If the embed won’t play, the promotional video is also here on YouTube.
The wait is over, and so, possibly, is the boundary between your games console and your living room. Devils’ Crest, Production I.G’s anime of Reki Kawahara’s light novel series Demons’ Crest, premiered worldwide on Prime Video on Friday 6th November as a streaming exclusive. When the trailer turned up in October, we pointed out that the Sword Art Online creator had worked out how to stop trapping players inside the game and start letting the game out instead. Now it’s out.
Warner Bros. Japan’s own pitch for the show is a little timeline of Kawahara’s career. Virtual reality gave us Sword Art Online. Augmented reality gave us the film Sword Art Online the Movie: Ordinal Scale. Mixed reality now gives us Devils’ Crest. It’s an admirably honest sales line, since it all but admits the man has been writing variations on one terrifying idea for more than twenty years, and has simply been working his way through the acronyms. Once he runs out of letters, the only frontier left will be plain old reality, at which point Kawahara will be forced to write a school drama in which nobody dies. Nobody believes he has it in him.
The set-up is properly Kawahara. Yuma Ashihara (Haruka Shiraishi) joins classmates including Sawa Ashihara (Konomi Inagaki), Kenji Kondo (Yuya Hirose) and Minagi Sano (Satomi Amano) for a test session of Actual Magic, billed as the world’s first full-dive VRMMO-RPG. Yuma is forcibly logged out, and wakes up to find the game has started eating the real world. A death game follows, in an isolated world where the game and reality have fused, and in this genre “isolated” is never good news.
Since the first trailer, the cast has grown. Yusuke Kobayashi, Maaya Uchida, Rie Murakawa and Sora Amamiya joined in September as four more classmates, and a second promotional video in October introduced Soala’s ending theme, “ReaL”. That bookends the episodes with Ado’s opener “Shinka” (“Evolution”), written by Yurii Kanon. Japanese fans got an early look at the first two episodes at a preview screening in Odaiba on 1st November, with Shiraishi and Inagaki on stage. Shinji Ushiro is chief director, Kenichiro Komaya directs, and Yuki Hayashi and Naoyuki Chikatani handle the music.
We’ll report back once we’ve survived a few episodes. In the meantime, the safest way to watch a Reki Kawahara anime remains what it always was: on a normal television, sitting on a normal sofa, with absolutely nothing strapped to your head.
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