Thunderbolt Fantasy

[Buffalobiian]

Official Title: Thunderbolt Fantasy 東離劍遊紀[とうりけんゆうき] (Touri-ken Yuuki)

Tags: action, fantasy, martial arts

Original Plan: Urobuchi Gen

Character Design:
-Chuuou Higashiguchi
-Mimori Shinobu
-Nishii
-Nitroplus

Music: Sawano Hiroyuki

In an Eastern-styled fantasy setting, a brother and sister team of sacred guardians is beset by the Xuan Gui Zong, minions of Miè Tian Hai, who seeks the Tian Xing Jiàn sword that they possess. Hai's appearance leads to the defeat of the brother, but his sister, Dan Fei, jumps off a cliff to temporary safety. Later, a wandering swordsman comes across a ruined temple, where a statue of Buddha is protected by an umbrella against the rain. When he takes the umbrella for himself, a man resting under a tree nearby informs him that he must be compassionate to the next traveler he meets as a trade-off for taking the umbrella. That next traveler is Dan Fei, still being pursued by the Xuan Gui Zong minions. Both his promise and the enemy's sorcery leaves the wanderer unable to avoid getting involved. Thunderbolt Fantasy is an original production made with puppetry and stop-motion animation.

Resources: AniDB, ANN, Official, Wiki


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So it seems that Urobutcher went to Taiwan, saw this this longrunning puppet TV show that actually uses high production values, and went ahead with a collaboration project.

I watched this by accident and it's great.

Ancient Oriental Martial Arts Fantasy -check
Japanese VA -check
Urobutcher for the story -check (The first half of his series' are usually great. 2nd half can be lackluster)
Sawano Hiroyuki for music -check

Yeah, I'm in. The "animation" is very smooth.

What's crap is that HorribleSubs is using what appears to be romanising Chinese names, which makes no sense when the voices are using Japanese names.