Yoko Taro is a celebrated video game director whose intricate imagination and taste for the odd have resulted in some of the most unique games of the past couple of decades, as well as some of the darkest and most violent. This is to say, it is no wonder his latest anime, an original death game anime called KamiErabi GOD.App, sounds weird as hell (the trailer literally calls this "a really, really dumb story"). We know very little about this show, but the talent involved is already reason enough to pay attention.
Fresh off his work on the Nier: Automata Ver1.1a anime, Taro is teaming up with Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters director Hiroyuki Seshita, writer Jin, and Soul Eater and Fire Force creator Atsushi Ohkubo (who serves as character designer) for a unique new anime. IGN talked to Taro, Jin, Seshita, and Ohkubo at Anime Expo 2023, with translation courtesy of David Higbee.
From the get-go, it was clear that this team wanted to create something different, and keeping with the odd but alluring tone of the anime, director Seshita had a very specific descriptor in mind for why KamiErabi will be unique.
"It's like a California roll," Seshita said, to riotous laughter from his co-workers. According to the series director, KamiErabi is not made for a Japanese audience or told from a Japanese point of view, but instead, the team wanted to make a show that was as if a foreigner tried to make an anime, which Seshita said would inevitably end up being "fake, an imitation, but with its own style to it," just like a California roll — which was created in North America. "To a Japanese person that is not sushi, it is not authentic. And yet, it is super delicious."
That idea, that sense of rebellion, fuels the entirety of the KamiErabi GOD.App production. From the very beginning, Yoko Taro, best known for the Nier games, wanted to try something completely different, because the concept creator likes to "fail uniquely in my own way in every single project." For KamiErabi, it was essential to try and do something new with the death game, which Taro calls "overdone."
Though the plot does involve people fighting each other in a contest, the key was to focus on "the human nature that is in the story." Granted, writer Jin says there will be battles and there will be deaths, but the goal lies not in the violence, but in the people involved: "[The series] has to do with the reason behind our existence, more than with the game or the enemy."
KamiErabi GOD.App follows a 15-year-old privileged rich boy named Goro who attends a prestigious high school and thinks he's entitled to whatever he wants. In other words, not a nice kid. The cast is rounded out by the girl he has a crush on whose younger brother died mysteriously, an adult film star, and a mad scientist, who all get invited to participate in the titular KamiErabi, a battle royale of obsessions where the winner literally gets to become God. Oh, and every participant gets a special power, apparently.
For Jin, it was important to portray all facets of teendom with the characters: "We're talking about adolescents here, so every character has secret desires and impulses. This is a story where everything has to be put out there, where the characters aren't hiding their sins."
For Atsushi Ohkubo, the key to making the designs of the characters for KamiErabi feel as distinct as their writing was to color code them.
"I felt like doing that allowed us to develop the characters and build an interesting story, because the color palettes represent something about each character,” Ohkubo said.
"There's this idea that the protagonist has to be a hero, and we didn't want to go in that direction," Taro added. "This is about just normal people who are kind of anti-hero types. It's not like they're cool, they're kind of shady. They're kind of doing things that don't look good from other people's perspective."
KamiErabi GOD.App is expected to debut sometime this October.
