Sora wa Akai Kawa no Hotori

6/10 Storytelling: It's a product of its time, so don't come in expecting to love everything (problematic rapey love interests). Honestly, this anime adaptation was overdue, and should have come out in the 90s... nevertheless, it has some interesting historical aspects you don't often see in anime, especially shojo anime in those days. I honestly wish shojo would explore more stories like this instead of constantly falling back on romance. There's so much potential in the demographic beyond romance alone, and hopefully with renewed interest in shojo adaptations, I’d love to see better historical, and political adventure shojo stories.

4/10 Art and Animation: The art ... isn't good, neither is the animation. There wasn't much effort put into it. Pretty sad.

7/10 Soundtrack: Probably best thing about it.

This is so violently 90s, a protagonist with more energy than brains and a love interest more horny that interesting, the girl came from modern world to another country and time and is scared fo like 1 day before deciding she can do everything, I really hope this is like a really bad adaptation script wise as it is visual wise, like really even ignoring all the dead seconds it uses for slide panels you basically can see the manga panel they are adapting in every scene, feel like watching those Manhwa 3 minutes episodes adaptations. We are into the story is cant empathize or ... even care for either of the main characters

When you adapt a manga in such a tight time frame that two episodes equal one volume of manga, you know damn well that corners are being cut hard. This means we're not allowing any of the characters to develop in a timely manner. Factor in that this was a shojo manga very much in the realm of Fushigi Yugi or Legend of Basara, you have to question the logic of trying to bring this back in the sensibilities of 2026. The terrible animation (especially whenever there's CGI) and atrocious adaptation screenplay really undercuts any of the good: the music, the casting ... choices -- at least Aya Uchida is having a lot of fun as Nakia. Still hardly enough to make up for the immense tonal and pacing issues.

What they've done turning Yuri Suzuki into a bland and shallow Mary Sue without establishing her character's quirks and strengths before she's thrust into this situation? Major oops.

I'm not writing my full length review here, since I have THEM Anime Reviews for that, but needless to say, I am deeply disappointed in this series, to the point where it's actually damaged my enjoyment of the original manga, and that is one bitter pill to swallow.

It really feels like a poor AI-summarized version of the much better original work. Will continue to watch, but this will have to change fundamentally to rise from "mid" (and that's being propped up SOLELY by the strengths of the original story). I don't know if I see that happening.

Read the manga instead and try to forget this ever happened.