When a portal to another world suddenly opens on Earth with their "Neighbors" planning to invade us, we will need our "Triggers" to defend our world from this strange phenomenon!
Conventional weapons were ineffective and useless and it seems all hope was lost at first until a mysterious organization called "Border" appeared and successfully repelled the Neighbors' attacks.
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| Trion Soldier Neighbor |
Border succeeded in the first battle through harnessing the Neighbor technology called "Triggers", which allowed humans to channel internal energy from the other world called Trion and use it as a weapon to defend itself from any Neighboring soldier crossing into our world.
Four years later, people in Mikado City have grown used to the occasional battles with the Neighbors and have returned more or less to their everyday lives. Meanwhile, Border and their agents have attained celebrity status among the populace as defenders of the new city in fighting off against the Neighbors.
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| A-Rank Border agent Kitora |
One day, a mysterious white-haired student named Yuuma Kuga transfers to a local school where he befriends Osamu Mikumo who is secretly a Border trainee. After some good old slice-of-life drama between those two, Mikumo learns that Kuga is a humanoid Neighbor during a battle against a Trion Soldier.
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| Kuga and Mikumo |
Since Kuga is completely oblivious and interested in the lifestyle of humans in Japan, Mikumo takes it to himself to help guide him through it and prevent him from being discovered by Border (he's basically an illegal immigrant from a neighboring war zone entering to our world without proper documentation).
Characters:
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| Osamu Mikumo using Trigger |
Mikumo is your typical anime straight ‘hero’ type. His motivation for being a Border argent stems from wanting to help people in trouble and joining Border seems to be the best way to do so given the circumstances in Mikado City, he immediately gets enlisted in the organization as a trainee in hopes to become stronger in protecting his friends and those around him.
He is an underdog character who starts off at the bottom of the totem pole in the show but slowly rises through the ranks of Border as he learns more about the applications of Triggers.
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| Yuuma Kuga, the humanoid Neighbor |
Kuga is the MVP attacker in Mikumo's team. Being a Neighbor, Kuga is already incredibly strong at the beginning of the show. This allows the animation to show some fun-filled action scenes when Kuga shows off his combat skills against higher-ranking Border agents.
Despite his talent in strategic combat, he is not invincible as there are times where he would lose a battle and had to rely on his teammates to help win a match. He still has much room for growth but eventually, Kuga joins Border in hopes to find out more about the origins of Neighbors and further develops his friendship with Mikumo as they move up their ranks among their peers.
World Setting
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| Combat with Triggers |
Creativity and power dynamics in the world of World Trigger depend heavily on the internal energy called Trion. Trion levels are basically a character’s base power level (Something like Chakra in Naruto) and Border agents would come up with creative ideas on how to shape, manipulate and form their weapon's power structure to be used in battle throughout the series.
There are some users with high amounts of Trion levels stored in their body which gives them an added advantage on the battlefield when it comes to long battles. However, it takes more than sheer Trion power alone to be victorious.
Intelligent operations and strategic battle planning are often the main deciding factors of combat in this world. We can often see characters going into a monologue of discussing their "battle plans" before starting a match and along the way, they would encounter obstacles that may cause their plans not to go according to "cake" (Death Note reference). This forces our characters to problem-solve the difficult situation they're facing at hand which adds a complex dimension to the battle scenes and more personality layers to the cast of characters (This means even the usual hot-headed characters aren’t dumbly lashing out irrationally but rather fights strategically with the power of teamwork!).
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| The cast of World Trigger |
World Trigger has quite the expansive cast of characters that only grows more as the show runs on. The first few episodes are practically exposition dumps and because of this, it takes quite a bit of time before viewers can really appreciate the story. On the other hand, you’d learn pretty quickly whether World Trigger is meant for you after the 5th episode.
World Trigger is a very kid-friendly show. Virtually all the important cast of Border agents are teens (Definitely the Shonen-type anime). The adults are there to just add a little mature dialogue but most of the time, they are sort of faded into the background as support characters, even though they are technically in charge.
The enemies are not too complex, they’re the literal machine monsters-of-the-week rampaging the city before our heroes arrive to put a stop to their destruction. There isn't any overly complicated fraction and internal politics on the human side can sometimes be seen as adults having a debate on which team is the strongest. Even so, audiences aren’t split on which Border team to cheer for as everyone can become your "nakama" after a nice long battle. Even fan-favorite characters are picked-out and ranked weekly on Shonen Jump as usual.
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| Kuga in Trion form |
Final Thoughts
If there’s a key exception to the story plot that World Trigger does right is that it breaks away from the conventional Shonen troupe of establishing rankings and forgetting them halfway. The rankings in Border matters a lot to an agent in the organization and they are accurate indicators of a character's strength and personality development.
The big negative of the show would be the abundance of slow-moving frames in the anime. There are tons of pauses within an episode, pause after pause over still shot and they usually happen during conversations from the characters. It can be maddening at times just to see a destroyed city for almost a minute before the scene gets cut (At times we thought we were watching a Monogatari series).
All in all, we would give this show a rating of 7/10 with the hopes that the creator does not forget about making season 2 for long-time fans. For Shonen lovers out there, World Trigger is an enjoyable watch for a Shonen genre and many would deem it as an underrated show considered we got some good ones over the last few years (Demon Slayer and BNHA). Thus we would like to recommend it to your watchlist during this quarantine period (it's not like Boku No Hero Academia or Kimetsu No Yaiba is going to come out anytime soon) :)
Written by KittyBoss
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