Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure

Did You Know?

• Dual! was inspired by the popularity of Neon Genesis Evangelion when it aired in Japan in the 1990s, with main characters inspired by the dynamics of Shinji, Asuka, Rei and Misato.
• A Blu-Ray version was released in Japan on October 11, 2018.
• On October 17, 2023, Discotek announced a Blu-Ray release of the anime in 2024.

Plot

Twenty-two years before the story begins, a construction worker named Yotsuga uncovered a massive alien object at a job site. His foreman insisted it be smashed up so work wouldn't fall behind. While Yotsuga carried a small fragment toward the dumpsters, reality split in two. In one version, he threw the piece away and the artifact was lost. In the other, he kept it, and the discovery of alien technology reshaped the world. In the present day, high school student Kazuki Yotsuga is treated as an outcast because he sometimes flinches or reacts to giant robot fights that nobody else can see. The most popular girl in school, Mitsuki Sanada, pretends to enjoy the stories he posts online, but this is a trick to bring him to her father, Dr. Ken Sanada. The doctor wants to study Kazuki for his work on parallel worlds. After a careless move by Mitsuki, Kazuki is thrown into the other world. He finds himself in the same basement, now dusty and abandoned. Outside, he sees a real battle between a white robot and a black robot. The white robot falls, and a wounded woman climbs out. Kazuki rushes to help, gets stuck inside the machine, and somehow makes it work, defeating the enemy. He goes home, but his parents do not know him. Mitsuki follows with a military escort and takes him to the Earth Defense Force headquarters, run by this world's Dr. Sanada. After learning that Dr. Rara, Sanada's old rival, is trying to conquer this world using artifact-based technology, Kazuki agrees to pilot a giant robot.

Characters

Kazuki Yotsuga is the protagonist, a shy and awkward young man who nonetheless has immense combat ability and a strange magnetism that draws many women to him. His classmates shun him because he suffers from recurring visions of giant robots fighting in the city. After Ken and Mitsuki Sanada accidentally send him to a parallel world, Kazuki learns he is the only male capable of piloting the mechas there. He joins the Earth Defense Force as the pilot of the white Core Robot, and to explain his presence at school, he poses as Mitsuki’s younger brother. No alternate version of Kazuki exists in that world, but he later unconsciously awakens an alien mecha called Zinv, which turns out to be his parallel-world counterpart. When Zinv is destroyed, Kazuki’s wish for everyone to remain together causes a third world to form. Mitsuki Sanada is the most popular girl at school, constantly receiving gifts and cards from admirers. She tricks Kazuki into coming to her house for her father’s experiments, then follows him to the parallel world, arriving a month before he does. She is the daughter of Ken and Ayuko Sanada in her own world, but has no relation to the parallel Ken Sanada. A skilled robot pilot, she joins the EDF hoping to fund research that will send her home. She is impulsive and easily tricked, and near the end of the series the Rara Army captures her, forcing her to pilot the complete HIMC. She is attracted to Kazuki but hides it by treating him harshly. D is a bioroid, a being that is part biological and part mechanical, originally from the Tenchi Muyo! universe. The war between the EDF and the Rara Army started when D and at least two mechas were found inside an unknown artifact. Her original body was damaged, so a bioroid was built to house her essence, which appears as a glowing orb where one eye would be.

Glossary

The Earth Defense Force operates three Core Robots, multicolored bipedal machines built from reverse-engineering the original Zinv. Being man-made, they are less capable than the source design. Unit 1 is white, nicknamed Hartzenen or Halcynen by Kazuki, and piloted first by Yayoi Schwael, then Kazuki Yotsuga, and later Mitsuki Rara. Unit 2 is red, controlled by Mitsuki Sanada. Unit 3 is blue, piloted by D, with brief replacements by Alice, Mena, and Ryla. This force is a United Nations-backed military group led by Ken Sanada, tasked with stopping the Rara Army's global domination plans. Their battles are unusual: the Rara Army announces attack times and locations, the area is evacuated, and either side can signal surrender with a callsign. No casualties have occurred in this war.

HIMC, pronounced Himiko, is the opposite of Zinv. It caused widespread destruction in D's world before she fled. Only those with negative emotions can control it, as seen when it rejected Mitsuki Rara initially and reacted violently to Mitsuki Sanada's jealousy. HIMC has a link to the alien Kumu. It is ultimately destroyed by Zinv, compressed into nothing to stop it from regenerating.

Kumu is a floating, glowing bell-and-garland-like alien that advises Ayuko Rara. It has a connection to D and strongly dislikes men. After Zinv is destroyed and the worlds merge, Ayuko Rara gives the Sanada family a puppy named Kumu, hoping to learn about Zinv. The puppy loves the girls but bites Kazuki whenever he approaches.

Life Sympathy describes a pilot's willpower controlling a robot. Higher levels boost speed and melee damage. For reasons revealed late in the series, Earth's robots only respond to female Life Sympathy, except Kazuki. His overwhelming negative Life Sympathy lets his robot achieve feats beyond other models.

Connections to Tenchi Muyo! Universe

The creator of Tenchi Muyo! and Dual! has confirmed the two series occur in the same universe. A mecha confirmed in the Tenchi Muyo! GXP novels to be Zinv is found during an episode of Tenchi Muyo! GXP, which runs parallel with the Tenchi OVA Series. The hero of GXP, Seina Yamada, is a direct reincarnation of Kazuki Yotsuga, and several other characters are partial reincarnations of the rest of the cast. Dual! is so consistently relevant to the GXP novels that they can be viewed as a distant sequel. The Great Prehistoric Civilization mentioned in the True Tenchi Muyo! novels is revealed in the GXP novels to be the space-faring civilization begun by the characters at the end of Dual!. It died out close to a billion years prior to the main Tenchi Muyo timeline and performed the greatest seeding program in the galaxy, seeding proto-planets so the human genome would replicate and even seeding cultural and technological norms. Tenchi's Earth is functionally identical to the earlier Earth; when the original solar system of Dual's Earth is found, it contains a giant gas planet like Jupiter, a ringed planet like Saturn, and so on. Washu explains that Kazuki's group made such an impact on the universe that their astrals replicated and continue to revive, forming the base of many beings. Certain astrals retain vestigial memories of past lives, experienced as déjà vu. Miki Steinbeck represents the closest direct reincarnation of Mitsuki Sanada, and her father Hiroshi Manada is physically identical to Ken Sanada but shares some personality features of Hiroshi Rara; a friend named Ken Raraiba Steinbeck seems to be the other half of this mixed-up duo.