Samurai 8: Hachimaru Den
Samurai 8: The Tale of Hachimaru

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It's unfortunate that this series was cut short. It had potential. I mean, cyborg samurai riding gigantic robotic beasts with their magical space princesses and wielding soul-powered swords?

It's a very cool concept. And I'm always a big fan of the traditional-futuristic hybrid aesthetic. Undoubtedly, the biggest draw for me was the worldbuilding, which seemed to have had a lot of care put into it, with many setups put in place (that were of course left without a resolution). It felt like we had a whole wild world to explore, akin to some other space opera manga.

The few characters that got the time to have ... one benefited from emotional backstories (of the kind fans of a certain other manga are accustomed to). To me those were the most engaging parts. I was curious about the direction the characterization was going with the two mains, Hachimaru and Ann: I thought the retooling of the uber classic knight-princess dynamic (couple with many cues from the samurai lore) into a sci-fi world was unusual and quite intriguing, and could've made an interesting story if it had had the time to be developed.

Ironically but understandably so, in both art and characterization, as well as some aspects of its story, this series feels a lot more like Naruto than its own sequel, Boruto, does. It would be a lie to say that wasn't one of the reasons I enjoyed it.

This is far from a perfect story however. A major issue the series had throughout was that there is a looot of exposition, to the point a significant proportion of the story was just exposition. Some chapters are literally only an information dump. The pacing was definitively off because of that. Since the manga was just starting, I kept hoping it would become more story-focused later on, but since it's dead now, we'll never know that and so we're left with only this relatively heavy story progression.

Another thing is that the cast of characters accompanying the protagonist on his quest grows pretty large pretty fast. They all end up somehow underdeveloped because of that, and it also contributes to bog the pacing down. The story would probably have benefited from introducing them more slowly, or shedding some of them temporarily to reintroduce them later on. But in retrospect, if this series was on the verge of being cancelled, maybe that's why they were introduced so fast...

Again it's a shame this series was cancelled, I believe it really had the potential to be something epic.

In the end that's what this series is: tons of potential that didn't manage to be realized before it got cancelled. I'd say the author wasn't effective at conveying the story, or who knows, maybe was under too much time constraint with the imminent cancellation.

And that is too bad. The last two chapters hastily tried to wrap the entire story to give it a semblance of an ending, and to me they perfectly showcase all the excitement and cool factor this series could've shown.

So all in all? I think what we got, despite numerous writing issues, and even though it's almost a shadow of what could've been, is still entertaining. But it'll be up to you to see if it does it for you or not.

Normally, a review of a manga should discuss elements of a work, but most of that has been said by other reviews already. Samurai 8 is mediocre, with weak character designs, motivations that aren't fully explored, and is artistically disconnected from what the writing is trying to achieve. You can feel that Okubo doesn't understand the story on the level Kishimoto did, and there is something missing from the way Kishimoto envisioned the work. Not all that different from the progression in the later volumes of Naruto where Kishimoto takes a back seat to Okubo. You gotta wonder if all the Zetsu art, Sai, etc ... were Okubo's doing, and it's confirmed he drew the reincarnated Zabuza and Haku. Many of Naruto's later designs begin to fall flat for the exact same reason Samurai 8's art, while an interesting variation of Katsuhiro Otomo's art, simply doesn't line up with the vision of the story.

To make it clear, I'm the person this manga is for, Kishimoto wrote this for me. That's not an ego statement, that's to outline the fact I'm the specific audience Kishimoto wanted to read this manga. Kishimoto wrote this for Ghost in the Shell/Akira/Cyberpunk fanboys who rate Naruto 10/10, and are aging up into a "daddy phase" of life and starting to think about children. That's who this manga is for, but it serialized in weekly shonen jump, competing with Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen. At no point do either of those manga attempt to play a Father-Son relationship as the core dynamic in the manga. Teenagers don't relate to how parents feel. While this element is complex and understated in Naruto, with Jiraiya being a grandfather figure to Naruto, it is never directly addressed in the way Samurai 8 does those same relationships. The same is true for the romantic relationship between Hachimaru and Ann. Until the very end of Naruto (which everyone complains about and thinks he failed at) romance is never directly dealt with in a way that says "YOU ARE MARRYING THIS PERSON" Samurai 8's entire premise is "a princess bound to their samurai" and while it's stated not all princess marry/date their samurai, it's fairly clear in Hachimaru and Ann's case that was the destined result. Except he's also kind of her brother cause demon slayer or something? Stuff like that makes me think there is heavy editor influence from jump expecting "the formula", and meeting the minimums of what a modern shonen has to have in their eyes.

