HATE FUN 2003! Ikkitousen

It’s Romance of The Three Kingdoms in high school. With some of the genders swapped. At this point it’s probably not a surprise that this isn’t the only anime in the last 10 years that is the Romance of the Three Kingdoms with genders swapped.

Slayers’ Takashi Watanabe directs this adaptation Yuji Shiozaki’s manga, and to be fair to Watanabe the weakness lies mainly in the source material, which not only relies on titillation as a crutch but is also derivative of other manga like Tenjo Tenge.

Future series would be handled by the man that gave us MD Geist – Koichi Ohata. And more notably, ARMS rather than JC Staff on production. ARMS’ history in high-end pornographic animation (Another Lady Innocent, Mezzo Forte) makes them a much better fit for this sort of titillating material (though not to say they didn’t get some odd mismatched projects too – more on that later).