Suikoden: The Anime confirms 3 October debut and themes

Konami's long-promised Suikoden II adaptation finally has a date on it. The production streamed its third full promotional video on Friday, and the trailer ends the guessing: Suikoden: The Anime begins on 3 October at 11:30 p.m. on Tokyo MX, with 31 further channels picking it up between 6 and 9 October. The first episode goes out as a 60-minute special rather than the usual half hour, and episodes one to three screen ahead of broadcast at advance events.

The songs, and who is singing them

The opening theme is "Kanashimi Sae Otonabite" — which the band glosses as "Even in Sadness I'll Look Like an Adult" — by amazarashi, the Japanese rock act that has spent a decade soundtracking melancholy anime. The ending, "closed eye sun", comes from the musician and producer Kōji Nakamura with the vocalist Honoka Takahashi featured on it. Both tracks are new, and both arrive with the broadcast rather than trickling out afterwards, which is a small thing that tells you the music was budgeted as part of the show.

Who you will hear

The cast announced so far is led by Toshiki Kumagai as Riliu and Shimba Tsuchiya as Jowy, with Ayumi Hinohara as Nanami, Katsuyuki Konishi as Viktor, Yūichi Nakamura as Flik, Taku Yashiro as Luca Blight, Chika Anzai as Jillia Blight, Akihiro Mine as Rowd, Tsukino Chikasada as Pilika, Ayumu Murase as Luc, Takeo Ōtsuka as Shu and Yoshino Aoyama as Apple.

Why this one, and why now

Suikoden II is the entry in Konami's back catalogue that people have asked for the longest. Its story follows Riliu and his childhood friend Jowy, cadets in the Highland Kingdom's Unicorn Youth Brigade during a drawn-out border dispute with the City-States of Jowston. A peace treaty signed months earlier is supposed to have ended the fighting; it does not, and the two friends end up on opposite sides of a war neither of them chose. It is a 1998 PlayStation game with a reputation built on exactly that kind of quiet tragedy, and the anime is being sold on it.

Our opinion

Konami has treated Suikoden as a licensing exercise for the best part of a decade, so an anime that handles the series' best-loved entry with this much care is the most encouraging thing the publisher has done with the property since the Suikoden I & II remasters. The risk is structural rather than artistic. Suikoden II is a forty-hour role-playing game built around 108 recruitable characters, and no television season can carry that many. The adaptations that fail at this are the ones that try anyway, stuffing the screen until nobody has room to be a person. A show that picks a handful, gives them the time, and lets the rest be background colour will land. One that produces a character card every week will not.