Bungo and Alchemist

Did You Know?

• In 2020, the series received an anime television series adaptation by OLM titled Bungo and Alchemist: Gears of Judgement, which ran for 13 episodes from April 3 to August 7, 2020.
• The anime was licensed in North America by Funimation and later moved to Crunchyroll after Sony's acquisition of Crunchyroll.

Gameplay

The player acts as a Special Duty Librarian, also known as Alchemy, and delves into tainted books to purify them with parties of writers who fight Taints. Writers are obtained by entering ensouled books to transmigrate and recruit them. The writers are depicted as bishōnen, with designs partially inspired by their real-life counterparts; each holds a book with a cover similar to one they wrote, though hairstyles are invented by the game's designers.

Development

Kōhei Taniguchi proposed the idea as a game about collecting fictional characters from Japanese literature, but after talking with Jiro Ishii they decided to focus on the authors instead. Taniguchi handled concept planning, while Ishii managed world-building. They initially felt uneasy about writers using weapons, but after conceiving the setting of writers delving into tainted books in a fantasy-like library, they liked the idea. The transmigration method for obtaining writers came later, with Ishii suggesting dragging them out of books. Early on, they added writers with strong connections to others already in the game to show real-life relationships, and Taniguchi wanted to explore how writers would interact based on their real-life feelings.

Characters

Characters are based on real-life writers, mainly from Japan with some from the western hemisphere. Their in-game weapons represent their literary work: blades for novel and short story writers, bows for Naturalist literature writers, whips for popular literature writers, and guns for poets and children's literature writers.