Review of Megumi no Daigo: Kyuukoku no Orange

The original Megumi no Daigo anime was a story about firefighters combining action, drama and romance but was quite over the top and cheesy in its approach and rushed and poorly written mostly because of its short runtime. It was more of a promotional material of a long manga than anything else.

This series is not an adaptation of that manga either, but an adaptation of the sequel manga, which came out way later. So, what you have here is the adaptation of a sequel, of a manga finished long ago, and not a sequel of the forgotten and never really popular ova, so if you try to watch it as a sequel to that entry you will be completely lost. The best thing to do is watch this entry and treat the other one as background lore or some shit.

So this series begins with a flash forward where you see THE WHOLE OF TOKYO ON FUCKING FIRE and the two main characters as friends, before moving to the beginning of its plot with a training arc that covers how they met, didn’t have a good relationship at first, and then became friends.

As it usually happens with series that begin with a flash forward, the actual content you follow for the whole season is never as fun as the initial scene that hyped you up, and I already know that the two main characters are going to become friends, so what’s the point in all of this? Well, the training I suppose, but where’s the fun in that?

Plus, the whole thing still felt over the top and more than that, like propaganda, as if trying to get more people into joining the Tokyo firefighters, instead of telling a proper story.

Speaking of over the top, the series has been criticized for how unrealistic it plays out in situations, procedures, and the behaviour of the main character, who is quite suicidal. It’s all done to showcase the heroic spirit and job that people associate firefighters with, so it’s properly done in that regard, but bad for everything else.

And even that is questionable when you think about the backdrop of the protagonist, as he basically wants to atone for something he didn’t do, and after someone else told him to do that. Well, you begin to ask yourself, does he really want to help and save people, as heroically as firefighters are portrayed to do in series, or is he doing it just to fulfill the task that was imposed on him, to atone for something that he wasn’t responsible of? And that’s without talking about the female lead that partially joined the firefighters so she wouldn’t go out searching for revenge.

And after the training is over and you think, well, we are going to see the characters on real action now, a tournament arc out of a fighting shounen begins in the second half and it doesn’t even show its actual ending on screen, although it doesn’t completely take away the real missions. Even then it’s questionable if you really would have someone training while on real rescue missions at the same time.

Another issue is the pacing, as the most common criticism towards this series is the recaps that every episode has, which along with the opening and ending songs take about a third of the episode, making it feel like there never was enough material for a 24 episodes tv series to begin with and they had to resort to that to stretch the duration as much as possible. There were even weeks without episodes that instead aired some more recaps, as if they weren’t enough in the series, and as if they were even necessary. To make things worse, there were a few episodes that were basically recaps in disguise.

Not everything in the series is bad though, as the visuals, although weaker in the second half, are not exactly bad. The artwork is pretty good, as are the backgrounds. The character designs though are very simple and hard to distinguish one from another when they are all suit and geared up, the motions are ok but nothing more than that, and the special effects are…good when they are not CGI, but when they are CGI they look really crude. The thing is, during some episodes of the second half the artwork, motions and even the in-betweening were pretty bad, the first two episodes after New Year’s Eve were particularly bad in that regard, even more so because one of them was a disguised recap with a very minimal amount of motions.

The sound effects and soundtrack are good, impactful and convey that heroic feeling that the series goes for, and that goes particularly for the opening, which sounds like it came out straight from a 90s fighting shounen. There were two ending songs and they were weird on a first listening but ok as you listen to them after that first time, one is kind of very melancholic and the other one is quite upbeat, both initially feeling unfitting for this type of show, but they grow on you if you like ballads and they give a hopeful feeling, which goes well with the more relaxed episodes and especially those after some citizen was saved and wants to thanks the firefighters or those after a tragedy was avoided. The voice acting is well done but nothing that remarkable and it feels quite typical.

Another good thing is that the characters appear simple and archetypical at first, and although they never really grow out of their archetypes, the more they interact with other characters and the more backdrop information about them is revealed, even showing how they are more interconnected as they seemed to be at first, they don’t remain as two dimensional as they initially are, which is particularly good for Shun, who had a lame ass backdrop story of wanting to be a firefighter to impress the female lead, until his real reason for becoming one is revealed.

So in the end the chances of enjoying this show or hate it come from the expectations which one approaches it with. If you want an ongoing plot, then you’ll most likely not going to like it, if you want a realistic drama about firefighters, then you’ll probably hate everything about it. As you’ll surely do if you don’t like fiction that feels propagandistic, unless you agree with its agenda. If recaps are the thing you hate the most while watching a show, then don’t even bother with this one. If otherwise you go into it and accept it as a hot-headed callback to retro shounen and something akin to a sport series than anything else, then you’ll probably like it.


4/10