Rurouni Kenshin: Meiji Kenkaku Romantan

In the final years of the Bakumatsu era lived a legendary assassin known as Hitokiri Battousai. Feared as a merciless killer, he was unmatched throughout the country, but mysteriously disappeared at the peak of the Japanese Revolution. It has been ten peaceful years since then, but the very mention of Battousai still strikes terror into the hearts of war veterans.

Unbeknownst to them, Battousai has abandoned his bloodstained lifestyle in an effort to repent for his sins, now living as Kenshin Himura, a wandering swordsman with a cheerful attitude and a strong will. Vowing never to kill again, Kenshin dedicates himself to protecting the weak. One day, he stumbles across Kaoru Kamiya at her kendo dojo, which is being threatened by an impostor claiming to be Battousai. After receiving help from Kenshin, Kaoru allows him to stay at the dojo, and so the former assassin temporarily ceases his travels.

Rurouni Kenshin: Meiji Kenkaku Romantan tells the story of Kenshin as he strives to save those in need of saving. However, as enemies from both past and present begin to emerge, will the reformed killer be able to uphold his new ideals?

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Himura, Kenshin Main

Suzukaze, Mayo Japanese

Sagara, Sanosuke Main

Ueda, Yuuji Japanese

Kamiya, Kaoru Main

Fujitani, Miki Japanese

Myoujin, Yahiko Main

Tominaga, Miina Japanese

Saitou, Hajime Supporting

Suzuoki, Hirotaka Japanese

Shishio, Makoto Supporting

Ikeda, Masanori Japanese

Seta, Soujirou Supporting

Hidaka, Noriko Japanese

Hiko, Seijuurou Supporting

Ikeda, Shuuichi Japanese

Shinomori, Aoshi Supporting

Yasuhara, Yoshito Japanese

Makimachi, Misao Supporting

Sakurai, Tomo Japanese

Hasegawa, Hiroshi Producer

Katou, Toshiyuki Assistant Producer

Matsuda, Keiichi Assistant Producer

Naruke, Yoshinori Assistant Producer

Reviews

May 25, 2024

Dompa112

Recommended

As far as individual story arcs go the Kyoto arc in Rouronin Kenshin might be the best of the lot. The fights are probably my favorite among anime. The suspension around it. The way they dont drag it out. Each character is interesting and has their own technique. Mostly not supernatural stuff but really good sword techniques theyve learned through effort and training. The accompanying music is such a good fit also. Voice acting is great. Didnt care much for opening and endings though.

So why only a 9/10? Well unfortunely the Kyoto arc starts around 30 and ends around 60. Rest is just filler ... or episodic. Especially the post Kyoto arc was a slog to go through. The pre Kyoto arc still introduced characters and stuff so you shouldnt skip that. But the post Kyoto arc you could skip and miss nothing.

So yeah just that arc is a 10/10 but counting all episodes it drags it down to s 9/10 for me.

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Jan 2, 2024

NisemonoDesu

Mixed Feelings

Oro? Oro oro??

Ruroni Kenshin… a beloved classic produced the year I was born. I decided to pick this up mainly because of how good I’ve heard Trust and Betrayal is, but after finishing the series proper I had to write a full review because it would do this show a disservice to just slap a number on it and move on. I’ll try and keep this one brief. I’ll probably fail.

This is a show I want to be able to say I love, because there’s a lot here to love. Kenshin is one of the gems in director Kazuhiro Furuhashi’s Infinity Gauntlet, next to Hunter ... x Hunter, Gundam Unicorn, and Spy x Family. This is a director who needs no introduction—his work across 40 years of anime speaks for itself. His blood runs shounen, and he’s made a name for himself because almost everything he touches is quality. And directorially, Kenshin lives up to the hype. Despite having to get by on a 90s budget and make it stretch for almost a hundred episodes, Kenshin has a certain energy to it. Action scenes are never sakuga-infused eye candy, but the cuts, angles, and sense of kinetic energy keeps it exciting to watch. But… what are we even watching?

This is where I’m going to have to show my hand a little and explain that I do not typically enjoy shounen anime. Like, at all. The tropes that everyone loves… shouting attack names, speeches in the middle of battles, the-former-enemy-is-now-your-friend, all that stuff just really doesn’t resonate with me. I’m a big salty bald adult man now, not a teenager; I’m decidedly not the target demographic for these kinds of shows. I prefer a bit more subtlety and maturity in what I watch. However, when I decide to spend my time doing anything I like to put my best foot forward, so let me get into some of the things that kept me watching through the entire lengthy series.

First of all, there’s the setting. I’m a huge history nerd, and an even bigger Japanese history nerd. And my favorite period of Japanese history is definitely the Meiji Restoration. This show doesn’t just take place during the Meiji period—it embraces it with reckless abandon. Actual historical characters appear left and right—we’re talking people like Yamagata Aritomo, Saitou Hajime, and Katsu Kaishu—and most of them play large roles in the plot. The entire central theme of the show revolves around Japan’s transition from a warring feudal system to a modern peaceful nation-state and the philosophical predicament that places on the people who must use force to enforce that peace. Heavier stuff than your average shounen.

That brings me to the second strength of this show: the man who used more force than anyone to achieve his goals, Himura Kenshin. Among shounen protagonists, Kenshin stands apart for several reasons. For one, he’s 28 years old—much older than what we typically see in these kinds of shows. That age lends credence to his dark past because he’s had enough time alive to actually… you know… HAVE a dark past. And second is his ideals. While every other shounen protagonist’s ideals can be easily boiled down into something you can shout at the baddie in the series finale, Kenshin has a little more complexity to him. He combines optimistic pacifism with pragmatism.

