Total Dragon Seeker Takuma

My second entry for Seventh Sanctum's Anime Mania contest. You have to use their random Anime Title Generator and get a fake anime name, and then make some sort of collectible memorabilia or something for it.

This time around, I got...
Total Dragon Seeker Takuma!

(The following is fake information about my fake anime series.)

What you see above you is a special collector's bonus if you bought the fancy DVD box set with the fancy art box. It's a dinky little poster, and four exclusive Creature cards from the card game based on the series. It also came with a horrible little plushie of Takuma, the blonde guy in the middle of the picture.

So Total Dragon Seeker Takuma was a horrible disaster of a project. It began with a good concept - they wanted to make a catch-em-all-type anime with an accompanying card game that would appeal to a slightly older audience than Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh and such. But there were production problems and the creative team changed four times and command of the project was handed off from person to person until no one really knew what they were doing anymore. As such, things turned messy.

For starters, the unintentionally-veryprettymen character designs deterred most male audiences from watching it. The characters also suffered from a bad case of one-dimensionality and had zero development. The episodes were poorly-written, predictable, and disconnected from one another.

Because of these problems and more, Total Dragon Seeker Takuma failed horribly. It struggled along for longer than anyone thought it would, before finally being cancelled after thirteen episodes.

The card game that came with it was slightly better than the actual series, but not by much. It was poorly designed, unbalanced, and childishly simple. It had a very short-lived run of popularity among fangirls for a while, but quickly faded into obscurity.

Speaking of fangirls, they're all the series has. Though it was bad and short, there's still a small group of die-hard fangirls who "squee" over the hot characters and write bad slash fanfics and will defend the series' art and intentions to their deathbeds.

The basic premise of the series was that Takuma, the young man in the middle of the picture, had to go around capturing one of every kind of Dragon for some reason. It was never really clearly established. That was about it as far as plot went. The other characters, Jin (on the left) and Orenjii (on the right) arbitrarily joined with Takuma, though again no one could honestly figure out why.

Suffice it to say, Total Dragon Seeker Takuma is the ugly stepchild of Ninja Pirate Studios, and we generally prefer to think it never really happened.