This recent anime hasn’t received much attention and I think it deserves more. It’s short and amusing; rather dark but witty and cute.

This is a set of traveler’s tales, where the characters arrive at a new town in each episode and get involved in some local story. It’s tempting to compare it to Kino’s Journey–except that if Kino’s Journey were a shoujo series and the protagonist were a cute but bratty little sorceress, and the stories were more spooky than satirical, it wouldn’t be Kino’s Journey at all.

• Original Title
  Hatenkou Yuugi (The Unprecedented Game)
• Genres
  Fantasy, Adventure, Comedy, Horror
• Demographic
  Shoujo
• Contents
  10 Episodes
• Based on
  a manga by Minari Endoh
• Director
  Nobuhiro Takamoto
• Script
  Yasuhiro Imagawa
• Character Design
  Norikatsu Nakano
• Art Director
  Toshihisa Koyama
• Animation Studio
  Studio DEEN
• Broadcast
  2008
• Region 1 Publisher
  None, as yet

Parental Advisory

This series features bloodless violence and sexual innuendo. Some of the storylines are likely to be very upsetting to young children. Probably age 10 is a reasonable minimum.

Characters

Fourteen-year-old Rahzel is enjoying a happy enough life…

…until one day her father kicks her out of the house and tells her it is time to travel by herself and learn about the world. Rahzel does not seem overly upset by this. She is very self-reliant and confident to the point of arrogance.

Also she knows some pretty devastating spells.

Still, she would really like to find a traveling companion. Wandering into a dark alley she encounters a beautiful albino man named Alzeid, who is busy robbing a hapless bystander.

Rahzel tells Alzeid that if he will travel with her, she will make his boring life more interesting and mysterious. Surprisingly he agrees.

Alzeid has a cold and arrogant attitude and is deadly with a handgun. He is humorless but loyal, and honorable in his own way. He wants to track down and take revenge on his father’s killer: a woman who, like Rahzel, had long black hair and striking blue eyes.

Rahzel soon picks up another traveling companion: Baroqueheat, who turns out to be an old army buddy of Alzeid’s. He is strong, athletic, cheerful and irresponsible.

Baroqueheat likes to tease Rahzel with sexual innuendo, but she takes no nonsense from him.

He has a butterfly tattoo on his right hand which can turn into an ornate sword.

I guess with character designs like these we have to expect at least a few yaoi overtones. These are provided by Soresta, who shows up near the end of the series. He is another old army buddy and he is obsessed with Alzeid.

Soresta is also a powerful magic user and he doesn’t seem to be a very nice person.

Other Versions

The manga is published in North America under the name Dazzle.

Links

Wikipedia entry. (Spoilers.)

ANN Encyclopedia entry.