Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito

Information of Anime

Hatsumi & Hazuki Azuma are sisters.  Hatsumi can't talk & uses sign language to communicate with others.  On Hatsumi's 16th birthday, she suddenly disappeared from this world.  A strange small chubby yellow bird named Ken-chan comes in & says to himself that he was too late to get Eve.  Hazuki threatens Ken-chan to take her to Hatsumi who is know as Eve when she finds out that Hatsumi is no longer in this world.  Together with a Lilith, they travel to different worlds to find Eve.

Storyline (CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Below is a summary of the storyline I've seen.  This section does contain some spoilers.  If you haven't seen the series yet & don't want to be spoiled, skip this section.  If you want to know the story & want to see how I viewed it, read on.

Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito involves Hazuki, Lilith, & Ken-chan travelling to different worlds to find Eve.  To do that, they use Lilith's power to travel to different worlds by books.  Lilith is the manager/caretaker of the Great Library.  The Great Library contains books of different worlds in the universe, so Lilith oversees them. 

Hazuki learns from Lilith that Hatsumi's real name is Eve, who is one of the caretakers of the Great Library.  Eve travels to different worlds every time & goes under different names in each world.  In one world, a boy named Gargantua met Eve for the first time when he was a young boy ten years ago.  Eve was known as Jill there.  He was so much in love with her that he couldn't express his emotions & only wanted her for himself.  He would do anything to have Eve.  Now that he's grown up, he too is searching for Eve for hundreds of years now.  However, he doesn't remember Jill.  Mentioning her name & recalling his memories triggers some pain to his head.

Later in the show, we learn how Gargantua started his search for Eve by making a sacrifice to summon Lilith to grant him a wish.  That wish for eternal life.  However, that changed when Lilith unlocked his sealed memories & gave him a world that he created.  He sealed in his own world, he is determined to find Eve.

Near the end of the show, Hazuki & Gargantua's party met at the Space Hall & finally found Eve.  Eve notices the trouble she caused when Hazuki & Gargantua are verbally fighting.  Eve fits this by sending Gargantua back to his world as he realizes that he doesn't need Eve in his life.  For Hazuki, Eve creates a final moment for her as a dream & erases her memory of Hatsumi.  However, Eve promises to come back as Hazuki's future daughter.  Even though Hazuki forgets about Eve, she doesn't know why she knows her 1st child will be a girl named Hatsumi.  With everything solved, Eve returns to the universal library with Lilith.

My Personal Review

Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito is your basic "travelling around different worlds" type of anime.  As a side note, this is a yuri type of anime; girl love girl.  If that's not your thing, I would suggest staying away from this as it happens quite a lot.  Also, it does have some scenes with sexual content with no sex or detailed nudity involved; mainly ecchi or soft porn.  Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabitito is based on an adventure game by the way.

Animation

Although it's pretty old now, I really like the character designs of the girls in terms of their faces.  Those are my kind of faces that I can dig.  The eyes look sharp in appearance & are quite large but not to the point that it's too big.  The designer is Carnelian & he does a lot of work with ero-game companies or companies that have ecchi or involved.  So, you can except some sexy clothing designs or nice body proportions.

The colours are colourful on the characters, but dull on the backgrounds.  The tones are well balanced that it almost looks like artwork instead.  But when white or whitish blue colours appear on both the background & characters, they tend to clash.  You can't see the characters well when this happens.  It usually occurs on the faces.  The same applies to dark or black colours as well.  However, I felt the character designs are much better than the backgrounds in terms of the quality of the drawings.

The animation movement is pretty good.  It was smooth, flowing & realistic.  No strange sudden movements can be found here like superhuman powers or speed.

Sound       

The sound effects are quite realistic & very cute at times.  These cute sounds usually come from Lilith going lovey dovey on Hazuki & Ken-chan getting punished.  The volume level is set very to tell the difference of where the sounds are located distance wise.

The seiyuus are pretty good.  They give off the energy & emotions of their characters that you can feel for them or hate them.

The music here are based on the theme of the worlds travelled. They are quite soft at times & set the mood okay at times.  I didn't like the opening theme much because of the singer's voice.  It was pretty high pitched for me.  The volume level overall is reasonable.

Story

The storyline is basically travelling to different worlds, but with some interesting elements.  You get to see both sides of each group of understanding why they want to find Eve.  There is even a narrator that sets up the storylines & makes them flow nicely.  However, there are times where I felt a bit bored watching this show.  It's probably becomes the worlds aren't interesting enough because of the staying length that the characters have.  Also, after watching more of the show, the storyline seems to jump around too much.  Although the narrator mentions this sudden change, it will loses that tension that was built up in that world as we move to the next.  It could be a continuation of the other party or a totally new story.  Luckily, this show isn't too long & is set at 13 episodes.  However, it should have been shorter.

The ending was very confusing.  Hatsuki's fading memory where everything goes back to the day before Hatsumi's birthday was strange.  Hatsuki knew what to expect, but it felt like deja vu instead where she just did things the same as normal.  Because Hatsuki's ending was almost the entire last episode, I think it dragged too much & that's where the confusion laid.  Also, the episode was titled "Lilith", but I didn't see any story about Lilith.  Only a very small portion of it.  It was mainly Hatsuki.

Another thing about Hatsuki is about her sword skills.  Her looks does give her that tomboy killing instinct, but it would have been nice for the show to tell us how she got those skills.  It looks so unnatural based on her technique & ability.  Showing us this from square one was nice to draw some attention, but explaining it would be better.

Overall Conclusion

Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito is something you should watch during your free spare time.  It has a lot of nice character designs, but the story isn't too strong to grab my attention with.  And the yuri factor may have driven me away from watching it.  I would recommend watching this show if you like yuri themes & like to look at excellent characters designs.  But personally, I won't consider it as a "must watch" show.

Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito gets a 6.5/10.  The storyline was good until it got to the point where it jumped around different worlds too much.  It caused a loss of drama & tension when watching a situation of one world.  Plus, the ending was pretty bad as it was quite confusing.

Last updated on January 22, 2008