This Week in Anime

Toka Gettan Delivers the Mid-00s Visual Novel Nostalgia

Jean-Karlo
YOU.

You filled in my spot at This Week In Anime and reviewed FUUTO PI without me when I even left TWIA with a Kamen Rider Black gif?!

Also, who's talking about Carnelian and their visual novels and the adaptations thereof? I got a few hundred paragraphs I could spew about those.

Are you kidding me? Coming back to TWIA to cover another Carnelian anime? If I had a nickel for every time I got to do that, I'd have two nickels, yadda-yadda-yadda. I can take a few moments from playing Xenoblade Chronicles 3 to jaw about this.

Folks, this is Toka Gettan: The Moonlight Lady Returns.

... And right away, we need to go over some explanations. Hoo-boy...

So, back in the early 2000s (bear with me), the artist Carnelian worked with her self-made studio Root to produce a visual novel titled Kao no Nai Tsuki ("No-Surface Moon"). This was, by the way, the same studio that went on to produce the Yami to Boshi to Hon no Tabibito VN that I wrote about with Nicky way back when. KnNT eventually got an adult OVA adaptation and was localized in the U.S. by Media Blaster's Kitty Media line as "Moonlight Lady" (at least it wasn't, like, "Shadow Sex Mansion" or something like that). Apparently, the folks in Japan liked that title because when Root made their next VN (a spin-off of KnNT), the proposed title was Toka Gettan: Moonlight Lady II. But the subtitle eventually got dropped... only when Sentai picked the series up for localization a few months back, they went with the "The Moonlight Lady Returns" subtitle, and someone in Japan had to sign off on that. And since I'm such a mark for Moonlight Lady that I used my first paycheck from ANN to help import a 20th anniversary daki of Tomomi Harukawa, here we are.

That kind of thing was weirdly common in the early 00s. Better adult VNs than light novels, if you ask me. And as an aside, the writing in the VNs is such that even with the smut yanked out, the story is compelling. The original Moonlight Lady dealt with an amnesiac protagonist who suffered from aphasia, a maid who was secretly an actress hiding her personality within a persona of a character she was portraying in a film, a woman who was just a sentient manifestation of pleasure, long-lost twins, a MILF who might be a ghost, and the requisite gay route bisexual guy who's a closet otaku.

In the spirit of that "first" episode: no actual Moonlight Lady characters appear in this anime. That's why you should have gotten the 20th anniversary dakis!

Poor Hazuki is still chasing through those myriad books for Hatsumi with a goal that'll only end in childrearing. It still brings a tear to my eye. Also, apparently in the VN, Io from Moonlight Lady is supposed to be one of the servants in the manor—but I digress. Anyway, let's rip this Band-Aid off: Toka Gettan starts the series off with the last episode of the story. So what you see here is the emotional climax without the emotional buildup.

Right off the bat, I'm reminded of Yoko Taro and how he writes his stories backward: starting from the crux of the story that is supposed to sell the main point and working back from that to make characters you'll become invested in so that the knife is properly twisted once you are forced to delete your save. It's confusing, for sure, and you have to want to stick with the show to see it through (or watch the series backward). But the story is well-structured in this regard. It's like why I don't believe that "spoilers" are a bad thing. Here's the show dropping all of its big set pieces: characters sacrificing themselves, massive reveals about people's true natures, and emotional climaxes about the weight of the new situation settling on characters who weren't ready for how much things would change. But you need to figure out why that matters, and finding out is the point.

It's like the "broadcast" order for The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. It's not an "arbitrary" order: the episodes are written in a way where the broadcast order satisfyingly handles all of its myriad ideas and fleshes them out properly if you'd only shut up and watch the show.

The gist of what you can gather is this: a boy with a sword banishes himself and three girls from the world. Doing so banishes magic at large from the town of Kamitsumihara, but that's okay because Kamitsumihara was at risk of succumbing to the powers of the supernatural and just outright dropping into the Demon Realm. Two of the people involved were Toka, a young man whose body housed the ancient Stone Sword, and Momoka, a young woman who loved him very much. They manage to get resurrected in another time and place, but only Momoka remembers Toka—but that's okay because she remembered to kiss him if they ever met again. With true love's first kiss, these star-crossed lovers are reunited.

