To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts
かつて神だった獣たちへ (Katsute Kami Datta Kemono-tachi e)
- Action
- Drama
- Fantasy
- Military
- Episodes
- 12
- Duration
- 23 min per ep
- Aired
- Jul 1, 2019 to Sep 16, 2019
- Status
- Finished Airing
Synopsis
The Patrian Civil War drove the outnumbered North to create half-human, half-beast soldiers to stand against the South’s superior forces. These “Incarnates” turned the tide with overwhelming power, earning a near-mythic reputation on the battlefield. Yet as the fighting dragged on, many found that the beast within came with a cost no ordinary remedy could contain.
After the war, unsettling stories spread of Incarnates falling victim to the same affliction that haunted them in combat. Hank Henriette—once their captain and now a Special Sergeant Major—takes up the role of Beast Hunter, tasked with putting down those who can no longer control what they’ve become. When Nancy Schaal Bancroft sees her father, a former Incarnate, killed by a Beast Hunter, she sets out for revenge—only to have that pursuit shift into a search for the truth behind her father’s death and the Incarnates’ troubled place in the world.
Otaku Consensus
To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts lands best as a bleak military-fantasy tragedy, with Jun Shishido’s direction and Shigeru Murakoshi’s series composition giving real weight to the veteran allegory and the moral cost of state-made violence. Its most praised material is the early run of self-contained Incarnate tragedies, with the Beatrice storyline often singled out by viewers, but the consensus criticism is equally consistent: after roughly episode five, the pacing slackens, and MAPPA’s TV production cannot always match the manga’s more intricate beast designs at full scale.
Why You Should Watch
Watch this if you want a compact 12-episode war tragedy that treats monster battles as aftermath rather than power fantasy. It scratches some of the same itch as Fullmetal Alchemist’s militarized moral unease and Attack on Titan’s body-horror spectacle, but without the sprawling mythology or multi-season commitment. The appeal is in the contradiction: guns, uniforms, battlefield legends, and kaiju-sized transformations are filtered through grief, public fear, and the question of what a nation owes the people it turned into weapons. Viewers who like their action with gore, guilt, and a heavy funeral-march mood will get the most from it; viewers looking for escalating tournament-style fights or clean heroic catharsis will probably bounce off its depressive rhythm.
Key Characters
- NNancy Schaal Bancroft(VA: Ai Kakuma)
Nancy Schaal works because she is not a battlefield veteran but a civilian witness, giving the series a sharper moral lens than Hank’s military perspective alone could provide.
- HHank Henriette(VA: Katsuyuki Konishi)
Hank is the show’s central contradiction: a former commander whose authority, guilt, and violence make him read less like a hero than a walking postwar sentence.
What Makes It Stand Out
- 1
MAPPA’s adaptation emphasizes readable, heavy-impact action over ornate monster detail, a choice that keeps fights clear on TV but drew criticism from manga readers who expected more scale and texture in the beast designs.
- 2
The series uses a tight 12-episode structure rather than a long campaign narrative, front-loading its emotional thesis in the first episode and then testing it through successive Incarnate cases.
- 3
Shigeru Murakoshi’s series composition leans into the veteran metaphor: the central drama is not who wins a war, but how soldiers and civilians live with the bodies, orders, and myths the war leaves behind.
- 4
The Beatrice material is a recurring bright spot in viewer commentary, often cited as one of the adaptation’s most effective tragic mini-arcs.
- 5
Its genre mix is unusually specific for a shounen action title: AniList’s strongest tags cluster around Military, Tragedy, Gore, Henshin, War, Werewolf, Kaiju, Guns, and Vampire rather than a single monster taxonomy.
Fun Facts & Trivia
- Fun fact 1
- The original creator is credited under the pen name Maybe, a distinctive byline that also appears on the source manga rather than a conventional personal name.
- Fun fact 2
- The anime aired as a completed Summer 2019 TV series from July 1 to September 16, 2019, with 12 episodes produced by MAPPA.
- Fun fact 3
- The production credits include two prop designers, Yousuke Takata and Danni Zhang, which fits a setting where firearms, military equipment, and transformation-era body design all have to coexist visually.
- Fun fact 4
- Its reception is notably middle-of-the-road across major anime databases: MyAnimeList lists it at 6.42 from 58,744 votes, while AniList records a close 61/100 with 441 favourites.
- Fun fact 5
- The core creative lineup pairs director Jun Shishido with series composer Shigeru Murakoshi, character designer Daisuke Niinuma, art director Hiroshi Morikawa, color designer Chikako Kamata, director of photography Momoko Mifune, and editor Satoshi Aihara.
Studios
- MAPPA
