Well this was underwhelming. Came for Takeshi Koike's involvement, found out he only worked on the character design(which turned out alright I guess). I liked Yasuke (the character) and the fights were generally cool especially that bar fight. Everything thing else... Meh
Long story short, it always felt like the show's grasp was exceeding its reach and the writing was never particularly strong enough to do what it wanted.
The grounded parts and the supernatural stuff felt like 2 couples after arguing trying to interact awkwardly with each other and the mechs were like a third wheel best friend wondering why he is even there. Of all the different things it was trying to do, the more "realistic" elements were the probably most interesting (His flashbacks, beginning of Episode 1). Mabye my favorite moment of the show was in Yasuke's flashback in episode 3 when he killed someone but plunged his sword in too deep and was unable to remove it and there was so much blood his hands slipped off. I was like "Wow, that is not something you see in a lot of shows, I hope we see mor- Nope back to the supernatural stuff."
Mabye the kicker for me was that throughout, I was just constantly reminded of the other samurai shows that I wanted to watch/rewatch:-
"Oh that spider creature reminds me of one of the antagonists from Ninja Scroll. That movie was sick!! I should rewatch it again."
"Saki and Yasuke remind me of the duo from Sword of the stranger. That final fight was something else. I should probably rewatch it"
"Men, I still haven't seen the Ruronin Kenshin live action movies. Saw one cool scene on Youtube so I should... "
Side Note:does someone know where I can find a list of Netflix's upcoming anime?
Edited by AbrahamOmosun on Apr 30th 2021 at 6:10:56 AM
Cowboys vs SamuraiThey do. They just like arbitrarily split up all their programming into smaller "seasons".
Latest blog update (November 5th, 2022).
x5 - I find this to be a huge problem with Thomas’s work. The big problem with Cannon Busters as a show was that it was a Cliché Storm, but everything there just made you want to watch the show’s it was clearly trying to imitate. You wish Netflix had taken their coffers and just funded a Trigun Maximum anime instead of this (although it looks like it’s going to be a single season). He crams so much in, in the vein of other, better shows, that you want to watch those shows instead. If you want samurai with mechs, there’s Kuromukuro. If you want sword duels, there’s Ninja Scroll and Afro Samurai, one being an all-time classic, and the other having Samuel L. Jackson and an incredible soundtrack.
Thomas did an interview before this show came out where he felt that this was going to make more fans of animated material than Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, which he said was too insular. But at least it’s its own beast.
Edited by Beatman1 on Apr 30th 2021 at 12:43:58 PM
What's wrong with robots? Haruto is precious and he should be randomly thrown into more shows.
You are not alone.
x3 - It feels immature to a degree to throw everything at the wall just because you think it's cool, and then it falls apart when you think about it too hard. It's not impossible to merge multiple genres, I point to Magic Knight Rayearth which manages to be a magical girl show, an isekai, and a super robot show all at the same time, and even then the authors specifically had to call in outside help (in the form of Masami Obari) to make it work.
The problem is that there's nothing grounding the fantastical elements. Afro Samurai is the big example that people are using here, but it was plainly established the world was a Fantasy Kitchen Sink and everyone there was fictional. You can do that and still use a feudal state aesthetic, but then you add actual people and no justification for the change in history, and it comes off as sloppy and disjointed.
I love all of these elements separately. I love mecha. I love samurai movies. But to quote a famous pinball maker when he saw one of his creations equally disjointed - "...it’s like saying, listen to this analogy, 'your biggest successes on our menu were pea soup, the shrimp pizza, and apple strudel with vanilla ice cream. Now you take those motherf***ers and put them all in a bowl and they’ll taste great.'"
God, that sucked as a History Fan Historically,Mitsuhide's reasons why he betrayed Nobunaga are unclear, but they range from the fact that his lord killed Buddhist monks, the fact Nobunaga made his mother die thanks during a hostage exchange, maybe Nobunaga physically assaulted and kept humiliating him, or just a bunch of reasons joined together. Here, the reason he betrayed him, is because Mitsuhide is a jealous racist.
I'm not Superman, not Batman, or Spiderman, or Aquaman, or a merman, or a wolfman. I'm not a brahman, or common, or a calman.Head musician for the series Flying Lotus is saying they want to do more with the series
. Not sure how receptive people will be to it, but it's scoring in the Top 10, something Cannon Busters failed to do.
So I watched the first episode, and it was uhm . . . I didn't like it. I was reall surprised about the supernatural elements (and robots). I would have thought the premise (black samurai serving Nobunaga) would be enough to sustain the anime on its own. We got some of that in the flashbacks that we saw, but its really confounding why more focus wasnt put on it. It's not that an anime cant introduce a twist like that on historical characters, but it needs to grab you, and I just did not get any of that
Watched the first episode and was sufficiently entertained. Hope the others focus on the alt history fantasy sci-fi aspect and ratchet up the action to Rule of Cool levels to really make this a blast.
I dunno. The premiere had its flaws to be sure, but I was way more entertained watching it than I was watching most of Demon Slayer. Then again, I'm a grown ass adult while Demon Slayer is aimed at kids and pre-teens, so obviously I'm going to be more attached to the show made for my demographic than one that I've grown out of. I'd certainly recommend this to other grown-ass men before Demon Slayer and I think that's what Thomas was going for.
The closest we get to an explanation for the Humongous Mecha is that they were reverse-engineered from the Mongolians. Which is an entire story by itself.
Say what you will about the average shounen, and there’s a lot of criticism to be had, I wouldn’t recommend Yasuke to anyone. It is, put simply, disjointed to a hilarious degree because Thomas wants to put everything in it. As a result, the elements present don’t have any sort of real elaboration, they just are, and it feels supremely disjointed and immature as a result.
Basically, Lesean Thomas wants to make his stuff be like Symphogear (To the point Cannon Busters was even done at Symphogear's animation studio, Satelite) while not understanding why it works.
Watch Symphogear

I mean, Nobunaga's portrayal always seemed to be fairly diverse - this Unskippable quote sums it up nicely:
Graham': Wow that guy really gets around.
Paul: Name one historical Japanese game in which he's not the bad guy.
Graham: Or the good guy.
Paul: Or just a guy. He's in all of them.