that appears somewhere on their body and is related to some arbitrary metric about their life and/or experience. Socially speaking, higher number is better, no matter what arbitrary bull the number is based on, and if your number is higher you can command anyone with a lower number (technically). Hit zero (which depending on the metric seems like it would be an inevitability for some, impossibility for others, and hazard for others still) and you go directly to Hell (or The Abyss as they call it). Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Taking this element of Plunderer’s world in stride is the price of entry for the show.
Our show follows Hina (Count: distance walked), who is looking for “The Legendary Ace” (Who should have a shiny white star-marked Count) because of her mother’s last words before being taken by the Abyss. As our show begins she’s been traveling the world for five years and quite the distance, but somehow doesn’t know any of the basic facts of the world, such that we can have them explained in the opening episode. At our opening, she encounters a weird eccentric pervert named Licht, whose count shows -999. Yeah, negative, making him what I would guess to be the ultimate pariah in this society if his behavior wasn’t enough.
She finds an Ace apparent, who turns out to be a mega creep who molests her a little, tries to steal her magic super plot trinket from mom (a shiny orb with 10000 on it, termed a “Ballot”), and challenges her to a duel she knows nothing about when she tries to pull Count rank on him. Naturally he beats her up, draining her numbers, but before he finishes gloating and gets to the stealing and raping, Licht jumps in from nowhere to act as Hina’s proxy for a second duel, in the process revealing that he’s the real Legendary Ace, with a secondary count on his sword. He shows off his obscene levels of “Do anything” super-speed power as he walks all over the faker.
Licht also trolls Hina a bit, seeming to take that Ballot, but as a friendly chef lady who seemed to know Licht pretty well reveals, that was mostly to keep her safe so no one would know she had it, since it’s evidently criminal to own one (which somehow Hina didn’t know) and would also draw all manner of thugs and killers to destroy her for it (which she didn’t know and hadn’t encountered despite not having any idea what it is nor being particularly secretive with it). This comes out before Licht makes a clean getaway, getting Hina another crying scene (to be fair she’s been through a lot) and Licht his -1000 tick as she says the magic words “I hate you”, his negative count being luck with the ladies.
But, with these two split up and some hints of people looking for Licht, we split the party for a bit. On Licht’s side, he gets the opportunity to harass a sweet, caring army woman named Lynn (count: helping people) while on Hina’s, she works with the nice cook lady, Nana, and her food wagon to lay low for a bit, which ends when the army comes knocking looking for clues to Licht’s location. This clues us in to the fact that Ballot Holders can, evidently, do magic based on their counts, with our first real boss of a military officer, named Jail, being able to conjure iron objects.
At least this makes for some dynamic fighting, even if we fall back on the “No, the protagonist is secretly way stronger” trope. While little is done for Licht, Jail at least gets some character development, and is set up to be a recurring semi-antagonist, of at least half-decent morals himself. It’s a nice archetype to have. He even takes Lynn with him. Oddly, this is despite him learning the lesson of how valuable she is to the local town just by being a nice person, and is treated as a good thing for her I guess because it promises a promotion vector for her. Really, I suspect it’s so we could get some boobs and thighs shown off in Jail’s scenes. And Lynn is both one of the less annoying characters in this show and very easy on the eyes so I won’t complain overmuch.
Hina and Licht are reunited shortly after, only to be interrupted by another random girl. This one is an inventor, trying to be this world’s version of the Wright brothers. This is apparently against the law, with an absolute and unyielding death penalty for researching powered flight. Arbitrary. Licht helps cover for her when the military comes knocking, after having given a speck of help with his apparent knowledge of avionics, but missing that shot drops the girl from 1 to 0, so off to the Abyss she goes, at the literal and kinda pervy hands of darkness. Hina tries to intervene, which gets the hands coming for her, and when Licht protects her interacting with the abyss hands seems to actually mess him up. Either way, down the redhead goes, being freakishly chill with it.
How do we follow this up? Cookoff between Hina and Lynn, of course! Well following that episode Team Jail comes across a town that’s been destroyed, its once-scenic lake now a pit to the Abyss. Looking for answers, Jail seeks out Licht and… gets dragged into a drinking contest that takes most of the episode, ending only when an abyss pit opens in that town too and the “demon of the abyss” spoken of by the lone survivor, a terrible flying thing that killed everyone in the prior town, emerges from the swirling clouds of darkness. It’s something that terrifies Licht, that he feels should have been cast down in the war three hundred years in the past where he became a legend.
It’s an attack helicopter.
