Tensui no Sakuna-hime

First things first, I LOVE the game this Anime is based on, so I review from a point of comparison and focus less on character and story progression.

Tensui no Sakuna-hime is a game adaption of "Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin" which is a mix of 2D Hack 'n Slay and 3D Rice farming while containing some RPG elements like the crafting of clothes and weapons. However, as you may know Anime adaptions of video games are kinda a gamble - there are great ones like Persona 4, pretty solid ones like Valkyria Chronicles, and such disappointments you regret you ever watched it (I'm looking at ... you, Corpse Party). So which type is Sakuna-hime? Well, let me explain.

If you played the game, you will notice the producers of this Anime didn't just played it as well, they LOVED it! You have the same outfits and voice actors of the characters, the mountain pass, the fields, the cabins are perfectly adapted as well - hell, they even sit in the same order while eating diner. You have some of the comments Sakuna uses in the game like when she steps on the watered field. On plus, every episode contains some information about rice and its planting.
So yeah, they didn't produced this Anime just for the sake of it, you can feel they put their heart in it!

But as I pointed out in another review, an adaption can - but doesn't has to - be close to its source material, so how about the changes?
Well, in the game you have a lot of fighting to explore the island and collect materials, but here, they kept out a lot. On the one hand it's understandable that you can't focus too much on the fights if you only have 13 episodes to tell such a wide story (24 to 26 episodes would have been better), but therefore it's kinda hard to feel all the pressure Sakuna is going through at the beginning of the story. I mean, yes, there are some short fight scenes, but it's only mentioned and not really shown that she has to do so like every day while also planting the rice.
Furthermore, some chronological orders were changed, but not really for the better - the story about Kinta, Yui and the Crane for example takes place in the later game but here it's in the first half of the Anime which let to lose some impact. The same problem occurs within the last episodes with the drama around Tama which they cramed in only one episode instead of building it up in the middle of the story and fulfil it near the end. Therefore it also lacks of impact. Oh... and a similar issue is there when it comes to the volcano and Kokorowa-hime.
Also, there is no mentioning what will happan to all the characters after the end of the story like you had in the game.

However, that all is complaining at a high level since you have a lot of effort put in this Anime and I just can repeat myself that 13 episodes are way too short for such a wide story. That's why when I saw there will be an Anime adaption, I thought they would do 2 seasons to capture everything. So my biggest criticism is just that the Anime is too short, which leads in my opinion to the problem, that the first half feels more like a kind of slice of life and the second part like it forced the rest of the story to happen (even if I wouldn't know the game).
The art is solid and nothing special, but THANK GOD there is no shitty CGI in it! The music is just on top! Most of the time you have the music of the game, which let you feel home if you played it, and the OP and ED just fit perfect and send you good vibes - especially the OP.

In Conclusion, this adaption is solid to great. This Anime has a lot of heart and effort in it and let you feel everything from joy to concern to hope. The only weakness is that it's too short and would has need more episodes to capture everything and to keep a better pacing. But either way, you will have a good time watching it.
If I wouldn't know and love the game, I would say it's just a solid 7 and recommand, from a perspective of a game adaption an 8 or maybe 9 with little mixed feelings.
So, since we unfortunately don't have a 7.5 rating, I round up to 8 and recommand ;)

Okay...who was expecting this? Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin is a video game that came out in 2020 and became surprisingly popular. I bought the video game at a random GameStop because it was on sale for cheap, though I haven't gotten around to playing it yet. I really ought to remedy that. But the game was so popular that PA Works decided to adapt it into an anime, which aired from July to September of 2024. Hell, the game was successful enough that there's not only going to be a second anime season, but a whole new sequel game that's currently in production. But ... this review is just going to be for the anime. I figured I'd watch this as a means to familiarize myself with Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin before playing the game, and...it's alright. I like the anime okay, but like most game-to-screen adaptations, it suffers from the fact that it's a 12-episode anime trying to adapt a game that's 30-50 hours long.

