Sakugan Episode 1 Streaming Review

Date: 2021 August 04 19:40

Posted by Joe

New anime Sakugan is due to hit streaming service Crunchyroll in October 2021. If you want to catch episode 1 early , the world premiere of Sakugan will stream at Virtual Crunchyroll Expo.

The good folks at Crunchyroll gave us access to a screening copy of Sakugan to review. So read on if you want to know about the show!

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Sakugan is the latest show to be streamed on Crunchyroll soon. We were lucky enough to get access a screener preview from Crunchyroll.



The show is produced by Satelight who have done a variety of shows, such as Log Horizon, co-producing Somali and the Forest Spirit.

Sakugan is set an a futuristic world, where people live in what we assume are underground colonies. It follows the adventures of Memempu, a genius 9 year old girl inventor college graduate and her father Gagumber. The pair work together in an industrial mining robot. Memempu longs for more, she craves adventures and wants to be "marker", who goes exploring and mapping the spaces between the colonies while avoiding the large monsters in the caverns in a place known as Underworld.

The show starts without explanation. We're throw into the densely packed colony city of Pinyin and throughout the episode details of the world are slowly revealed to us. It feels refreshing as things aren't spelt out, the world is established and the conversations between various characters reveal what we need to know about the show's setting.

The dynamic between main characters Memempu and Gagumber works well with the bickering daughter and Dad team.

The animation quality is good and it feels like there is more to come. The mining mechs have that industrial feel, like they could be real machines working on a construction site or mine, while the Marker bots feel racier. The legendary Shoji Kawamori did the monster design for this show (that's right not mech design, monster design) and we're looking forward to seeing more of them.

While most of the show has the classic 2D feel, the mechs and monsters are CGI. It works well in this case as it's not jarring.

The show mixes comedy and action well, but it's clear there's also an element of real danger too. At times the bickering between Memempu and Gagumber almost felt like a Studio Trigger show, but the humour is more subdued. It shares an underground location like Gurren Lagann, but it never really goes that over the top.

The first episode gets off to a good start and it leaves us wanting more. We've only seen the first episode, but while it gets started we'd probably recommend seeing the first and second episode together, as the show just gets warmed up explaining the world and setting the scenario for the rest of the season.

Sakugan ticks all the boxes, it's well animated, it's got an interesting concept, good character dynamics and back story. Yet it all feels strangely familiar, maybe we've just watched too much anime, but we're not sure if this will be one of the shows of the season or just something enjoyable. We're eager for more episodes to see which way it will go.

The world premiere of "SAKUGAN" will stream at Virtual Crunchyroll Expo Thursday, August 5 at 12:45 PM PT before the series airs on Crunchyroll this October 2021.