Sometimes a manga exists for the wrong reasons. Samurai 8 exists because Shonen Jump wanted a Cyberpunk/Sci-Fi story, and that's the simple reality. In an interview with the editor of Samurai 8, Hikaru Taguchi even says as much and implies that Jump approached Kishimoto knowing he was the only author at Jump they could trust to write cyberpunk. The issue with this is that while I personally love Kishimoto, and view Naruto as my favorite work alongside Ghost in the Shell, a cyberpunk work, Kishimoto is not a cyberpunk writer. Yes, he pulled his work from cyberpunk heavily, and arguably Naruto is the beginning of Ninja-punk, true cyberpunk works are infodump thick, seinen level explorations of human life, not a shonen series. Kishimoto is a cyberpunk writer in the same way Masamune Shirow would write an abysmal shonen. This mixed style is ultimately the reason this manga falls flat. You can't attempt to "blow a readers mind" philosophically while also following a traditional shonen format (under the limitations of Jump editors). To make it patently clear, Naruto is the guy who shouts DATTEBAYO at his enemies, which has absolutely no meaning and is just an audible shout to imply his emotions. While in Samurai 8 Hachimaru info dumps you with his motivations. To make the point even more clear, the LARGEST CRITICISM AGAINST NARUTO is "talk no jutsu" and Kishimoto has continually leaned on the Akira style info-dump even though that's not what he's best at writing. That would be fine if Kishimoto was writing a cyberpunk, but he is writing a shonen, and cyberpunk is as much it's own genre as shonen, shojo, or seinen. It has it's own tropes and world building style that don't necessarily mesh well with what shonen jump expects, and it's the root of the problem in this manga.

If I wasn't the audience for this manga, I'm sure my score would be even lower.

As an aside, I also want to specifically bring up the manga that replaced Samurai 8 in serialization. Undead Unluck. Currently I am 6 volumes deep on Undead Unluck, which is as much as Samurai 8 ever had, and I can say it is essentially Samurai 8 without the cyberpunk info dumps. Not only does Andy mirror Hachimaru (samurai, cuts off his body parts/regens them as his fighting style, Fuuko is Andy's princess) but even the world building towards a universal God confrontation between a "group" of chosen ones. This is not a coincidence, and I question how much was intentionally the same. I'll save the discussion of how Jump chooses a variety of genres/styles and never wants to overlap manga to simply say this manga was greenlit for all the wrong reasons. Without Kishimoto's name attached, any other sci-fi work could have taken it's place. Nothing particularly stands out, even for those this manga was intended for philosophically.

Imagine working on your manga idea for four years and this is what you come up with.

Android samurai hackers in space with epic gamer shut-in as a protagonist. No, this isn't a B movie idea, this is the basic plot of Samurai 8.

From start, this manga feels like the reader is missing a chunk of information, like it's a sequel or a spin-off set in a world we should already be familiar with. The story is chaotic, confusing, all over the place and doesn't really bother explaining itself much. Which is quite ironic, considering 75% of the manga is infodumping. This isn't an overstatement.

Awful ... plot devices are used to set things in motion and the power system is not explained beyond "reality is whatever you believe it is, yo", leaving all of the fights without any tension, as it's obvious from the writing style since the start that the protagonist will just bullshit themselves into victory every time, no matter how weak they start. Well, that and the fact that they can regenerate from almost everything. He gets literally sliced up during a training sequence and pulls himself back together like no big deal. Because that is the way of samurai, duh.

The manga is full of pseudo-deep quotes whose only job is to sound cool, intellectual and make it look like it's some complicated, well-thought dialogue. It isn't. It is even remarked by the main character few times that the explanations are needlessly confusing, though I doubt it's a meta humor directed at the manga itself.

The characters are your basic uninteresting shounen cast, most of them not being flashed out at all and just kind of existing there. The protagonist it your typical "my kokoro and spirit will make things work" and of course it's quickly discovered that while weak at the start, they actually had fox demon... wait, no, a samurai soul inside of them the whole time that makes them incredibly powerful. It also includes my pet peeve which is including a blind characters only for them to act like they have normal vision most of the time while the manga reminds you they are blind from time to time. Is there any reason for them to be blind at all beyond "look how amazingly they can find even though they are blind, so cool!"? No.

The romance of the main characters (if it even can be called such) is laughable and arranged marriage-tier. While their relationship might be explained by destiny, it is actually disguise for author's inability to write a believable romance. They just kinda like each other because uuh reasons.

The art is hard to read, especially in the first half of the manga. It's often hard to tell who's where and what is going on in the action scenes. Overall it looks like a spin-offish Naruto fancomic (I've actually tested this by sending pages of this to people who haven't read Samurai 8 and they thought it's either Naruto or Boruto). I have no idea why Kishimoto chose to just write the plot and leave all of the art to his assistant that never made his own manga before. At least hire someone competent if you can't be bothered to draw your own art. The space setting is wasted and it would make no difference if all of this happened on the same planet. Actually, it feels exactly like that - there is very little originality and variety.

But to say at least something positive, I expected the final chapter to be much worse, since the manga got axed. Yes, it was still unbelievable asspull bullshit, but taking the publishing situation into account, it was an okay way how to end this manga, albeit very rushed. But I feel we would get very similar finale even if Samurai 8 would go on for few hundred chapters more, so at least we don't have to waste more time on this series.

With Kishimoto's second manga serialization being an absolute trainwreck and his one-shots being not really great, I'm almost convinced that the success of Naruto was just a lucky fluke. I also believe that anyone who claims that this manga is "actually good" and "they kinda liked it" just refuses to believe that Kishimoto could have written something this bad.