I’m sure everyone watched the classic Ninja Scroll movie. It was pretty cool considering when it was made.

Now let’s discuss the TV series.

Ninja Scroll

It was awful. 13 episodes, 80% of which were utter nonesense.

ALL characters were not developed effectively through the course of the series. The music sucked, the “villains” were mediocre… AAAAARRRGH, I’m getting way ahead of myself.

We have Jubei Kibagami, a rurouni as it were, who’s known for his skill, but apparently has no care for the world (they never bothered to explain why or how he came to be such a person) Who finds himself having to keep a promise of delivering an item to someone.

Frankly, I have no patience to even explain the secondary characters, cuz I feel even their existence was pitiful. I guess only the old man from the movie is worth mentioning since he also is in the series, but that’s as far as it goes hehehe.

Basically you have this girl, who is the rumored “Witch of Light,” an everyone wants to get a hand on her (the reason for which, appears in the last episodes) and a certain jewel (the item Jubei had to deliver). To cut a pathetic story short, those were the conditions which made possible for all our characters to “stick with each other”

Having said the plot, here comes the ranting! As I said, it was a 13 EP series. the whole 80% middle chunk could’ve simply been omitted. If the EPs were shortened and the development was improved, this would make a decent OVA I guess, but that’s all in hindsight now.

All middle episodes could’ve been standalones since you basically had new villains, most of which were slain anyways, so you’d know that they wouldn’t be that important at the end.

Which brings me to the end: in fairness, it did quite explain a number of things, but in a hurry if I may say so. Plus, right at the very end, things get annoyingly lame, and weird. It will truly make you say “WTF?! WHY?!” or some rant like that, no matter what level of understanding you may have.

The only saving grace would be the animation and violence… otherwise it was a lame series.

THIS ANIME IS A WASTE OF TIME