Hametsu no Oukoku

Bestowed with magic from God, witches worked to guide humanity toward progress, garnering adoration and fear alike from humans. However, times have since changed. With the advancement of scientific knowledge, humans now stand on an equal footing with witches. Determined to weave their own destinies and establish supremacy over the world, the mighty Redia Empire has ordered the extermination of all witches, which may bring the era of magic to an end.

Fleeing from the decree, the famed witch Chloe and her apprentice, Adonis, seek refuge. Hot on their heels, the Empire captures the duo and mercilessly executes Chloe. Agonized by the brutal murder of his master and the callousness of humans, Adonis vows to avenge Chloe by annihilating humanity with the very magic they intend to destroy.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Adonis Main

Ishikawa, Kaito Japanese

Doroka Main

Waki, Azumi Japanese

Chloe Supporting

Shiraishi, Ryouko Japanese

Yamato Supporting

Hino, Satoshi Japanese

Kunoichi Crew #6 Supporting

Okamura, Haruka Japanese

Goethe Supporting

Saitou, Jirou Japanese

Punch Supporting

Miyake, Kenta Japanese

Eekhout Supporting

Sakakihara, Yuuki Japanese

Clementine, Ophelia Supporting

Karyou, Mayumi Japanese

Kunoichi Crew #5 Supporting

Kurisaka, Minami Japanese

Cao, Cong Producer

Aoi, Hiroyuki Producer

Wakabayashi, Hideyuki Producer

Tateishi, Shigeru Producer

Reviews

Dec 22, 2023

Marinate1016

Recommended

Funny

While not without its flaws, Hametsu no Oukoku was one of my favourite shows of Fall 2023 and the year as a whole. A really good dark fantasy story with an interesting world. But, it’s not for everyone.

Many of you will have seen clips of the first episode of Hametsu on YouTube, IG or another social media platform and for good reason, it’s insane. It is one of the most infuriating and emotionally gripping premieres I’ve seen in a long time. The tragic ending sets up what promised to be one of the more entertaining revenge quests in recent anime. Does it live up to ... that first episode? Well, yes and no. Hametsu does indeed follow through on giving us an MC who just goes absolutely insane and tries to kill everyone in his path which I loved. We have so many cardboard cutout MCs that you could pickup and drop into another series and not notice a thing. So it’s nice to get an MC who doesn’t subscribe to the traditional moral high ground stuff. Adonis says, you know what, you take my girl, I take your world. Sadly, that only went so far in the anime.

Adonis being the disciple of a witch as a human and not a witch himself makes for an interesting situation. While he has access to many spells that only the witches would normally, he’s still a human and has to work within those confines. He’s got some very powerful magic, but he’s limited with the extent he can use it. It’s a cool way to make him strong, but not overly powerful to the point where the story isn’t fun anymore.

The main complaint you’ll hear about the story is that what starts off as an interesting revenge story turns into a more slower “boring” fantasy story. Now, in truth, that’s not entirely wrong. After about the halfway point in the series, Adonis gets a travel companion and things slow down quite a bit. While he’s still an edge lord, there isn’t as much plot development. There’s a few episodes dedicated entirely to character relationship building, world building and dialogue. This is not a bad thing to me for a couple of reasons. 1: in a long running story, there’s always going to be lulls in the story where characters have to actually develop. Otherwise this would just be God of War where Adonis goes full Kratos killing everyone without speaking or actually thinking. Which, for some people might be appealing, but I like my stories with a little more substance at this point in life. 2:I really like Doroka and her relationship with Adonis. While her being a damsel in distress can be a little annoying but at times, she’s cute as hell and helps Adonis to see there’s more to life than just his quest for revenge. If their relationship were not in the story, it would be substantially worse off in my opinion. But if constant action is your thing and you just want pure unadulterated rage, this one isn’t for you.


Now while I do unabashedly love this show, it’s not without its flaws. My biggest issues here are the production values being pretty subpar to bad depending on the scene, and frequent use of sexual assault or sexual assault bait to create villains. I’ll clarify what I mean by that in a second. First, I’ll clarify the production value situation. There’s quite a few action scenes in this that look really bad. Like amateurish. Particularly the big fight in episodes 10-11 which is meant to be one of the more hype moments of the series, yet it’s marred by animation errors, stiff animation and more. I mean at one point, the studio doesn’t even draw Doroka consistently. She’s wearing stockings in one scene and the next she’s bare legged. Not to mention how bad Adonis looked floating through the air against the antagonist’s flying hand attacks. It’s kind of odd because the art and designs look amazing, but that was lacking.

