Review of The Elusive Samurai

The Elusive Samurai was an interesting one to say the least. It’s a historical setting, featuring some true to life characters which of course would be something that would keep history buffs interested in this one. To Give Cloverworks credit here, this was animated incredibly well, and even if I wasn’t the biggest fan this clearly was a quality show. From a visual standpoint it doesn’t get a lot better than this. From the unique and interesting character designs, to some incredibly fluid animation work the show just looks incredible. The discussion point for this show will always be the strange tonal shifts. I might aswell go ahead and address this now, and say that yes the tone was the problem for me. I understand that a lot of anime has this sort of issue, however I have not seen such an extreme example of tonal strangeness in a long while. It would go from images of an entire village with children slaughtered, then you would have some radiant beam craziness filling the screen completely taking away the impact. I imagine the intent is to keep the show from getting too dark, but then wouldn’t it make sense to scale it back a bit? I mean trust me, I like Akame ga Kill, I like gore, but this just doesn’t seem like the series to do it given the tone. It just feels like it’s holding its punches then for some reason accidentally decking them with the punches right after. Strange stuff.