Review of Sword of the Demon Hunter: Kijin Gentosho

Rarely has a show been so short-changed by its production quality. On the basis of its story alone, Kijin Gentosho had the potential to really make a name for itself. The story follows Jinta, a swordsman from the Bakumitsu era who, without spoiling details, becomes entangled with supernatural affairs that significantly prolongs his life. A prophecy awaits in the long-distant future of the modern era, but that's not what this first season is about. Instead, we get to follow Jinta throughout the time leading up to the modern era, and see him develop as a character as he comes to grips with the inevitability ofthe passage of time, and his peculiar outside perspective of it. In this, the show repeatedly approaches time as a narrative concept in various unique and refreshing ways that I personally haven't seen in anime before.

Now, the plot isn't perfect. There are some narrative short-cuts, and some characters feel oblivious at times for the sake of preserving particular mysteries until their intended reveals. These are minor discrepancies however and normally they wouldn't impact my final score of a show.

However, there is a much bigger elephant in the room, and it's the reason why I believe this show is among the most wasted potentials in all of anime history. I'll be bluntly clear: the production quality of Yokohama was abysmal. The art direction was generic and stale. The animation itself felt static and clay-like, with fight scenes feeling like they were animated on a stack of Post-It notes. And this isn't even to mention the further falloff in the second half of the season: if the first half was bad, the second half was historically terrible. Most scenes were reduced to static depictions of characters speaking with no real additional movement, and even then characters were roughly rendered in a lower-quality artstyle as if the production itself was rushed to complete. Even worse, some scenes started to not even be fully animated at all, with backgrounds being left unfinished in the initial release.

You'd think this, while a tragedy, is still fine to put up with in exchange for such a great story, but that's why the otherwise minor shortcomings in the story are more notable. It doesn't help that the greater issues with the plot begin to arise in the second half, particularly with how weak Jinta seems relative to his age. It's not a battle shounen, but Jinta is actually pathetically weak for what he is. Again, this would be a minor discrepancy, but taken together with the poor animation, it becomes more noticeable to the point of being grating.

I have a feeling that based on the visual production quality that these story defects are also in part Yokohama's fault, so I think I'm going to continue the story in its original source material. I recommend as much, and while the show still has some good moments, it's akin to coal mining in order to find an artificial diamond: it's just not really worth the effort.