Seikishi Monogatari News
聖機師物語

Atonashi has Tenchi news out of this summer’s Comiket 2008. On the cover of Kajishima Onsen 8.08 are the characters of Rashara, MASAKI Kenji (Tenchi’s half-brother) and Kyaia from Seikishi Monogatari (Saint Knights Tale). Atonashi doesn’t have the doujinshi yet, but he does have a copy of the front cover (seen at left). While the doujinshi story inside is a Tenchi one (“the continuation of Noike’s grooming story”), there were concluding remarks at the end of the doujinshi concerning Seikishi Monogatari.

From Atonashi:

The main staff is pretty much in place and production is ongoing. Except for Kenji Masaki, someone other than Kajishima is in charge of original character planning. That’s because of workload issues and because the idea is to have a different worldview from “Tenchi”. Kajishima believes Seikishi will be formally announced later this year.

I’m not 100% sure if the name 剣士 is supposed to be Kenji or Kenshi. It means swordsman.

This certainly is exciting news from the world of Tenchi! ^_^

With Kajishima busy with the the writing & storyboarding, for Seikishi Monogatari (to say nothing of his continuing to write the GXP novels and doujinshi, two of which just came out of Comiket), I’m not surprised he passed on having to do the character designs for the entire production (he’d already created Kenji’s character design in an earlier doujinshi so there wouldn’t be much work that needed to be done there). Plus, as Kajishima states, the goal is to have a different look to the other character which is likely due to the fact that the story won’t take place in the TM!R universe (the original plan for Seikishi was that Tenchi’s half-brother would end up in a parallel universe ala Kajishima-sensei’s Dual! series and so far, nothing has been released to counter that core story idea).

I’m pretty sure I’ll start a section on Seikishi Monogatari sooner rather than later on the Tenchi Muyo! FAQ site since this will be a canon spinoff.

As always, thanks to Atonashi for the news!

(Note: This would eventually become Tenchi Muyo! War on Geminar in the West.)