Following up on the near sexual assault point, there’s several times in the show where villains rip the clothes off female characters for seemingly no other reason other than humiliating them. I mean we as the audience don’t even get to see any semblance of an anime tiddy during these scenes, so it just begs the question what was even the point? It’s always been one of my pet peeves when SA or stuff similar to that is used to make viewers dislike a villain. I think it’s cheap and overdone. From what I’ve heard this is somewhat of a recurring theme in the manga too, which I own but have not yet read, so keep that in mind. It’s not a massive deal, but it did irk me a little.

My overall experience with Hametsu was positive. It’s not a show for everyone, it does at times feel like an edgy teenager is writing it, but I like edgy. It’s enjoyable to me and opens up some cool possibilities with storytelling. While we only briefly touched the surface of it in the anime, I believe this world and its characters have a lot of potential. It’s really only a matter of how far the author’s mind lets him go. I look forward to finding out.

Hametsu gets 8, out of 10.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Sep 30, 2024

Keny0

Mixed Feelings

First two episodes were like a strong 7/10, maybe even an 8. The hook is really there and you wanna see how this epic revenge story pans out. But unfortunately the overall quality and writing just falls off one cliff after another. Every. Passing. Episode.

The animation gets awful the last half of the season and they essentially just keep throwing dark themed plot twists and blood fiestas in your face for the sake of it, hoping it will be enough keep the viewers interested. Sadly it doesn't, at least not for me because if you keep trying to plot twist your way out of ... every given scene, the fact that a twist is coming will even that eventually become predictable.

It's such a shame because the premise is actually good, the world seems well thought out and interesting and I somewhere genuinely like this kind of character dynamic between two main characters. One drowning in hatred and cynism, the other kind hearted and hopeful to the point of being very naive. (Almost Naruto and Sasuke'esq) With proper development I was looking forward to them eventually meeting somewhere in the middle or just one proving the other wrong. But not now when it's apparent the writing just isn't there, at ALL.

If you're not picky about well paced story or character development, writing that makes sense or animation quality, you might actually still find it enjoyable though.

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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Dec 22, 2023

