The Count on your hand decides whether you eat, whether you can refuse an order, whether you live. In Plunderer, the 2020 anime adaptation of Suu Minazuki’s manga, that is not a metaphor. It is the machinery of the world.
The series aired from January 9 to June 25, 2020, across 24 episodes on Tokyo MX and KBS Kyoto, adapted by Geek Toys from a manga that began in Kadokawa Shoten’s Monthly Shōnen Ace in December 2014. Yen Press licenses the manga in English. The show sits in Action & Adventure, Sci-Fi & Fantasy and Animation, and it earns all three tags.
Trailer, via Crunchyroll Dubs.
Alcia, Where Your Worth Is Printed on Your Skin
The setting is a post-apocalyptic world called Alcia. Every human being has a “Count” printed on their body, and that number records one important aspect of their life. It might be the distance they have walked. It might be the number of compliments they have received. The Count sets your social standing: a person with a lower Count cannot refuse an order from someone with a higher one. When the Count falls to zero, the Abyss takes them forever.
The system that governs all of this is called the Althing. It is the show’s central idea, and it is a good one. A world where hierarchy is not enforced by law or money but by an arithmetical fact about your own body is a world that can generate real dread. Plunderer knows it.
Hina Farrow and the Legendary Ace
Hina Farrow is a young traveling girl with long light-blue hair, alone in the world after her mother Tsukina Farrow was dragged into the Abyss. Her Count, initially shown as 441, measures the hundreds of kilometers she has walked. Her mother left her a last wish: find the Legendary Ace.
She also carries an enigmatic sphere with a 10,000 Count on it — one of the seven original Ballots. That object is the story’s engine. It turns a girl’s private promise into a political problem, and it pulls her into contact with factions that want the Ballots for their own reasons.
Licht Bach, the Degenerate With Minus 999
Then there is Licht Bach. He first appears as a masked pervert groping Hina, which is the show’s least defensible introduction of a major character, and his Count is −999: the number of times he was rejected by girls, printed on the back of his left hand. Everyone treats him as a degenerate. He is in fact a Legendary Ace, one of the heroes who ended the Waste War over 300 years ago, and he carries two different Counts.
Licht is called the “Ace of Flashing Strikes” and was the first to receive the Ace surgery. His designation was Colonel. His Ace ballot Count is 5,700, printed on his long Odachi-like sword, based on the number of enemies he has killed. His Ace ability is light-speed movement, which he uses to beat opponents by simply moving near them.
Yoshiki Nakajima voices him in Japanese; Eric Vale voices him in English. Nakajima has the harder job, because Licht has to be a joke and a legend in the same scene, and the performance keeps both alive.
The Mask That Hides a Colonel
Licht rescues Hina from an Ace impostor from the Alcian Royal Army and then tells her he is not the Ace she is looking for. That refusal is the show’s best running tension. He is a man who hesitates to kill and prefers to subdue enemies non-lethally, hiding behind a mask and a reputation for being worthless, in a world where a negative Count makes him socially powerless on paper.
Revealed to be a true Legendary Ace himself, Licht rescued Hina from an Ace impostor from the Alcian Royal Army, but claimed that he was not the Ace she was looking for.
The contradiction is the point.
Ballots, the Althing and 300 Years of Conspiracy
Hina’s journey brings her into contact with influential factions inside Alcia, and with a history and conspiracy three centuries deep, tied to the Althing, the mystery of the Legendary Aces, and the fate of the world. The Ballots are the connective tissue. Hina’s mother entrusted her with one of the original seven, and the show treats that inheritance as both a gift and a target.
The cast around the leads is small but functional. Ari Ozawa voices Linn May, Aoi Ichikawa voices Pele, and Shizuka Itoh voices Nana. Rina Honnizumi plays Hina in Japanese, with Sarah Wiedenheft in English.
Why the Count Mechanic Works
Here is what the show gets right, and it is not the fights. It is the arithmetic. A Count is legible, personal and cruel. You can look at your own hand and know your rank. You can look at someone else’s and know whether they can disobey you. That turns everyday interaction into a negotiation with a number, and it makes the Abyss feel less like a monster and more like a ledger closing.
Licht’s two Counts are the sharpest version of the idea. The −999 is what the world sees. The 5,700 is what the sword knows. Plunderer is at its best when those two numbers are in the same frame.
Where the Adaptation Stumbles
The first appearance of Licht is a real problem, and no amount of later context fixes it. A series asking you to care about a man who is introduced groping its teenage heroine is asking for patience it has not yet earned. The show does eventually explain him as a deeply kind person who hates killing. It does not make that opening any less of a hurdle.
Hina’s arc has the opposite issue. She is capable — she can kill wild animals and treat wounds after years alone — and she develops feelings for Licht that are strengthened when she travels back in time 300 years to meet him, promising never to let him live alone again. She is also the daughter of Tokikaze Sakai, Licht’s adoptive sibling and another Legendary Ace. That is a lot of machinery around a character who spends stretches of the series being carried.
What Plunderer Gets Right and Wrong
Plunderer is a show with one great idea and a shaky pair of hands. The Count system is strong enough to carry a season on its own, and the Althing conspiracy gives it somewhere to go. Licht’s double life as a despised degenerate and a 300-year-old Colonel is the emotional core, and it holds.
What drags is the execution around the edges: the introduction of its male lead, a heroine whose backstory does more work than her present-tense agency, and a plot that occasionally mistakes new factions for momentum. None of that sinks the series. All of it keeps it from being more than very good.
The audience score on TMDB sits at 8.3 out of 10 from 792 votes, and that feels right. This is a series that rewards the viewer who stays past the opening episodes and accepts the arithmetic on its own terms.
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