May 5, 2024
Ninja Kamui is a good anime, at least it was for the first 3 episodes. It was really fun to watch with beautiful flowing animation, amazingly choreographed fight scenes, a cool revenge story, and a simple but fun futuristic ninja concept. However, it seems all of the budget and thought process went towards those first 3 episodes. The animation was getting lazy, the plot started getting explained, but it sounded like a toddler wrote it (I'll get to this later), the whole anime just started to get boring because it was spouting meaningless exposition which was occasionally broken up by a short well animated fight,
...
or a lazily animated CGI mecha fight. This had so much potential to become a great anime, and it's sad to see something like this fall apart.
Story: [4/10]
The story follows our protagonist "Higan." Higan is a ninja on a mission to take vengeance on rogue corporate ninjas. Moving on.
Premise/Plot: [2/10]
A quick rundown of the premise is pretty simple, and would go something like this - Some futuristic ninjas rebelled against their clan because for whatever reason they wanted to "rule the world." To enact this great big plan, they decided that their best option is to join a bunch of greedy corpos. The corpos thought that ninjas were outdated, and so they made them mecha suits. They use these suits to threaten politicians to let them build energy factories. - Corpo-Mecha-Ninjas trying to dominate the world by building factories? Seriously, whoever wrote this needs to be fired immediately.
Characters: [3/10]
The characters in Ninja Kamui don't develop. Like... at all. Sure, they have a story to tell and that is all well and good, but that isn't character development. The only change in character I have seen in this anime, was Higan growing noticeably more complacent, and way less bloodthirsty, which does not make any sense for his character, because it's as if his "unbridled rage" just fizzled out. Furthermore, Emma, Mari, and Mike all felt like they were written using a character guideline. Mike is a chill, fun, honest cop who is too focused on cracking cases, Emma is a cool, pretty, tech-savvy side-kick, and Mari is a loving mother and wife who would do anything to keep her husband and son safe. That's it though, that is all of their characters summed up. Nothing changes, and nothing develops. Every other character I didn't mention is just a throw-away to serve the plot.
Art/Animation: [5/10]
It's kind of hard to rate something that is this inconsistent. As I previously mentioned, it was beautiful seeing the animation flow during the action in this anime. However, once the ninjas started to fight in the mecha suits, not even the fights were good anymore. If they had kept up the same pace they had in those first few episodes, I would've given this category a High 8 to a Medium 9, but alas, they did not.
Audio: [7.5/10]
The voice acting was fairly good, and with some familiar faces making an appearance, most notably our beloved Kenjirou Tsuda. So no complaints there. The soundtrack and ending were both okay, nothing really too special, but the opening song was phenomenal... and I mean PHENOMENAL. Definitely a playlist worthy song.
Conclusion:
If you only want to see incredible action and animation, go for it. It's probably worth it. Just make sure to stop watching when mecha suits get introduced. If you're in it for anything else I wouldn't even bother, but if you decide to, you do you.
Critical Rating: High-Medium 3/10
(If you're curious to see how I rate, check "My Rating Criteria" on my MAL.)
Enjoyment points: 0
(A 0 does not mean that I didn't enjoy the anime, it means it deserves it's critical rating. More about this on my MAL.)
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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