Reflections – Tsubasa Chronicle

June 15, 2007 at 7:51 pm | Posted in anime, lookback, manga, tsubasa chronicle | 3 Comments

Title: Tsubasa Chronicle
Adapted from: Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE- (Manga)
Production: BeeTrain, Production IG (movie)
Broadcaster: NHK

The story is a crossover using lots of characters from past series made by CLAMP.

“Syaoran, a boy who wants to become an archeologist, and Sakura, a princess from the Clow Kingdom, are childhood friends with a close relationship. On a fateful night, Sakura lost all her memories as a result of a conspiracy to obtain her powers. In order to regain her memory, Syaoran seeks help from the witch, Yuuko. Yuuko tells Syaoran that he has to travel from one alternate reality to another to collect fragments of Sakura’s memory. However, even if Sakura regains her memory, she will have no recollection of Syaoran. Travelling together with them is Kurogane, a warrior who was exiled from his country, and Fye, a magician who wants to escape from his King. With the help of a magical creature, Mokona, they set off on an exciting journey through time and space.“

As a CLAMP fan, I quite enjoyed Tsubasa, yes. Or at least, the manga… the anime, however, left much to be desired. (;

The manga was already better than the anime in the first place. However, it didn’t mean that the anime started bad. No, it didn’t. The first season was actually pretty good, aside from throwing some of the comedy out the window and making it more serious. Tsubasa Chronicle’s first season was pretty faithful to the manga too. The second season, however, started bad and ended bad because alot of the canon arcs were rushed, if not skipped entirely, and most it consisted of pretty horrible fillers. Some episodes were okay, like the Kurogane background story arc, the chibi filler and the Kero cameo but a majority of it was pretty bad. The last arc of season two was the most painful to watch, not just because it was filler… it was just bad. All of it gave me a “WTF” feeling as I watched: “wtf is this prince of the bird/wing/whatever people and why is he trying to molest Sakura?!” It was esspecially unbelivable at the end where all those feathers scattered and Syaoran didn’t even try to get at least one them. And there were a shitload of feathers too. What was the anime trying to do?! Make an establishment for MORE fillers?!

I don’t even see why the fillers were there in the first place. The anime had a good amount of material from the manga to adapt from – adding that to the “season break” the anime seemed to have, there was no way possible that they would go ahead of the manga. If they had filled the anime’s second with more manga material, they would probably have ended around Rekord. WHERE IT WAS SUPPOSED TO END IF THEY TRIED. And it probably wouldn’t have been canceled (from broadcast on NHK at least. Good news in the next post…)… if it wasn’t done by BeeTrain and wasn’t aired on NHK, then it probably wouldn’t have canceled. Blah.

The animation for the anime ranged from good to completely terrible. As with the story, the animation in the first season wasn’t all that bad. The only complaint among fans were that they were too scrawny, but honestly, that’s how CLAMP drew them so I wouldn’t care less. Most of the animation in the second season was… terrible. Some characters looked completely off-modeled in some frames.

As for the story itself (spoilers ahead), it’s quite enjoyable if you like your typical romance/adventure. Actually, it isn’t that typical at all. If you are, in any way, a fan of CLAMP (or seen one of their series; that should be enough lol), this would feel like an anime-version of Kingdom Hearts. Same concept, recycled characters crossing over to the same story and such. The characters aren;t exactly the same people you knew them as, just the same “soul” taking on the same appearance in another world, heck: taking on a completely different role. A person you may think is good may be completely evil in another world and so on.

At first you’d think Syaoran was just a typical, polite, and boring hero, only a shadow of his former self in Cardcaptor Sakura, but you’d come to like his kindness towards others and how he cares about Sakura (like he was at the end of CCS (:). As the story progresses, we find out that he has more mysteries in his past than we expected.

As the story gets more intense in the manga, we find out that our Syaoran (the one we’ve seen leading the story so far) is actually a clone of the boy that looks like Syaoran floating in the tube in Fei Wong Reed’s sanctuary (who was, at first, shown as if he was going to be an antagonist), made specifically to collect Sakura’s feathers. He reverts in the Acid Tokyo arc, and becomes a heartless drone that only cares about collecting the feathers (he even tears Fay’s eye out and eats it), leaving his former friends behind (with the real Syaoran, the tube boy, taking a spot in the main group… for the meantime, hopefully). After this, Sakura is often seen pretty depressed (poor Sakura… ):).

Fay is also revealed to have a tragic and dark past… but I don’t want to spoil any of you too much. (;

Anyways, the story isn’t exactly the best, but it’s decent and gets pretty intense later in the manga. It’s a definite recommendation to all the CLAMP fans out there. The anime, however, is not recommended besides the first season (though there would be no point since that wouldn’t finish the story…). All the openings and endings in the anime are awesome, though.