Early on in the series Okubo Toshimichi approaches him and asks him to become part of the new Meiji government and Kenshin declines, which is surprising to Okubo because Kenshin fought so hard to put that government into place. But what Kenshin knows is that to keep that government in place, he’ll have to continue to perpetuate a cycle of violence that he doesn’t agree with. This is basically Max Weber’s philosophical treatise “Politics as a Vocation” presented in an anime for young teens: the fundamental characteristic of any government is the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Kenshin both understands that fact and disagrees with it. After all, even if he fought to establish the Meiji government because he felt it was a better alternative to the Tokugawa shogunate, would everything they ask Kenshin to do be justifiable? He knows the answer to that is no, so he chooses a different path: rather than blindly do the bidding of some dubiously moral entity, he just tries to help the people who are directly in front of him who are obviously hurting or in danger, because that use of force requires the least possible amount of mental gymnastics to justify.

This is where my opinion on this show begins to fundamentally differ from most other people’s. Everyone else I see talk about this show unanimously agrees that everything before and after the Kyoto arc is boring filler, and the Kyoto arc is the real 10/10 stuff in this show. I have the complete opposite opinion: I think the “filler” is the best part, and the Kyoto arc is boring as sin. Those slow episodic “slice-of-life” -ish bits are where the show really takes its time to establish characterization and explore the show’s themes and setting. The Kyoto arc is where the show slides right back into all those same tired cliché shounen tropes that I mentioned hating a few paragraphs ago. By the time the Shishio battle was nearing its conclusion the show had become an absolute slog for me; I contemplated dropping it a few times but was barely able to finish it.

Is this the show’s fault? Not really—it just wasn’t written for me. I touched on this briefly in my last review of Kemono no Souja Erin, but I’m not the target audience for shows written at the YA level. And if you’ve read my review up to this point but haven’t seen the show, don’t let my over-analysis fool you—this show really doesn’t explore those interesting concepts it presents very deeply. I guess that’s the most frustrating part of this whole experience for me: the show teases my brain with these interesting themes and characters, and then barely scratches the surface with them because we can’t go too deep since we’re a shounen and need our battle arcs gosh darnit.

Overall, I’m going to have to give the show a 6—which on my rating scale is still a recommendation, albeit a weak one. If I were 13 years old again, this might be one of my favorite shows. If you’re a shounen fan, you should definitely check this one out. As it stands though, this is a battle shounen first and foremost, and an interesting historical thinker a distant second.

Oh, and Misao best girl don’t @ me.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Jun 6, 2021

Resting_Bonfire

Not Recommended

Funny

Rurouni Kenshin

This work has undoubtedly a deserved cult status for its performance at the time. Many still see her as a heavyweight of her time and would call this shounen even today one of the best.

Note, I only watched the anime adaptation and not read the manga. The manga is supposed to be better and also have a different ending, I don't know about this.

At the time, he was definitely one of the more individual anime among the anime. The portrayal of the old Japanese era in which there was a lot of cruelty has given the series a certain atmosphere.

Apart from that, the ... series has some nice portrayals of sword fights and techniques, even if the adaptation at the time couldn't raise enough funds to give the fights the right dynamic.


What unfortunately prevents "Rurouni Kenshin" from passing through as a good work today are its actual qualities apart from the setting and topic.

As expected, this series had a pretty weak plot with a subtle ending fight, but practically nothing happened along the way. Most of the fights had little real impact except for the 2-3 important ones. This series made many mistakes that you would also find in "Inuyasha".

The build-up of tension was practically impossible, most of the various arcs are enormously Shounen-typical and clichéd with the corresponding plot armor. It took a lot of stamina to get to episode 90 at all.

One of the biggest problems with this Anime was clearly the characters. The protagonist has a very popular Japanese approach with the passive swordsman that you hear a lot about from the old Japanese films. The warrior has laid down his sword and no longer wants to kill. You see this approach more often than you might think, but it always depends on the implementation. Not much was made of it here, even if you at least understand the protagonist's motives. Otherwise, his personality is quite off-putting, uninteresting, and anything but personable. Especially with his usual boring running gag, which is just as bad as Naruto's "Datebayo".
The antagonist of the anime was subtle, he had a background, ambition but he was more the "cool" type of villain than the interesting and fascinating.

Most of the other supporting characters have been literal sidekicks. Without her, the anime could have been pretty much the same. In particular, these were neither personable, interesting, nor profound. The female protagonist was also only a decoration. It's a shame, especially with such an unstable protagonist, you could have built very nice relationships with other characters. This was definitely not the case.

The animations were pretty impressive for the time, especially when it came to the shounen aspects. The backgrounds are satisfactory. I found the sword duels particularly positive, they lacked an enormous amount of dynamism, but they were visually beautiful.

Musically speaking, this work only has average intros and outros, but some very appropriate Osts that underline the theme and the old days well.

In general, at least the anime adaptation is mostly a disappointment. By and large, this work has hardly any strengths and, due to its excessive number of episodes, has too much-unused space. Apart from the final arc, which "apparently" should be a filler and even an enormously bad one.
You can look at it, especially if you like such topics and have few demands.

Story 4
Art 6
Sound 6
Character 4
Enjoyment 4
Overall 4

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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