I’ll be honest, I kind of love this twist. I like the trope enough I’ve even used its like. So how does it go here? Jail and Licht try to fight back, but the creepy hands (now called Althing) appear, both blocking them and going after the chopper ineffectually. Eventually, as Licht hesitates on reaching the cockpit, it is taken down… by a new arrival. This is Sonohara, one of Licht’s old compatriots and a fellow ace. In a dark as hell moment she then turns to slaughter everyone, shooting Jail and also shooting up what’s left of most of the townsfolk, along with her also firearms-toting secret service. She Yanderes at Licht some, calling him Rihito-senpai, and finally forces him to take on full serious business mode to fight her in a duel to the oblivion.
Licht’s serious business mode turns out to be a berserker state. It’s one that Sonohara was also in, but of course, her snapping out of the apparently involuntary and drug-induced mania does nothing when Licht is in said crazy mode. Other attempts, like Hina throwing herself in the way, only slow him down by forcing him to demand if the person to enter his view is an enemy. What does stop matters is Jail deciding to walk off a gunshot to the chest and busting out the fact that, since his iron is founded in conviction, he’s got type advantage against berserkers. That, and what is presumably his ballot with a nice big number to get closer to matching berserk Licht. He pummels Licht down, getting Sonohara kind of flustered in the process. All’s well that ends well, except for the innocent civilians slaughtered by the chopper and/or crazy mode Sonohara, which aren’t mentioned.
We’re then introduced to General Schmerman, who looks to be our next antagonist and possibly an actual villain.
When we cut back to Licht and company, we open with the “comedy” of the fact that Sonohara and Licht are still technically dueling (though it will supposedly fade eventually) meaning that the Althing hands are all around and… mostly seem to be molesting the girls (or at least the busty ones, sparing Hina) presumably because Licht is slightly too bedridden to do much molesting himself. This is basically one line of an episode while the other has Jail reporting to his adoptive father, the Supreme Commander, about all these goings on.
When Jail gets back, bringing the “what to do with Licht?” to a head, Nana, who did always seem to know quite a lot, intervenes, reveals she’s also one of the Aces, and sends all the people who weren’t there the first go around back in time to see the whole “300 years ago” scenario for themselves, possibly even changing it. This lands them in what appears to be a roughly modern Japan.
Well, it’s more like a post-apocalyptic dystopian Japan, and the cast (along with the past versions of the Aces they knew, and some new characters like the flattest bully archetype to ever go bullying, Doan) is inducted into the local military academy. Schmerman is there too, as staff. They also learn about Althing – not creepy black hands in this time period, but alien ultratech that crashed on Earth and can enforce Democracy.
The students faff about like it’s Muv Luv Unlimited for a few episodes until war comes to pay a visit, during the operation to turn Rihito/Licht into an Ace – a blood transfusion from Schmerman, who is some kind of wizard type person. We see his origin, including that of his darker side, and Hina tries to make an important promise to the future him while admitting her feelings, which would be a lot cooler if she’d been treated better as a character for most of the show. In any case, it seems like the future refused to change, and the characters are sucked back to their proper time (which is what prompts Hina to go all out).
In the intervening years, their nation is created, complete with all its strange rules, thanks to Schmerman and his allies gaining all seven “original Ballots” (glow spheres like Hina’s) and thus forming a unanimous vote for Althing. With it, they ordained the creation of a paradise continent in the sky and stealing all the natural resources from the surface, which became the “Abyss” (so I guess redhead was probably fine after all. Unless she had a long drop. Or aside from the mass starvation, but they’ve evidently got the power to put choppers back in commission). Apparently, the disparity was such that this new paradise for a select few new people would be at the expense of the vast majority – the opposite of something like “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”. This sparked dissent, first from Licht’s best friend (who he cuts down in blind fury) and then from Licht, who has to deal with basically everyone he cared about meeting terrible ends while he was insane.
But really, what did we gain from this whole past arc? Well, basically everybody important is some kind of immortal, there’s a pink-haired mad scientist lady who seems like even worse news than Schmerman, and we have the right spares to resolve all romantic entanglements happily, with the exception of Nana (Hina for Licht, Jail for Sonohara, Lynn with her trolly sidekick… I guess work is also done with Jail and Nana, so maybe not all the spares.)
Aside from that, this is the movement that, should you get this far, will make or break Plunderer for you. Either you can accept that the awesome power that creates and maintains Alcia couldn’t be used a hell of a lot more logically, at which point the whole plot and theme falls into place with this monstrous system that innocent people are simultaneously dependent on, or else you find it to be full of holes and the plot collapses because, hello, magic wishing orbs! Why was this your solution?
For my part… Jail is cool doing his Colonel Mustang thing, but I have my issues elsewhere. Like when we get back to the present, what do we spend most of our time doing right away? Having everybody drink and making fun of Lynn for being “fat” like she’s not damn pretty by anime character standards.
