4 Star

Peace at What Cost?

MVM brings us an original anime from Spider Lily and Asaura, and produced by the people who brought us such great anime as (Fairy Tail, Sword Art Online, ALDNOAH.ZERO), A-1 Pictures, and directed by Shingo Adachi, best known for Sword Art Online. The MVM Blu-ray comes with a 45-page booklet housed in a rigid artcase. It’s deadly girls keeping the peace at all costs.

In a different Tokyo, there have been many years of peaceful existence, and there is a very important reason for this peace. The diligent work of D.A (Direct Attack) a secretive organisation that operates behind the scenes, using people you never look twice at, teenage orphaned girls, known as “Lycoris” and they can take out a terrorist in seconds.

Somewhere in Tokyo someone and his cohorts are trying to do a massive arms deal, and they have managed to capture a D.A operative, and D.A are at a stalemate, that is until Takina Inoue (Xanthe Huynh, I Want to Eat Your Pancreas, Persona 5 (Video Game)) grabs a large calibre machine gun and opens fire taking out all the terrorists, except their mysterious leader unfortunately they also lost the 1000 guns that the leader was trying to get out into the city. For this reckless, but very accurate attack Takina is summarily expelled from Lycoris, and sent to one of DA’s front operations, Café LycoReco, run by its owner Mika (Kôsuke Sakaki, Ninja Kamui (TV Series), Resident Evil 4 (Video Game)) and former DA agent Mizuki Nakahara (Ami Koshimizu, Code Geass (TV Series), Persona 4 Golden (TV Series)).

To say that Takina is unhappy with this situation is a very large underestimation, she lived and breathed Lycoris, and being a top operative here life was fulfilled, but now she is reduced to working in a café. Chisato (Chika Anzai, Re: Zero – Starting Life in Another World (TV Series), Sound! Euphonium (TV Series)) informs Takina that their job is to help others in need any way they can, which could be giving foreign language to school children, delivering coffee to the Yakuza, and protecting people from stalkers, such as Saori Shinohara who accidentally caught Takina’s stalemate in a photo.

The search is on for the mysterious leader of the terrorists, all the while trying to find out who was clever enough to hack into the D. A’s Supercomputer during the stalemate.

There is a lot going on in Lycoris Recoil that is well worth the time watching, with great intrigue, and deadly teenagers versus determined terrorists that want to pull back the curtain on this peaceful existence.

Great story. Great anime. A tale of two radio towers.

Lycoris Recoil Collector’s Edition is available on Blu-ray

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