Women be eating. Like, how do we proceed? Because I guess we should also point out that Momoka is the reincarnation of an elder deity named Sei. She's part of a trifecta of other deities whose banishment renders Kamitsumihara mundane. But where does that leave everyone else?

For the record, they are demons, just demons who terrorize people in less immediately harmful ways. Also, they all have the "Oh-ho-ho-ho~!" laugh, and they live to troll the ever-living daylights out of everyone around them. They keep a vampire chained up in their basement and force her into cosplay for their amusement, but she's a vampire. She had it coming.

Hers is a weird situation because even if you take her "first" appearance at face value (one of her last scenes in the anime), it's still disappointing. After all, it means she vanishes after that, and nobody spares a second thought about her ever again.

Oh geez.

See, Yamibou had a ton of moments that you could tell were sex scenes in the original VN that the anime adaptation cleaned up a bit. Toka Gettan... has a moment where Toka seeks maternal affection from Yumiko, and she takes advantage of the moment to have sex with him. And while the show tries to be as coy about it as possible, they want you to walk away convinced that Yumiko has ridden Toka like she paid for it. There's even porno jazz backing music. It's the most jaw-dropping scene in the whole first batch. Like, was it supposed to be funny? It's towards the end of the series, so is it supposed to be dramatic?

There are two things curbing this whole fiasco of a scene that we know courtesy of the first episode. First, Toka isn't Yumiko's child—Yumiko just whole-heartedly believes Toka is her child when in reality, Toka was just a character Yumiko had written about in one of her novels (she's a writer, it turns out, and part of the magic in her town makes her writings affect reality). Second, once Toka and Momoka vanish, Yumiko is absolutely and horribly crushed at the notion of being left entirely alone in the world, without even her maid Nene around to keep her company.

I can say that further episodes illuminate that there's much, much more to Yumiko than we're getting right now, which not only recontextualizes the whole "Mommy knows best!"-bit and even makes her ultimate lonely fate even sadder but that's outside of the purview of these episodes. Suffice it to say, Yumiko has earned the right to be lazy. Maybe not a cradle robber (get yourself a daki, girl), but definitely lazy.

Also, I should point out: Yumiko throws me for a loop because part of her climax is that she's a dead-ringer for her mother, Yuriko, and given Yuriko's name and appearance and the fact that Miki Ito voices her, that makes her a dead ringer for Yuriko Kuraki from Moonlight Lady. Is there a connection? I can't say, but it's a good detail.

This is as good a time as any to mention Nene, the family maid. She can do magic (like when she turns a pumpkin into a watermelon for Yumiko), and she has her own reasons for being a maid in the family's service. We don't see too much of her in these early episodes, though, so all we can do is promise that she knows more than she lets on.

For the record, this was because Mana wanted to send Momoka a message, and the most expedient way she found was a freaking letter on an arrow.

As mentioned earlier, Shoko has an ongoing feud with the Second Shrine Princesses and takes out most of her road rage against them on... everything around her. This isn't helped by those darned butterfly triplets pranking her in every way possible.

Like, to coin a phrase, this is an anime-ass anime. You've got people with ancient relic swords embedded within them, reincarnations of ancient goddesses, an absurdly powerful student council, and a massive high school where feuds over snacks lead to car wreckages... as I watched this and thought of ways to describe Toka Gettan, I felt like I was slapping together all of the random clichés people usually make about anime. The catch is that the emotional core is also here; for example, in the case of the snack war, the student council president Kikyo (herself a magical figure who stands alone after the events of the first episode) has to taste-test snacks made by the Second Shrine Princesses and Shoko. Kikyo ends up choosing the Princesses' snack (leading to Shoko crashing her car out of the building as seen above), but Kikyo later confesses to nobody in particular that she was giving the Princesses an act of mercy—after all, they were the ones whose time was running out, and as we'd see earlier, they vanish from Kamitsumihara (right in the middle of a food fight with Shoko, no less).

