Like other forms of media, there are many types of stories to be found in anime, including love comedy, various kinds of romance story (love triangles, yuri, yaoi), and of course plenty of hard-core sci-fi action. There’s also a healthy traditional of “alternate history” to be found in anime, such as The Ambition of Oda Nobuna, classical Japanese history remixed with cute moe girls; Koihime Musou, a reworking of the Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms in eroge form; Strike Witches, World War II-era magical girls (?) fighting aliens with the power of pantsu; and Muv-Luv, in which humans reach the moon in 1967 only to find a murderous race of aliens who then invade Earth over several decades. I recently started watching Hyakka Ryouran: Samurai Bride, the sequel to the fan service-laden Samurai Girls. The story is set in a steam-punk — or more accurately, “Edo-punk” — world in which the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate never relinquished power and the era of Bushido never ended. The show itself can be summed up as Queen’s Blade with samurai swords and lots of ecchi jokes, but the stylized world they create is surprisingly deep and interesting. Our upcoming Nitroplus eroge Hanachirasu is another example of alternate history, set in a world in which the atomic bomb was not completed in time to force Japan to surrender, resulting in Kyushu and Hokkaido being occupied by the U.S. and the Soviet Union permanently. When guns are banned from Tokyo, mega-corporations are forced to hire sword-wielding mercenaries to protect their interests.
Samurai Bride is an alternate world of sword-wielding girls.
