Review of The Elusive Samurai

"The elusive samurai" is a story set in a feudal Japan in which some people have rare super-powers such as seeing the future or in the case of our MC, agility so good that not even a group of well-trained warriors can get close to touching him even in a pincer attack. We follow a young boy who after losing everything, is set on a campaign of vengeance and self-preservation. The characters while poorly fleshed out and one-directional are mostly likeable (With huge exceptions like that weirdo who can see the future and is interested in practicing Japanese bondage for some reason, who tf thought ofthat?), the villains suffer from the same issues but have interesting skills, there's some interesting fighting strategies and one particular close-quarters fight that was very good. That's everything positive I could think of.

The world building is not there, same thing for character development, the animation is sometimes decent but usually there are a lot of cut corners, this series has the worst fighting/fleeing animations I've seen in the last few years, there's one scene in the beginning where our MC is thrown down a cliff and into the fray so that he can practice fleeing and climbing back up, you can see how this scene would've made sense if you were seeing some manga panels but it was translated so unskillfully into an animation that it is laughable.

There's an overarching story but 90% of what we see are self-contained stories where there's either a new ally found, a new skill learned, a danger avoided, etc... Most of the time I found myself putting the anime at 2x speed because between the bad animation and subpar story I was constantly debating whether I was going to finish it, the only reason I trudged through the whole thing was so I could write a review.

The story is loosely inspired in Japanese real events but after reading about them I don't get why they didn't just go with a fully fictional story since not much is taken from the real story other than things like dates and names, I would be insulted if I was Japanese, truly, because not only is the story poorly written, there's also a push to subtly cater to a perverted audience with things like bondage depictions, and odd direction choices like showing the concubine of the MC happily dancing in both the intro and outro when she's only seen for like a minute in the first episode before being raped and executed, or one part where the characters are playing modern hockey with some of the proper equipment, this makes no sense even if there's a guy who can see visions of the modern world, like who made the equipment and how did they learn to use it when they're always on the move and fighting for their lives?

I would rate this a 4 but I really liked that one close-quarters fight divided between (I think) episode 7 and 8.