True, we do get a good emotional resolve for Nana and Licht. There’s also an anti-resolve around Hina, where we find her mother was another immortal and her father that best friend that Licht killed. I’m not sure how the timeline lines up, given that Hina isn’t ancient and the whole “killed the best friend” was implied to happen before Licht spent centuries wandering the land above with Nana, but never mind that. We’re right back to the stupid stuff and random fanservice for a whole episode which given the beats that come before and after… it’s jarring.
They do manage to throw us into the next plotline in due time. Evidently, the power of a unanimous vote needs to be ratified regularly, and since an original ballot has been missing for five years, that’s why the land has started to crumble, forcing a showdown at the Royal Capital for the Ballots. In this, the black-uniformed baddies send out their own ace, Doan, who is no less nasty after three centuries and also theoretically has a power with type advantage against Licht by wielding the power of gravity.
At this point, Doan kills Licht by squishing him under some rubble. Jail faces his father in a pointless duel and gets reduced to one star and kicked from the military. The rest of the party is interrogated by Doan, who in an oddly merciful turn was just going to let them go, until Hina managed to literally fumble her Original Ballot into sight, pissing him off since her having that was an existential threat to the nation he and the others went through hell to make.
Lynn gets away with only a few holes in her thigh and torso, sent for poor dead Licht, who Hina insists is not dead and will save everyone. She pretty much kills herself trying to perform CPR while gushing from missing chunks, but the villagers from her starting town show up with a flimsy explanation and bandage her up so she’s all better, more or less. After an entire night between Lynn and the villagers, Licht finally decides to just get up and go rescue everybody. Doan just sort of waits while everybody has their reunions, Lynn finally gets real medical aid, and Licht and Hina have their big damn kiss. But it’s not a duel this time because while she was off screen, Sonohara evidently got dosed with crazy again, and comes in to attack Licht.
Jail shows to pretty much just talk down Sonohara the way that only Jail can (gruff speeches about conviction). Licht tries to talk down Doan, but gets thrown in a black hole that then disintegrates for his trouble.
So that should be Licht deader than dead, right? Well, all narrative logic says no so of course rather than Licht being spaghettified into oblivion we pick up the final episode with him in what appears to be actual hell, a plain of endless skulls and darkness where he’s confronted by all his darkest memories and thoughts. However, Hina’s voice reaches him there and he exits the hell at the bottom of a singularity that vanished through sheer willpower.
Even for this show, that’s kind of silly. Doan takes a hint and pretty much gives up after that, returning Hina’s ballot and stalking off. That just leaves a long postscript with a lot of hooks for a continuation that presently doesn’t exist in anime form.
I think, on the whole, the best description for Plunderer is “uneven”. Back when I reviewed Bubuki Buranki, I likened it to the exercise of an amateur writer going for word count with speed, and thus throwing in any new thing to get another scenario in the can. I felt as though it had been polished somewhat from that, but it still had that energy of something bizarrely written. Plunderer is similar, except its uneven twists and turns more feel like a scenario with many writers and little in the way of direction.
There are some examples of this even from famous authors, where a group got together and wrote parts of their story separately, with only the guidelines for the general outlay to direct them. Unlike Bubuki Buranki and the NaNoWriMo shuffle, pretty much none of these are traditionally good.
Plunderer slides wildly between extremes. When it goes comedic, it forgets basically everything and goes for comedy. When it wants to go dark, it goes abyssal black hole dark. When it wants the one soldier in the first episode to be a sleaze, he is one of the worst sleazes put to film. When it decides that sexual harassment is funny, it goes all in with it expecting it to be funny. This goes alongside arbitrary plot swerves and an insane premise, and it makes the whole thing feel like a quilt put together from the most clashing pieces of fabric that could be found.
While inconsistency might be Plunderer’s most major malfunction, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention all the minor malfunctions as well. First off, the characters have… issues. Jail is king of enjoyable as a stick in the mud, but when he’s not getting Sonohara or Nana blushing he doesn’t have the best foils to play off. Licht is okay at it, but their interplay is not as strong as it could be, leaving Jail merely the most watchable of the major players. Lynn is okay too, she’s cheerful and pleasant, but at the same time her run as the romantic third wheel to Licht and Hina does her no favors, consuming much of her dialogue and interest for little in the way of returns. We know it’s not going to work out for her, and she knows it too, but rather than have her do more interesting things she’s capable of, that’s what we focus on.
Licht, for his part, is… a victim of the inconsistency. He’s a weird pervert at the start, seriously all in with that and certainly having fun with his existence. Even when he shows off his power, he still seems to be a kind of goofy, Arata-esque sort of guy. But after the attack by the helicopter, and especially after the arc in the past, we’re instead supposed to see him as an absolutely tortured figure, who was so haunted by all the blood on his hands that he wore a mask for the better part of three centuries, unable to smile or even speak for most of that. And they go all in on that drama. Did you forget how you wrote him in the early episodes messing with Hina and Lynn? That was not a guy who couldn’t laugh, and he had that reputation before Hina came along so attempts to say she changed him fall kind of flat.
