Anime Flashback: Flame of Recca

Flame of Recca's another show I started over the summer. I'd been meaning to watch for quite sometime, but it just wasn't a big priority. The manga was one of the first ones I read as a teenager when I got my first computer, and to this day it's still a favorite of mine.

The anime, however, finished ages before the manga, and I was never a fan of incomplete adaptations. Particularly when the final arc is omitted, leaving the anime a shadow of it's manga.

Still, I had to see what they'd done to it, so I gave the series a shot. Series synopsis as described by AniDB:

Recca Hanabishi is a ninja, but is nearly killed in an accident. However, a girl named Yanagi heals him with her powers. Later, the two are tracked down by a woman who attacks them. She tells Recca to ignite his flame, but he is clueless. Just as she hurts Yanagi, Recca releases a powerful flame upon the woman. She is excited to see this. It turns out that Recca was a baby, from the Hokage Clan of the past, that was sent to the future in order to escape death. Now, Recca is the leader of the new Hokage Clan who must stop his half brother, Kurei, from kidnapping Yanagi.

Flame of Recca is one of the earlier shonen series, following in the steps of Dragon Ball Z in terms of tournament battles and escalating powers. As a result, it's easy for this series to be overlooked in favor of either DBZ or Yu Yu Hakusho. (Or Naruto/One Piece, now.) And it's true--overall if you're going for best 90's shonen, Recca is far outclassed. An unfortunate consequence of never getting a complete adaptation (the anime ran from 1997-1998 while the manga ran from 1995-2002), the anime is forced to give up not only the arcs that followed and made Flame of Recca more than your generic tournament series, it even dropped plot lines it had already introduced.

It's sad, really. Recca is one of a small number of shonen series that manages to keep a female character on the front lines of battle for the entire series (something even Yu Yu Hakusho couldn't manage), and make her both smart and a competent fighter. Come to that, Flame of Recca is one of but of a few series that refuses to write off ANY of it's characters. In shonen manga/anime, where strength tends to be directly equivalent to story relevancy (and consequently, the odds of a character being fleshed out), only the strongest characters get a real backstory and solid characterization. By keeping it's cast small, Flame of Recca offers us characters with more complex development than your average shonen (though even that's limited in the anime).

And it's the fact that Flame of Recca presents twists on classic shonen tropes that makes it worth an anime fan's time to begin with. Mangaka Nobuyuki Anzai has a habit of bringing us stories that don't necessarily bring completely new ideas to the table rather than a different way of looking at what's already been done. And at this, he shines--even if it doesn't necessarily look that way in this adaptation all the time.