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[ a parent's guide to anime ]

[ rated pg ]

The Flame of Recca

Rated: PG

Parental Guidance Advised


Reviewed by Camrock:

Recca Hanabishi is a normal high school student who discovers some not-so ordinary things about himself.

For starters, Recca finds he can shoot flame from his hands. He meets a girl named Yanagi who has healing powers, and a mysterious woman named Kage Houshi. Recca also faces evil forces - Kurei, a man who shares Recca's ability, and his father, who wants Yanagi in order to gain immortality.

Yanagi is kidnapped and taken to Kurei's mansion. Along with his friends Fuuko and Domon, who have their own special abilities, Recca must rescue her. Why does Kurei have Recca's power? What will become of Yanagi? All will be revealed in the end.

Though Flame of Recca, created by Anzai Nobyuki, is based on a manga of the same name, the manga is a bit different from the anime. A fighting series with lots of drama and comedy, fans of Dragon Ball and Yuu Yuu Hakusho will love this series.


Parent's Guide Rating:

yellow (parental guidance advised)

Lots of fighting, but not extremely graphic violence. (This IS a fighting series.) The battles sometimes have blood but not very much of it.

There is nudity in the series, though it is not graphic. Kurei's flame angel, Kurenai, appears nude and there are a few scenes where clothing gets ripped/blown off. There is a fair amount of innuendo and such in Flame of Recca, such as the scene at the fighting tournament registration when Fuuko mentions a "breast squeeze coupon". (There is one scene where Fuuko is mistaken for a boy. ^^)

On the subject of bad language - if you buy the Shinsen Gumi fansub [a fansub is a subtitled anime that has not been commercially released in the U.S. and therefore is legally distributed by fans] expect to be exposed to a lot of cursing. Also, a lot of American expressions (like Recca saying "Don't be dissin' the ninja!") are used in this version of the series. (This is what's known as "creative translating".) If Flame of Recca is commercially released in the US, there will not be nearly as many curse words.


Additional review by Colleen Lester:

Flame of Recca starts off as a high-school-boy fighting show, which borrows a lot of the concepts from Yuu Yuu Hakusho and Rurouni Kenshin.

I don't know if the people who reviewed the show so far have seen the entire thing yet. About halfway through the show it seems to change a lot.

Some things parents would probably object to:

Recca's flame power is at first like fire that he can shoot out of his arm. After he takes off his arm-guard, however, he finds that there are 8 dragons living inside him and he has to make deals with them to get them to work for him. It's kind of... weird. Some parents might object because it's kind of like demons or other things that they would not want their children exposed to. Also sometimes the show is violent and could be scary to children. In one fight a seemingly good-guy like character who is compared to a Buddha turns into a seriously scary-looking demon. Every fight is life-and-death and there's lots of blood, etc.

The first thing that bothered me was a bad guy in the first part of the show named Mokuren. He can shoot these plant tentacle things out of his body and he likes to talk about how much he likes to stab his tentacles into a girl's flesh. He gets suggestive about it and it is awfully reminiscent of the cliche tentacle hentai theme...

Yanagi, Recca's girlfriend, is kidnapped and tortured while naked, in the bad guy's mansion. It's kind of disturbing. Another girl is shown as the victim of a mad scientist and the way they show the dirty old man operating on her is kind if sick and twisted. Also some of the girls the boys fight try to distract them by taking off their clothes or etc.

Later on Recca and his friends enter a tournament for a showdown with the bad guys. To get them in, Fuuko, the girl, offers a "breast-squeeze coupon" and then when that doesn't work the other girls try the same thing. The guys nosebleed.

Fuuko, the girl on the fighting team, battles this very hentai guy who says/does an extreme amount of sexual innuendo-like stuff to her (like about being able to taste her, or different things he's going to do to her... ahem, it gets pretty bad) and proceeds to cut her clothes off of her while they fight. She is a high-school aged girl, BTW, and this is a grown man. The guys on the fighting team seem to object to the hentai guy's behavior but nobody stops him. All through the rest of the show, during Fuuko's fights, this hentai guy is yelling to her that if she wins the fight, he'll do different sexual favors for her or whatever.

At first Fuuko seemed to be a strong female character. I thought they might show her beating up the guy for treating her this way, but no such luck. At this point in the show she seems like a different person. She doesn't exactly do very much to discourage this guy, bragging about her breast size and stuff. Just when she is about to beat the guy up for humiliating her, when he says she is like "Robo-Babe" and she is extremely flattered (!) and so she lets him go, when of course he proceeds to attack her again.

The guys on the show DO have a little bit of a negative reaction to this guy, but it seems kind of apathetic and no one stops him or tells him to shut up. The show just keeps letting him do so, like this is acceptable comic relief.

(Ano... my rating might also differ from a commercial release of Recca, I watched the Shinsengumi subtitle and they sometime exaggerate a little in the translation. However, they also did Rurouni Kenshin, which has almost NO sexual content at all.)

Warning: Please watch the WHOLE SERIES before you decide if it's appropriate! Not just the first half!



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