jahver

Not Recommended

Funny

I’ll be the first to admit I am an inconsistent writer. My life is a constant barrage of new tasks and distractions that keeps me from accomplishing, well, pretty much everything I set my mind to. Things get especially difficult to manage around the holiday season but here I am, back in the game, because over the past 13 or so weeks I’ve been subjected to one of the most indefensibly piss-poor, psychologically agitating pieces of “art” I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Hametsu no Whatever, Who Actually Gives a Shit About the Title of This Garbage is the rare kind of complete and ... utter disaster that only surfaces once every few years, whenever anime studios have to really start scraping the bottom of the barrel for content. It single-handedly snapped me out of my depressive stupor because of how eye-openingly bad it was. It even inspired me, in a way, to never produce anything on this level of quality, lest I never call myself an artist again in my life. I’ve started writing and illustrating again thanks to Hametsu, and I at least owe it or the author of the webcomic or the staff behind the adaptation a bit of thanks by trying to interpret this work of pure schizophrenia before I inevitably sink back into the oblivion of daily apathy.
Hametsu is an anime where not a single aspect of it is pleasant or inviting. It shocks you in with a bleak, cynical first episode full of rape, slavery, genocide, and just about every one of humanity’s worse vices before shifting gears and psychotically jumping between genres every single episode like an ADHD kid who managed to ingest a red skittle and keeps trying to entertain himself with whatever’s around him. We go from EXTREMELY fucking edgy revenge fantasies where characters unironically say stuff like “I don’t even feel like raping you so I’ll just kill you” that sounds more like an Anal Cunt song title than real dialogue while standing waist-deep in pools of blood rife with faux-philosophical melodrama about how “humanity is…LE BAD”, to corny shoujo shenanigans where the unbearably annoying main girl fawns over the edgelord bishounen MC and gets scared by a spider or something and turns into a chibi while silly comedic music plays. It genuinely feels like a series that was on the brink of getting axed every chapter. At a certain point I should’ve discerned that there was nothing of value on display here and moved on, but it’s hard to look away from a trainwreck.
From the very first episode, Hametsu wants you to know that this is a serious show. The comically evil and petty human emperor genocides every witch on the planet because modern technology has made magic obsolete (the emperor actually says “the fruit of our wisdom, the smartphone” is superior to fucking magic that can level cities) and sexually assaults Adonis’ mentor/love interest in front of him before shooting her in the head while thousands of people salivate like animals. Adonis is then placed into stasis (for some reason, they never really explain this brilliant little moment of bad writing) to let his hatred marinate for a few years until he’s ready to kill his way to the emperor. Want to understand the complex mechanisms at play that led to all of this happening? It’s simple, really. The queen is actually a time-traveling witch who has the power to mind control everyone on earth except for other witches, who are all female and reproduce asexually using a magic tree on the moon, and the other female MC is a reincarnation of her from the future who has the same magic power as her or something according to the author Yoruhashi’s previous work (which is untranslated so I’m doing my best to try and interpret it using what meager Japanese I know) so she decides to mind control the king and everyone under her rule into hating witches so she can wipe them all out and end any competition to her reign, and also the anti-witch technology is giving everyone super cancer.
Got all that? Good, because after Pinkshit (I’m not even going to dignify this character by calling her by name, you’ll learn why later) manages to execute a prison break by stealing the controls from a wildly out of place caricature of a transsexual, Adonis breaks out and decides that instead of killing the emperor, he’d rather cause 9/11 2 and gun down thousands of innocent people (children included) onscreen because they’re guilty by association. From there, the show descends into misery porn and over the top wangst for the next 5 or so episodes. They go to the moon, all the witches want to revive Adonis’ mentor and kill him, he summons the humans to kill them instead and revives Pinkshit (an annoying nag he’s known for all of a day), kills a guy named Yamato who wants to fuck his sister or something, burns down the magic witch tree and leaves. Is this Alpha Male behavior or blatant stupidity? Also, remember the king? The queen brainwashes him into an heroing by throwing himself off a building because he got super cancer from the anti-witch technology. He’s not important after all. What is important, however, is her becoming an Idol of all things, because it wouldn’t be a product of the absolute dregs of the anime industry in 2023 without idolshit being forced in even when it makes zero sense in-universe. Now the two are suddenly back on earth and the show takes a few episodes to devolve into a bunch of thinly-connected shoujo-lite moments where Pinkshit and Adonis are radically different characters out of nowhere and there’s an unfunny quip or silly moment every 5 seconds.
This is where the series’ two main issues become clear as day; firstly, it can’t commit to anything. The tone shifts around with little restraint in between episodes, sometimes multiple times within the span of 2 minutes. It introduces a dozen new characters every single episode and either kills them off before they can meaningfully grow or develop or blatantly writes them out of the story once the writer gets bored of whatever subplot they spawned from. Even Adonis’ revenge plot gets phased out halfway through the fucking anime. This is not how you write a compelling story; this is a teenager’s emotionally charged fanfiction you’d read on LiveJournal in 2006 where every character is based on someone from their high school.