Being so episodic towards its beginning means getting crumbs of action before things go wild. Like when this weird dude, Mihashi, kidnaps Momoka. He plans to use Momoka's powers to trick Toka into killing the other two Goddesses using the Stone Sword, forcing him to disappear and leaving him (Mihashi) with Momoka all for his own. This is a tense episode, courtesy of everyone pooling their efforts together to keep Toka from being a killbot.

This is where we should introduce Makoto—she's another of Toka's classmates, and she houses the Dragon King's powers, which means she wields great magical power. She's intended to be the centerpiece for the Recital that kicks off the ceremony that banishes magic, but for now, the Dragon King's powers let her use her flute to block Toka from accessing the Stone Sword's powers.

At least it's not Diavolo's frog phone. Also, we should at least touch upon the Stone Sword, I guess? It's pretty integral to the whole thing. It's an ancient relic stored within Toka and what gives him life. But it's a twisted life; the Stone Sword houses over two millenniums of memories of everyone else who's wielded it, but anyone who uses it loses their soul. It leads to a lot of dysphoria for Toka at the, er, beginning of the series because Toka only has a few months of memories he feels are his own, but also has two thousand years of memories that are just as vivid. It doesn't help that the strongest memories are of Isamihoko, who had initially used the Stone Sword to rescue Sei/Momoka from a forced marriage.

The Stone Sword also passes from user to user, and there's a minor subplot of a young girl's ghost who had once tried to wield the Stone Sword to earn the love of one of Toka's classmates.

Part of the issue is that this ghost girl is Juna's daughter. Juna had been inside Yumiko for 15 years, but now with the Doll Festival Recital approaching, Juna has transferred into Mana. I'm not going to pretend this was all super-easy for me to follow; I have to refer to my notes a ton here.

When I covered Yamibou with Nicky way back in my first column, I mentioned how you could visualize it adapted as a quick-and-dirty five-episode hentai OVA—but to its credit, it probably would have been remembered as a very ambitious one with better-than-average writing and tone (which is how I feel about Moonlight Lady and why I was genuinely obsessed with the writing and characters back in the day). Instead, it was a one-cour TV series with good art, mood, characters, and a lot of memorable writing but not quite the right amount of emphasis on its better elements. And I feel like Toka Gettan is the final piece of the puzzle: this is what Yamibou and Moonlight Lady would have been if they'd been given a full 26 episodes to explore their characters, themes, and world. In some ways, it's hampered by the central gimmick of having its story presented backward. In others, it's a fascinating experiment and a very novel way of presenting what would otherwise have been a very trope-laden series that nevertheless does a great job of sucking you in. It's not quite Haruhi Suzumiya, where the show hinges on the gimmick of how it's presented to you, but I won't blame folks for getting frustrated at having to watch a show backward to have a more reasonable time with it.

If the worst thing I can say about a show is that you need to pay attention for the story to make sense (at the cost of having to trot out the ol' "It Gets Better™" canard), then that show is batting at a pretty high average, as far as I care. So maybe don't watch this show if you're huge on Moonlight Lady (I kid, the only person like that is That Bitch™ who writes This Week In Games). But check Toka Gettan out if you don't mind a lot of charming fun between supernatural teenagers mixed in with esoteric paranormal mysteries.

That's the spirit! And hey, it's out on physical media from Sentai, too. Just in case you need more Carnelian on your shelves.

It's a pleasure! Being able to go hog-wild with the weird detritus I've become passionate about makes my job the delight it is to carry out. Folks who don't mind me bringing up other weird nothings can join me in This Week in Games. But also, thanks to This Week in Anime and its readers. I asked 'em to take good care of you guys, and it does me proud to see they've done just that. Who knows, maybe the day will come when you guys need to hit The Button and drag me back out of the Hyper World for more backup. Until then: remember to look up every once in a while.