Synopsis
After losing a family to bandits during a night raid, Kanu swears she will not let others share the pain she experienced that night. She quickly becomes a well-known and feared by villains bandit hunter. During her journey she comes across others, who wish to join her in her cause. One of them is a girl named Rin Rin, who had similar experience with bandits in the past.

• Title: Koihime Musou (Koihime Musou)
• Series: Series
• Episodes: 12
• Status: Finished Airing
• Release Date: July 08, 2008 – Sep 23, 2008
• Producers:Dogakobo
• Genre: Ecchi, Action, Comedy
• Rating: PG-13

Keeping with the same sort of trend that I have been doing this month, this review is also over an anime adapted from a visual novel. This time, it is an anime adapted from BaseSon’s Strategy visual novel series, Koihime Musou. Three anime series were made from the two visual novels, but I am only covering the first one today, which is called Koihime Musou.

The anime was produced by Dogakobo, who have done in-between animation and second key animation for many anime over the years, as well as producing the first Hell Girl series, one of the Pokemone movies, and, more recently, the first YuruYuri series. The colors are bright and colorful and the animation is smooth for the most part, though it doesn’t seem to do well in action scenes. The music is all right, though the ED is a bit too cutesy for my tastes. The series is available in the states, but as a subtitle only release, which will disappoint those looking for a dub here.

Animated adaptations tend to take liberties that make them different from the source material of the visual novel, and in Koihime’s case, the liberties taken are kind of big. For one, the male protagonist is nowhere to be found in this adaptation at all, making Kanu the default main character instead. The visual novel itself basically plays like a gender flipped Romance of the Three Kingdoms with eroge aspects, to make it simple to describe. Here, everything takes place before the Yellow Turban Rebellion, so Kanu and the others get into mainly more light hearted adventures and the occasional fight against bandits. There is a sort of a more serious plot going on near the end that involves a character calling himself Liu Bei, but that also goes into a direction that some might not be hoping for.

Since the male character in the VN is gone, Kanu receives the “attention” from the girls as he would. Do note that this is as explicit as the Yuri gets in this show.

As for the characters, they have their own quirks and motivations, though a good deal of them are made to pander to different crowds. There is nothing wrong with this, as other shows like Queen’s Blade does this as well, though that means that not every character gets to be developed very well. There are also lots of characters in this show, which are, again, based on different famous people from the Three Kingdoms period and plays loose with their characterizations. For example, Kanu is based off the famous general Guan Yu, who is famous for his flowing black beard and prowess in battle and has even been deified in China. Here, Kanu is still a very strong fighter that is known for her great beauty, but isn’t seen that way when people know who they are speaking too. Basically, one should not go into this show hoping for something especially serious.

Choun is the gender flipped version of Shu General Zhao Yun and is kind of level headed but also one of the more odder members in Kanu’s group.

Due to the nature of the show, there aren’t really any villains per se, save for the bandits they occasionally fight and a character during the final arc. They don’t have any other motivation but to pillage and kill, and one would think that with Kanu wanting revenge against the bandits that there would be greater focus in her quest for such a thing. It also doesn’t help that they are generally pretty incompetent and hardly present any challenge to our multitude of gender flipped warriors. The series doesn’t really get a true antagonist until the third entry, but I will go over that if and when I decide to get to that point.

For some light hearted fun, Koihime Musou isn’t a bad watch though. If you are a fan of the Three Kingdoms period, or if you want to watch something with cute girls, comedy, and some light action, then this would be up your alley. The series is available in the states from Sentai Filmworks and should be relatively easy to find, along with the other entries in the series if you wish to see those as well.