Speaking of Licht, sexual harassment isn’t funny. I’m going to go against what’s probably the grain here and say that clever writing can actually make it funny, but there is no inherent humor to a guy trying to force a girl’s legs apart in order to see her panties while she shrieks for him to stop. This takes up way too much screen time in the early acts.
And Hina… poor Hina. Her writing cannot catch a break. Early on she was a painfully dull girl who knew nothing about her own world and was given too many crying scenes for her own good. Sure, the crying was often justified, but it was still not a good look. Later, she was a normal girl with too many crying scenes. Then we go to the past and come out the other end and she’s flipped a switch to become a perverted sex maniac… with a few too many crying scenes for her own good. I wanted to like her, but she was a chore plain and simple
And as to the plot… I feel like there are too many holes in it. I try to be generous and sporting about this kind of thing when dealing with speculative fiction After all, “Fridge Logic” problems (ones that are likely to occur only when you really think about a plot, not necessarily while you’re watching) are minor, and speculative fiction – Fantasy, Science Fiction, supernatural Horror, and so on – absolutely require a level of suspension of disbelief, which does extend to patching up small holes where a world built by an author doesn’t always have the correct implications. Plunderer, however, has far too many holes that are far too wide to ignore. This happens all the time, such that you’ll more likely be thrown out of the moment somewhere along the line by the one that gets you than not.
As an example, Licht has a negative Count and isn’t in the abyss. A couple times, characters point out that this should logically imply he has a Ballot, offsetting his negative value, and that this should in fact be obvious. Despite that, he’s had that negative count for some time at least and theoretically until Hina has avoided being hounded by the military and anyone else who would like a Ballot. At the other pole of the story, there’s escaping a black hole (which was already shown to wink out of existence) purely through the power of love and no other explanation given in a setting that otherwise used at least metaphysical explanations for its powers, because apparently “gravity well that light can’t escape” equals “extra-dimensional hell prison”.
There are plenty more in between, to say nothing of the universal problems you get when you introduce magic wishing with no clear limits. In part because of the obvious gaps where something was stitched together, some hole will get you somewhere along your journey with Plunderer.
And the storyline itself is both weak and stitched together. Hina’s mother told her “Find the Legendary Ace.” And? Nothing. She hands over the Original Ballot and tells her daughter (who in another plot hole should be centuries old rather than a normal age, based on when her dad died) and descends into the Abyss without anything to do after. Did she want the Ballot kept out of government hands? Presumably, seeing as she’s implied to have stolen it. But most of the Aces work for the government, so perhaps Hina could have used a word or two to make sure she didn’t deliver the shiny orb incorrectly? Or anything to do once she found her Ace? Hina leaps to the conclusion of “Might as well make babies” but there really seems to have been no purpose to the mission that gave her a reason for being. It’s incomplete.
This weakens the first act of the story when we’re finding and teaming up with Licht because dead mom said so, and doing nothing with him because dead mom didn’t say anything to do, to ask of the Ace, or what have you. Then we get into the bridging mini-act with city-killing holes to the Abyss, and what’s revealed to be more advanced tech than the locals had. To their credit, this was set up in episode 1 with a spec ops guy using wireless communications (also out of the normally seen tech level), but it appears arbitrarily when it seems like the whole “Find Ace” thing is stalling and then just as suddenly as it came we discard it for the rest of the show. You’d think with attack helicopters busting through the world, we’d at least mention a possible invasion from the surface again, but nope! Time travel! School Scenario! And we get back and just sort of go with “Nation’s founded on evil, gotta try again.” And okay that at least is derived from the time travel, but I still think we’re kind of skipping around just to play with Doan for the climax and not really do anything.
In the end, Plunderer is a show that takes too long to get going, and then doesn’t have enough direction once it is moving to go somewhere worthwhile. Most of the setups could, in isolation, support stories. “Find the Ace” is the weakest because there’s the huge now what, but you could jump from there. Invasion by modern armed forces? That could be engaging. The hero squad trying to live up to their morals in a brutal world? That could be a show but instead its failure is backstory. Gathering the magic wishing rocks to right a world built on lies and evil. Cool, did we need the rest of this mess?
But nothing us used well. It doesn’t add up. We go through twenty-four episodes and have very little to show for it.
From me, Plunderer gets a Fail. There was nothing I enjoyed here, nothing that I felt was worth watching. It wasn’t entirely devoid of effort, and I think I’ve highlighted most of the best moments already, but they don’t save it from scoring in the bottom ranks. I’m not going to throw this one a pity grade, just avoid it and move on with your life.