In the far eastern corner of the country of Yanato, it has been believed since ancient times that there are two worlds in this land: the world at the top where the gods live and the world at the foot of the mountain where humans live. Princess Sakuna, a high-ranking deity who lives in the world of the summit, was born to a war god and a fertility god is a spoiled brat who would rather spend her days lazing around and drinking than doing any work herself, wasting the grains her parents had stored like a trust fund kid. One day, due to some strange circumstances involving a group of humans that wandered into the Lofty Realm, she is banished from the city of the gods and sent to Hinoe Island—an isolated island inhabited by demons—accompanied by the humans in question. In a barren land where there is barely enough food for the next day, she cultivates the soil, grows rice, and sets out to defeat the demons. The humans who have stumbled into the world of the gods and the novice fertility god begin their rice-husk-filled communal life together.

As far as its production values go, Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin's anime is fine. The backgrounds are detailed, the character designs are faithful to their game counterparts, the fight scenes are well choreographed, and the actual animation is decent. It'd be pretty hard to adapt the game's thick linework and unique style into animation, but for the most part, it does its job well with what it has. Honestly, compared to another PA Works anime, Nanare Hananare, Sakuna's production values are far superior. At least Sakuna doesn't go the route of giving everything and everyone gaudy colored outlines that make everything look radioactive and a literal assault on the eyes. The execution of stuff like that really makes a world of difference in either making or breaking a show. Yeah, I couldn't resist taking the potshot at Narenare. I have even less to say about the soundtrack. It's fine, it does its job, I don't know if it reuses BGM from the games or not, but I did like what was there. I like the ending theme better than the opening theme.

Speaking as someone who hasn't played the game, I'm sad to say that the characters definitely suffer from the transition from game to anime. Honestly, the characters are pretty bland and are only memorable because of their character designs rather than their personalities, and even when they do get development, they stop being relevant after they change a little bit and don't get to do anything anymore. Now, to be fair, it's impossible to compress a several hour long game into a 12-episode anime, so of course a lot would have to be left on the cutting board. But the writing around the characters sometimes feels so haphazard that it feels like they change personalities whenever the plot feels its convenient. For example, at one point, Sakuna finds Kaimaru nursing a demon's injuries, and she gets angry and tries to kill the demon...and seconds later she's like "Nah, I won't kill you after all because I forgive you and don't want to continue the cycle of hatred." Even though beforehand there was nothing that indicated that hatred was even a running plot thread, so it feels less like Sakuna is actually developing as a character and more like the writers putting stuff in her mouth because they wrote themselves into a corner and hastily slapped a random Deus Ex Machina together. Even without knowledge of the game, the characters' development feels really rushed. I like that Sakuna is forced to grow from being a spoiled brat to someone more capable, that's actually one of the anime's strengths, but the other characters are made to be bum rushed through their development, making any growth they receive have less impact. Oh, and the villains are so generic and laughably cliche that I can't even remember their names.

That's not even going into how strange the plot gets, and I don't mean that in a good way. One episode goes into Yui's backstory...and suddenly introduces aliens that come right the hell out of nowhere, contribute absolutely nothing to the narrative, disappear, and nobody so much as comments on it, or they only mention it nonchalantly and move on to the next thing. I'm sure the game goes into it, probably, but the anime treats this whole thing like a Big-Lipped Aligator Moment and makes no effort to actually explain just what the hell these aliens are! Plus, their whole existence just raises a ton of questions that are never answered: Are all the demons on the island just weird aliens? Is the “Lofty Realm” not a divine realm for gods but just some advanced civilization posing as them? Are these places even on the same planet?! You can't dump aliens into my medieval fantasy farming show without some kind of elaboration! This whole bit was just so baffling and out of nowhere that it made me wonder just who the hell thought that was a good idea. Speaking of, the second half of the anime starts to go off the rails as it rushes through important plot points and doesn't really try to give them any real gravitas whatsoever, cutting out important bits from the game for the sake of getting through the story. For example, at one point Sakuna finds out that her friend Kokorowa has been conspiring against her and confronts her about it. The anime just has the two of them talk and it's played for some needless comedy, while in the game, it's a full-on boss fight. There's also all the later reveals about Kaimaru, which just absolutely scream Deus Ex Machina, and they're just as bad as they sound. Also, the anime has a pretty huge continuity error that I'm surprised nobody caught: One episode states that it takes three years for Sakuna and her friends to rebuild their destroyed home and fields...yet the characters are never shown physically aging. For Sakuna this makes sense since she's a goddess, but everyone else is human, and you'd think they'd physically grow up a bit, with their designs changing over the course of those three years, but nope, they look and stay the same, even Kaimaru, a toddler. Like...what? How did this get past quality control?

