Utawarerumono: The False Faces

Episodes 14-15

Thanks to Winter Preview Guide swallowing up my weekend, this review will cover another double-decker of U2warerumono episodes, along with another king-size game of Good News and Bad News! The good news is that episodes 14 and 15 cement our point of no return for an actual war plot in this war-game-based series. (Finally!) There's kemonomimi slinging around swords, spears, and magic of every kind, there are heads flying, villages being razed, and all other manner of chaos consuming the screen. We've gone from zero miles an hour to a fur-flying massacre of epic proportions in no time at all!

The bad news is that it's still a pretty disappointing experience. It turns out that no amount of gloriously violent retribution can fill the hole left gaping open by a dearth of emotional investment and development in the characters doing all that ass-kicking. In episode 14, it's up to our main cast to resolve a minor scrimmage on the road to the bigger battles, which also makes it a small step in the right direction toward making Yamato's conflict a more personal one for Haku. Unfortunately, by episode 15, the entire war seems to have been resolved by the Pillar Generals in a curb-stomping display of vacuous supremacy that seems like it would be more at home in GATE than Utawarerumono. Oh well. At least they're trying to make a point through Yamato's soul-crushing tactics that isn't just "Yamato sure is the bomb!" but I'll get to that later. With this much going on, it's better to begin at the beginning.

We pick up the story on a caravan driven by our perpetually apathetic protagonist. He's riding to back up the main armies solely at Kuon's request. Atui and Rurutie have been conscripted into service in place of their fathers, and Kuon thought it would be good to bring their whole group for moral (and combat) support. This leads into the most (if not the only) emotionally rewarding aspect of the whole war as not Haku, but Atui and Rurutie become the star players in the battle against the Uzuurussha. At first, Haku just wants to skirt around the carnage and make his way to General Oshutoru as fast as possible. ("Have you ever been hit with an arrow? It's serious! This is war!") He's too busy worrying about all his harem members to consider that they might be more worried about their own citizens. Ultimately, it's better for everyone that they decide to get involved, and their passion for justice has even infected Haku by episode 15.

Atui leads the more offense-driven members of the party against the main enemy force to keep them at bay, while Rurutie convinces Haku and his magical twins to sneak around the back of the village they've captured and release the hostages. These two assault and recuperative driven missions turn out to be linked when we discover that the most formidable soldier among the Uzuurussha, a mighty swordsman named Yakutowaruto, is a Yamato native being forced to fight for the enemy to ensure the safety of his (totally adorable) daughter, Shinonon. No matter how hard Atui's group fights, they can't take on Yakutowaruto and survive, until Rurutie's group shows up with his rescued daughter. This immediately turns the tide of the battle as Yakutowaruto lops off the barbarian general's head and joins their side instead. Hooray for rotten princesses!

But just when you think Haku and his harem are finally taking up the mantle of main party in the adventures to come, and we'll finally start bonding with this group through their wins and losses like in the first Utawarerumono, the next episode just plumb ends the war through the overzealous tactics of Yamato's main generals, none moreso than the bloodthirsty Vurai, who doesn't bother to distinguish between civilians and invaders. That doesn't mean the whole episode is unsatisfying. There's something to be said for the pure spectacle of it all: fluid fencing and impactful spear thrusts abound, to say nothing of Vurai's twisted final showstopper where he literally turns into a gigantic god-monster. (Even if "Akuruturuka" looks more like a gigantic spoiler for the newest legendary Pokemon than a demi-god.) On that note, I wanted to be more excited that actual plot elements from the original story were finally coming back in this one, but the fact that the masks turn their wearers into pseudo-divine monsters was kinda assumed from the beginning, so it mostly felt like old news delivered shockingly late. If you weren't expecting this to happen, I'm not sure where it would fall for you on the scale between "awesome" and "silly," given the monster's design. Don't worry, the gods of Utawarerumono have always looked incredibly silly.

So yeah, it's hard not to feel that urge to fist-pump when Munechika responds to an enemy general's threats by saying "I shall become a man-eating demon and destroy all who oppose me." (Thanks to Vurai, we know that's not just a metaphor!) But it's a lot less satisfying to see Oshutoru duel the far more sympathetic old general Zeguni to the death right in front of his weeping daughter Entua. (I thought maybe they were going to do more with that relationship, but nope! Just a weirdly unsatisfying slaughter!) Yamato 1, Barbarians 0, let's all go home and try to forget about all the senseless loss of life!

To some extent, this is the point. This is supposed to be the moment where Haku realizes that Yamato is a cruel empire that responds to all opposition, sympathetic or not, with criminally excessive force. Now that he's seen the horrors of war firsthand, he has to decide how he's going to respond. There's just one problem with that: Haku is still way too much of a blank slate. It's like the writers of The False Faces decided that giving him more personality than Hakuoro at the beginning of the show was enough to carry him through the entire series, because unlike his predecessor, Haku hasn't received basically any development since the day we met him.

The first series' Hakuoro was absolutely a two-dimensional character, but he still underwent a lot of change. He started out being Amnesiac Captain Perfect, but evolved into a sensitive scientist/strategist, a father figure, a regret-riddled war veteran, and by the end, a dark god who chose to sacrifice his life for the mortal family he'd found in Tusukuru. What has Haku done? He's grumbled about work, schlepped his way from one dumpy job to another, grumbled as more and more women piled into his lap, and ultimately, he got dragged into a war where he basically did nothing but get spit out the other side feeling repulsed by Yamato's brutality. (They didn't even bother to make it personal by having him witness his friend Oshutoru taking things too far. Instead, he watched the cruel actions of Vurai, someone he had no attachment to at all!) Haku is still barely present in his own story, making this entire war plot feel only slightly less pointless than all the harem adventures that came before.

To make matters worse, the next episode preview seems to imply yet another break for comedy and fanservice hijinks is on the way, at the absolute worst possible time. Right now, this sequel series is better than it's ever been, but I'm still mostly just waiting for it to be over. I'll weather the filler episodes as they come until they finally spill the beans on what makes Haku so special, but I've basically lost hope in the show ever being worth its two-cour time investment.

Rating: B

Utawarerumono: The False Faces is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Hope has been an anime fan since childhood, and likes to chat about cartoons, pop culture, and visual novel dev on Twitter.