The second glaring issue of Hametsu is how unlikeable each and every character is. I don’t think Adonis requires or deserves an in-depth explanation; he’s a one-dimensional perpetually emo dipshit with zero critical thinking skills who can’t even seem to remember his own motivation. He gets his ass kicked in every single fight and only manages to win because of his tremendous plot armor. No one ever refutes his insane rhetoric outside the other worst character, Pinkshit, who is honest to God one of the most insufferable characters ever written. She is a walking woman moment; nearly every single line of dialogue from her is her whining and crying about how Adonis shouldn’t kill the enemy combatants who are literally trying to murder and/or enslave the both of them and their entire race at any given moment. She doesn’t shed any tears for the innocent people Adonis slaughtered earlier in the show, but she’s more than willing to slap him in the face and bitch him out for defending her from the never-ending onslaught of armed soldiers and cyborgs who want nothing more than to see them hanging and literally killed off the last members of her entire fucking race a few minutes ago. Pinkshit’s even more out of touch with reality than the guy who wants to commit mass murder, and she’s supposed to be the moral high ground of the anime. Every 5 seconds she’s whining about how “we can all still live in peace!” like a braindead hippie who reduces every single complex human thought process down to the simplest possible rationalization. Sure, she may have a point, this conflict is only arbitrary and would’ve been avoided altogether if anyone in this setting wasn’t staggeringly retarded, but just because every character is a slave to their own emotions perpetuating a totally pointless and dumb as fuck battle doesn’t mean we need a character pointing out what’s already obvious every single minute they’re onscreen as if that isn’t the most annoying thing a writer can do. I’m not sure if Pinkshit’s intentionally written to be out of touch because you can never be sure of anything with this show, but if she is it shows the author has only an incredibly shallow and cursory grasp on the concept of pacifism. Writing a character who is both naïve and likeable is admittedly difficult, and Yoruhashi decides to forgo that entirely by writing Pinkshit to be so comically stupid and braindead that any sense of likeability is automatically thrown out the window whenever she opens her hole. The only thing she really excels at is rabidly simping for Adonis and taking the brunt of his abuse, because pandering to the “I can fix him!” crowd is a guaranteed way to print money.
Meanwhile, every other character in Hametsu is some kind of raving degenerate with no moral compass or a weird sex pervert. They’re all shallow, one-dimensional psychopaths. As a matter of fact I couldn’t tell you any of their names, but I can tell you what atrocities they engage in, because every character in Hametsu would feel right at home in the Dirlewanger Brigade. And the more savagery and inhumanity gets thrown in your face, the cheaper and emptier it starts to feel. There is no moral gray area here outside of Adonis; everything is presented in extremes. In Hametsu, you are either a good guy or a remorseless monster who will gladly inflict any type of suffering onto whoever you can when it’s convenient. The only in-between is Adonis, whose mass-murdering behavior gets portrayed more like a he’s just a tortured bad boy making a few mistakes rather than a victim warped into a mass murderer by his circumstances. He has no depth. If the story even bothered trying to explore his thought process and rather than trying to gloss over his atrocities, there’d be at least some semblance of humanity to him. But then his previously defined personality gets thrown out because Pinkshit’s intolerable idealism starts rubbing off on him. At the end of the day the only character I can say I thoroughly enjoyed watching onscreen was Shirousagi, the white guy with dreads and an absolutely baller hat who beats Adonis so hard he looks like he’s about to cry and gouges out Pinkshit’s eyes onscreen. What a Chad. He is exactly what he’s presented as, and in his case that’s alright because he’s a stone cold badass and the closest I came to actually rooting for a character in this entire anime. Hametsu is probably the only anime where a guy who looks like Brian Welch rips out a Mori Calliope clone’s eyes and then crushes them, so at the very least you can’t call it unoriginal.
You’d think I’d at least have something good to say about Hametsu after I spent nearly 2000 words railing on it harder than a Thailand ladyboy, maybe some words of praise for the production quality of the anime? Woefully, there is none. Yokohama Animation Lab is just about the very bottom rung in the anime studio society; almost every project of theirs is rated a 6 or below on here, and that’s probably not an accurate gauge considering how many users wantonly hand out 10s to every anime they watch. The opening animation is probably where 99% of the show’s budget went, and if I’m being truthful it’s not that bad. The song (Kieru Made by Hana Hope) is far too pretty and refined for a show like this. It almost feels dishonest; I was expecting something more like Musashi Gundoh’s infamously deranged opening, that’s a clear and present indication of exactly what you’re about to watch, but Hametsu’s opening feels like it belongs to a much more refutable anime. And on that note, I can’t bring myself to praise its extremely shitty animation and presentation. I’m not sure what I expected considering the source material was almost entirely unknown outside Japan before the anime was announced, but this anime treats drag and drop animation like a fucking Olympic sport. Every fight is a slideshow where off-model characters slowly move across still frames and jitter around. There’s a scene in episode 11 where Pinkshit drops to the ground that’s utterly weightless, and she looks completely stiff. This scene was so ridiculous looking I had to pause the episode and get a drink to steel myself into finishing it. The anime was directed by School Days director Keitarou Motonaga, a guy who is infamous in this day and age for fundamentally not understanding the source material of the projects he directs (see: Digimon Adventure tri, an incredibly pretentious borderline fanfiction-tier movie series that almost killed the franchise in terms of animated projects).
Hametsu is a show I can’t fathom anyone taking seriously, even the people behind it. The part of my mind that’s still trying to comprehend why this even exists can only rationalize it as being some kind of avant-garde parodic work. It is one of the few anime I’ve seen that goes from comically overblown edge and misanthropy to goofy preschool humor within the span of a minute every single episode. There’s a scene in episode 3 or so where Adonis brutally kills a bunch of soldiers onscreen and within 20 seconds or so it cuts to one of the villain generals chibified and dancing around while making stupid noises. That’s basically the thesis statement of this anime. Either nobody had any idea what they were doing behind the scenes, or they knew exactly what they were doing and none of us are intelligent enough to grasp this kind of cutting-edge satire.
Either way, tl;dr: https://i.imgur.com/WYNwMyK.png

Reviewer’s Rating: 1

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	Poll: Hametsu no Oukoku Episode 5 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) Stark700 - Nov 3, 2023	126 replies	by JoexySun »» Dec 12, 5:08 PM
	Poll: Hametsu no Oukoku Episode 12 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) Stark700 - Dec 22, 2023	100 replies	by RyuuJiuS »» Nov 17, 5:44 AM
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	So the "love spell" **SPOILERS** Dustin1280 - Jul 12	20 replies	by Dustin1280 »» Sep 24, 6:34 AM