Kummen Jungle Wars:
This arc takes us through to the halfway mark of the series and starts off by taking place three months after Chirico has escaped from Uoodo City. He’s found himself working alongside with the mercenary side of the army in the Kingdom of Kummen. The country is an oddity in that it’s an autonomous region outside of Melkia and has managed to keep its independence throughout the hundred years war that had gone on. The country hasn’t been devastated like much of the rest of the planet as we’ve seen in the first arc but it’s a very backwater place. The kingdom has found itself now in a civil war due to the way the royalty has decided to make changes in the nature of its make-up. Instead of continuing to work through the traditional ways, the king and most of the family has decided to make a move forward to becoming an industrialized nation that could potentially help everyone. One of the princes through wants to keep to the old ways and has gained a strong following which has led to the war that’s now in place.
Amusingly, Chirico easily falls in with the royalty side’s military movement as its made up of a lot of mercenaries which has allowed him to blend in quite well. Along the way he finds himself in a sizeable camp which actually is a decent sized village that has a number of real buildings to it, including a bar/restaurant that’s owned by Gotho and has Vanilla and Coconna employed there. They managed to get out of Uoodo as well and provide some good threads from Uoodo to shift over to this arc. While they do make appearances throughout, they’re not as strong as they were during the first arc but they do help out at key moments and provide some sort of semblance of friends for Chirico during his adventures here.
Chirico spends most of his time dealing with the mercenary crew he’s working with, which includes a somewhat cocky veteran type as the captain named Kan Yu who doesn’t like listening to others. He’s the military type who believes he knows exactly what needs to be done and nobody else has a real clue. He and Chirico butt heads continually which is amusing at times but the story shifts a bit when Chirico realizes that the renegade prince is working with those from Uoodo who were in charge of the Perfect Soldier program. The chance that Fyanna survived and that he can get closer to her again is now paramount in his approach which leads him to taking some chances along the way. But things aren’t as smooth as it could be when he finds out that another Perfect Soldier named Ypsilon is working with Fyanna but he’s not quite the prototype she is. His level of hate is much stronger and when set to find and kill Chirico he takes it to heart and the two end up in a number of solid action sequences throughout the arc.
The Kummen arc is a lot of fun after how the Uoodo arc played out where so much of it was underground in dank places as well as having to do so much setup in general with character interactions and motivations. Even better, the Kummen arc doesn’t really have anything in the way of recaps or real filler as everything is working towards the story goal of putting Chirico on the path to finding Fyanna and picking up where they left off. The setting change alone adds a good new element to it since it brings in more varied locales and then we also get the mercenary crew that Chirico spends a lot of time with after establishing his place with them. While they don’t have the camaraderie of some teams, particularly with Kan Yu as the captain, it’s a small but amusing group with distinct reasons for what they do and why they’re fighting in the war.
Chris Beveridge
Chris has been writing about anime, manga, movies and comics for well on twenty years now. He began AnimeOnDVD.com back in 1998 and has covered nearly every anime release that’s come out in the US ever since.
He likes to write a lot, as you can see.