The H*** Did I Watch? Onmyo Kaiten Re:Birth Verse

Before I explain Onmyo Kaiten Re:Birth Verse, I have to establish my credentials. Why is that? Because Onmyo Kaiten Re:Birth Verse is what happens when someone takes popular concepts, throws a unique spin on them, and then crams the mixture into firecrackers and detonates them over your house. Which is to say it’s loud, colorful, and familiar.

I’ve watched mecha since Evangelion and its existential homages. I’m familiar with fantasy, isekai, romance, and horror anime, as well as visual novels. My biggest weakness is Japanese history, where I’m lucky to recognize the occasional famous person or event.

What do these have to do with Onmyo Kaiten Re:Birth Verse? Come along for this insane ride, and I’ll answer that while I try to understand what the hell I watched this season.

Onmyo Kaiten: Slow Starter

The anime begins with protagonist Takeru running from monsters and then waking up. Imagining the danger was a dream, he heads home. Except on the road, he spots the cute pet of a girl who saved him in his dream, and it’s about to be hit by a truck. The truck misses, but Takeru goes over the cliff and falls into another world anyway.

Quickly introducing Oni (monsters who appear from another dimension), the Onmyo who fight them in their mechs, and that Takeru isn’t put into stasis by the Oni, unlike all their other victims, Onmyo Kaiten pretends to be a generic mecha anime for an episode. Then Takeru dies. Takeru now has a new mission after reviving at the location where he had entered the world. The girl, Tsukimiya, who saved him in his dreams, died too. This time, he’ll save her.

Takeru’s a larger-than-life character. He shouts, runs into danger, and claims different family mottoes whenever he needs to give advice. He learns that Onmyo use magic to control their mechs and learns their magic-technology. It turns out that he has powers these people have never seen, so he’s recruited to stop the Oni threat. He fails, of course, but he has resets, so he doesn’t mind.

Revelations Never Stop

While Onmyo Kaiten Re:Birth Verse has elements obviously inspired by a dozen or more anime, and probably has even more inspirations that are more niche than Re:Zero (NSFW) or Japanese history (more on that in a moment), it never stops with the crazy reveals to shake them up. From the fact that the futuristic realm Takeru finds himself in seems to be in the past, to the leader of the city being Abe no Seimei — the most famous onmyōji, who pops up in Japanese fiction everywhere — reveals start coming in episode one and never stop.

Some of these reveals are deeply tied to the show’s inspirations. Most are to stand out, though, rather than copying. Sure, Takeru pulling a Subaru at first feels derivative. But when the mechanics are explored, it’s to add stakes, as Takeru learns that every world he’s lived through was real, alternate, and destroyed by his failures. All those people died. Yet somehow that reveal isn’t even the last about his reincarnations, let alone the setting as a whole.

The issue is that these reveals come slow and then speed up. So, for five episodes, Onmyo Kaiten feels like a derivative, slow, mecha-isekai mash-up. You have to watch six episodes to start the actual conflict. Seven to get answers to shocking questions. That’s a lot to ask.

Spoiling Onmyo Kaiten Re:Birth Verse

Because the real plot starts so late, it’s impossible to give a fair assessment of Onmyo Kaiten Re:Birth Verse without spoiling a little. If you are curious enough to know more, though, keep reading, and I’ll cut to the heart of the show.

It turns out Takeru is embedded within a bubble universe with a hundred copies of the same city, traveling between them when he dies and they’re destroyed. More than that, they’re obliterating each other because Abe no Seimei created this bubble universe and has the various worlds fight each other to further their warring technology. He aims to evolve them to defend against a worse threat. There are no Oni. Those are illusions of each world’s mechs and people as monsters. Abe no Seimei dies in each world but is also an immortal who doesn’t die and absorbs the memories of his dying versions (I still don’t fully grasp this part).

How does Tsukimiya factor in besides being a cutie? She’s a digitized mind reborn into this pocket universe. Like Abe, she gets to experience all the memories of all her duplicates, which she loves. And all this is only the core of the story.

Fighting Fate Means Fighting Everyone

Takeru’s arc is coming to terms with the revelations to fight for multiple worlds. Even to fight against the person (Abe) Takeru had thought had protected those worlds, if he must. In other words, the reward for sticking with Onmyo Kaiten is existential and metaphysical angst. A Japanese teen winds up torn between genocidal schemers on both sides of a thousand-year multiversal war that is part self-fulfilling prophecy and part the consequences of dystopia. Except, everything about that sentence but “Japanese teen” is a huge spoiler.

The show’s draw is interpretation. Interpretation of moral quandaries and whether Takeru’s actions are correct. Interpretation of time travel and determinism. For instance, is Abe’s genocide of 99 worlds every century justified to save his whole universe from a greater threat? Tsukimiya is even more shocking than that, but she’s also utterly human. Her core motive is to experience as much living as possible, even if she has to experience hundreds of deaths to do it. I’d spoil more about her, except that her reveals were my favorite part of the show, so I’ll leave them out in the hopes someone reading this enjoys them too.

Onmyo Kaiten clearly takes its cues not from most modern anime, but also from older mecha that ask mind-bending questions. The extreme, surprising, philosophical turns make it entertaining. Which is why it’s a shame it takes a while to get there, and benefits so much from knowing other shows.

Finalizing A Universe

If you enjoy weird philosophy in your anime, this is the mecha show for you. Like characters with grand personalities who fight against inevitable annihilation? Also, for you. Few other shows explore the consequences of wiping hundreds of cities from existence, and what dimension-hopping to safety, knowing they’re dead, can do to a person.

But I can’t recommend it to anyone else. People curious about this show who haven’t watched its inspirations would be better off watching those. The production values of Onmyo Kaiten don’t match its ambitions, and its slow start means half the season is borderline misdirection.

So, what the hell did I watch? An explosion of popular idea fireworks that turn out to reveal complex images in the sky as they fade. Though I’m still not sure if those images — the show’s philosophy and reveals — were clever or only entertaining because of how over-the-top some of them are.

Does anyone else see Onmyo Kaiten Re:Birth differently? Let me know in the comments.

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