Senkou no Night Raid is a run of the mill action show depicting the events of Shanghai in 1931 and centered on an undercover squad of super power wielding agents. While the first half of the show is episodic, the second one tells you about how our squad clashes with one particular villain on whole Asia is in danger scale. Nonetheless, neither production values, neither the plot are any notable, or even interesting. What’s worse is that the cast of the show is completely dull. Unless you are a big fan of episodic super power squad shows or want to cure your insomnia, I wouldn’t recommend putting Senkou no Night Raid into your to-watch list.

People don’t feel the pain of disasters as long they don’t happen somewhere close to them. To achieve something, it is a necessity to make as many people as possible to share the same pain. That is why tragedies never end.

An original work written by A-1 Pictures and directed by Matsumoto Jun (Blood+), Senkou no Night Raid depicts the fictional events set in 1931 Shanghai and is centered on a super power wielding special operations squad which works undercover. The show follows episodic nature for the first half, telling random stories about how our cast gets their hands on terrorists, spies and so on. In the later half the show gets centered on one particular villain, but frankly, never really goes out of its way to become something notable. Though if offers a complete ending and some solid writing from time to time, the few last episodes are rushed and the story as a whole is simply not that interesting.

It doesn’t help that most of the characters are totally dull without a single interesting trait to offer, and that production values are hardly outstanding. Thanks to this not particularly exciting combination, and the adequately written but boring plot, all Senkou no Night Raid eventually achieves is becoming an alternative treatment for insomnia at best. Unless you are really excited about super power wielding squads or pre world war II Shanghai, forget this show. I mean, it’s just like a washed down version of Darker than Black, which wasn’t that much of a groundbreaking show either.

Animation: 3

Animation done by A-1 Pictures is pretty simple. While none of the backgrounds are particularly breathtaking, both attractive color palette and above average detail make most of the sights a pleasure to watch. There is a moderate variety of sights and all of them are realistic for the most part, thus making the show a little bit dull if you are one for imaginative fantasy like sceneries.

Character designs, on the other hand, are of surprisingly low quality when compared to the backgrounds. For starters, everyone is forced to look really realistic.. and really plain at the time. I had trouble telling people apart, and I’m pretty sure you will too. Not to mention that none of the cast look particularly attractive or cool either, you’ll actually end up mixing your main guys with the background extras a lot. Detail put into faces is not exactly high level and there is some deformation going on here and there. Some episodes near the middle drop in quality even further offering you nothing but a sight for sore eyes. Being that dull character designs blend in the backgrounds well. Unfortunately, sometimes they blend into them so well you will have trouble noticing them, and again, that’s not a particularly good sign, is it? Fluidity is nothing to get excited about either, you wont see any impressing sights, nor anything choppy enough to raise your eyebrows. It just flows through in the average way you’d expect from its average planning and boring battle choreography. In-betweens are indeed here, but don’t really offer anything particularly worth noting.

Sound: 3

Energetic OP song Yakusoku by Mucc is great, probably much better than the show deserves. It’s nice to listen to, it fires you up, and the allegorical imagery which follows it looks awesome. ED Mirai e by Himeka, while not as cool as the OP, is still a nice relaxing song fit quite well for the closure of the show. Background music is likely the best thing Senkou no Night Raid has to offer as it spurts a variety of nice classical instrumental songs which can please you more than the actual action on the screen. However, while many scenes are indeed imbued by the music very well, there are way too many moments spent in silence or wasted on bland themes I can’t even recall. Nonetheless I wouldn’t mind putting some of the instrumental pieces this show offers into my mp3 player, some are really nice.

Japanese voice-acting is moderate, if not particularly outstanding. What I can’t say about English, Chinese and whatever other language these clunkies decided to use. Not to mention that pronunciation sometimes gets so bad you have to read Japanese subtitles despite being better at the spoken language than the actual Japanese, all the lines said in languages other than Japanese are completely dried of emotion. I get the feeling some of the seiyuu didn’t even know what they were saying, while others, who might have been natives of the language had so little experience with the actual voice-acting they just read their lines straight off the script without anything as much as an intonation. Really, I wish they just used Japanese discarding other languages whatsoever, I mean, you shouldn’t even consider putting things you don’t know how to use in a non-home brew work of art.

Story: 2

The show is set in the pre-World War II China where people are just about starting to understand what globalization and international conflicts mean. While it’s the first time I see such setting in an anime and I indeed was excited by it at first, the China one hundred years ago didn’t turn out to be as interesting as I thought it was… Or at least this show couldn’t portray it in an interesting way. Everyone is having trouble with life, there is a lot of political propaganda going on, and short of some special army units and bloodshed nothing interesting ever happens.

Which brings me to the plot which, though in essence grand, ends up as being nothing more than a ‘meh’ material. The first half of the show is filled by hardly interesting episodic fillers which have our main cast of super power wielding agents do something for their Chinese superior. You also get some insights on politics, organizations and society of the setting during those missions, but frankly, anything is hardly interesting. Not to mention that most of political talk is expressed through horrible English which you can’t understand unless you read Japanese subtitles (for raws at least). Either way, there is a lot of stuff going and our special unit guys eventually end up clashing with a messiah-like revolutionary, Takachiho Isao, and kind of try to foil his plans of revolutionizing the whole Asia… You have some twists thrown in for your pleasure and the whole affair kind of grows big enough to threaten the entire Asian society, but frankly, the realization of the story is so dull you’ll be yawning through half of the show. And even though big things happen, none of them are expressed in a particularly cool or dramatic way so you’ll likely get the same feeling you get from reading a history book or something. Yeah, there was a conflict, many died, many have not, political structured changed, end of the story. Creators forgot to add drama somewhere along the way making Senkou no Night Raid into a really dry and quite boring show. Nonetheless, political and social parts of the scenario are relatively well written and the show, unlike many other anime, has a real ending, so you might as well like it if sour political conflicts without hardly any drama are your thing. Though I still get the feeling the last episode flew through twice as fast as it was supposed to be.

Characters: 1

The main problem of Senkou no Night Raid is its completely bland characters. While a few guys from the cast do indeed get backdrops, none of the characters are any interesting to begin with so the particular backdrop only serves to bore you even further. I mean, everyone has considerably normal personality for an anime and follow archetypes which are overused to death in live action fiction already.

Main character is a carefree secret agent on the outside, but is actually crying for his lost dead lover inside. His partner is dead serious guy who is just.. well… serious about everything. The villain of the show is, as we all know it, intelligent and scheming, “means are excused by the goal” type of person. And then we have a little sister of his and her attendant who also have special powers and work for the squad which actually tries to catch him. Actually, now that I wrote it, I realize I barely know anything about characters apart from the fact that they are not interesting and try to follow the most boring archetypes ever. There are very few conversations in the show which would express any character traits and there is barely any development going on in their heads. Really, they just do their job and rarely get emotional at anything. All you really end up seeing is a bunch of boring leads attempting their hard missions in the plot which is already dried up enough to look like a history textbook.

Conclusion: Rated for 17 year olds and older due to profanity and violence Senkou no Night Raid is just your run of the mill episodic action show which throws in a few historical elements and some megalomaniac schemes for spices. It’s not a show you’d want to watch if you want to boil your blood, nor it’s a show to entertain your intelligent pursuits. Frankly, Senkou no Night Raid is below average at everything it does and while I can’t really call it terrible at anything, it’s simply doesn’t offer a single special trait to become worth watching. If episodic special squad shows are your thing, then Darker than Black and Ghost in the Shell are what you would rather want to see.