In the end, Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin, for all its effort, is yet another addition to the pile of middling to bad video game adaptations that don't manage to do its source material justice. That said, it did get me curious about the game, so it's got that going for it. But I recommend skipping this one, especially if you like the game in question. It's still better than the incoherent mess that is Nanare Hananare!

Game adaptations are definitely an interesting medium. One way or another, they're very loose adaptations of their game counterpart due to the game in nature being a completely different experience -- usually spending tens of hours to complete. How does one adapt those hours of gameplay into a mere four hour adaptation?

Mobile games, in my experience actually tend to have the most success. Surprisingly, the production value of mobile game anime adaptations tend to be the highest, with a solid plot that the original game might not have been able to produce in it's mobile medium. Examples can be Rage of Bahamut Genesis (only season ... 1 let's be honest here) or Magatsu Wahrheit: Zuerst.

Tensui no Sakuna hime? It's a console game. Still, I don't judge. The first six or so episodes were good, especially the first 3 or so. It's about farming on a remote island, with a main character that acts spoiled, but slowly comes to age as the story progresses. Whether it be doing minor chores, taking on major responsibilities, or acting as a mediator, Sakuna-hime goes from a pampered spoiled god to someone that is shouldered with a bit of responsibility as a Goddess of Harvest. Sakuna-hime is a great character that's multifaceted and experiences many dynamic changes due to the challenges and hurdles she's forced to confront.

However, that's where all the magic stops happening. When the show becomes less about character development and farming, then it starts going downhill. Suddenly, a show about farming and developing land and character interaction becomes some third rate shounen anime about beating the evil god. Of course, this theme about demons looming around is certainly a theme that was always behind the scenes, but to so suddenly only focus about fighting was a wrong move. You're subject to the most one dimensional villains with self-righteous dialogue from Sakuna-hime and the rest of the cast that it's sickening. Yet another cliche-filled dialogue about how "we have to stop the cycle of hatred," and yet none of the main characters are forced to make a difficult moral decision. Rather, despite letting go villains and evil-doers constantly, the issue resolves by itself. By "forgiving everyone," Sakuna-hime and her people are able to still easily be absolved of any consequences due to plot armor. The final boss is similarly boring plot armor fights where feelings and sentiments are more important than the fight itself.

Additionally, I never said that the side characters were good. Tama is good just because he's mentoring/a close companion of Sakuna, but the rest of the characters -- especially the human ones -- are extremely cliche. Kinta was supposed to be a reclusive, polemic yet perhaps misunderstood or kind character that could have been explored a lot more than it should have. His whole arc with Yui kind of makes sense, but it just seems quite rushed and there's not enough exploration into the character relations afterwards for me to care. In fact, after Kinta's and Yui's character arc, he kind of just becomes a completely different character, which is to say he becomes a nice and generic side character that never contributes to the plot again. Tauemon, Myrthe, and Kaimaru are also similar in that there are some surface level descriptions of all of them, none of which are going into depth, and they also similarly contribute literally nothing to the story other than sometimes functioning as a plot device to a Hero's Journey.

If all of the human characters were likeable, the slice of life farming with some fights and magical happenings could have carried the entire show for 12 episodes, but unfortunately that would require good writing capabilities. Instead, if you slap an already failing cast of side characters and shove them away to make way for a generic and below average shounen show about beating the big bad boss guy, it's still slop, but you can get away with the terrible writing you had in the initial half of the show.

Art was fine, probably above average definitely when it comes to character design, details, and renders, but it was quite obvious that 90% of the budget was focused on the first few episodes where the visuals were quite a few notches above the latter parts of the show.

Overall, an uninspired anime adaptation that could have been great if it focused on character development and better writing.