Review of Katanagatari

I don't write full form reviews normally but after re-watching Katanagatari i am left with no choice as my conflicted feelings towards the show cannot be compressed down enough to fit into the tag section for my list... As a teenager katanagatari was a fantastic watch: cool fight scenes, great art style, unique premise, flashy and adorable characters. It felt as though i had stumbled upon a proper anime that didn't hold my hand, with a difficult ending that it pulled off very well. At the time i didn't quite understand the morals or overall message of the show but i put this down to theshow being 'deep' and 'smart' and having a meaning that is set for the user to interpret themselves...

Now, starting with the first problem that i found with my rewatch of the show: Maniwani suck. Maniwani even right from the first episode are one of the most ridiculous over the top chunnibyou villains i have seen in anime. Every maniwani is either A) meant to be intimidating but with execution that falls so flat that you cant take them seriously not just as an obstacle but as a character due to how 1 dimensional and cringey they are or B) set to die and given the absolute bare minimal time to induce an emotional response in the viewer as if they are supposed to care. Now i will give some credit to a few moments: Ho-oh dude chopping off his arm, turtle dude pretending to not care and then going for the surprise attack, duck woman with the whip getting straight up shot with a gat and penguin bloke with his magical speedy yo yo elastic ball or whatever that was supposed to be. These are legitimately the only non cringey or awful moments i can remember featuring maniwani, suffice to say for a 12 episode series with double length episodes this is absolutely pitiful.

Moving on to the shows next issue, when you have a character that always wins, you need to make each victory feel justified and earned, not contrived and forced. Countless times throughout the show Shichika will seemingly have no way of winning, yet out of nowhere will magically do some super contrived punch that ends the fight in the best way possible: whether this is defeating the speed of light samurai man in episode 2 with a tactic of jumping above him as 'he can't draw upwards' or 'aiming just for the tattoos' so that Konayuki can be magicaly saved etc. The worst offender of this is definitely Shichikas fight with his sister, who is essentially better than him in every single way, mastering loads of various ninpous, saying at the beginning of the episode that she could have killed him 200 and something times before he even hit the floor. yet Shichika is magically able to beat her just by entering a dark room as all these ninpous are apparently useless in the dark or something according to the show who even knows honestly that was utterly ridiculous. This problem is also multiplied as the ending of the show attempts to have a gotcha moment in which Shichika is easily able to defeat all the blades climbing the castle as he wasn't allowed to brake them before, but the problem is each battle Shichika faced before was essentially just as easy to win, he only gets injured one or two times throughout the entire blade collecting journey up to the ending and one of those is a fluke, his victories aren't hard fought battles, he just wins because the show demands it so this attempted subversion at the end ends up feeling very under developed as it could have been so much more effective if Shichika actually had difficult battles that required unorthodox tactics due to the rule of not being able to brake the blade but this is never the case; for a show with a literal strategian as a main character the solutions to the majority of the fights in the show are really generic

As we have started to talk about Manami we might aswell continue, she is probably the most underutilized and poorly developed character in the show which is a shame as her premise was by far the most intriguing. Shes set up to be a morally questionable character yet her motives and beliefs are never explored in any meaningful way, her only thought is simply that 'shes okay with dying' and this is the extent of the meaning that is explored behind her character. Even her conflicted feelings towards her parents are downplayed and brushed off, she ends up as an almost stoic character who's just awaiting death and sees herself as nothing more than a weapon and this is such an under utilization of her initial set up its insulting.

My next point is that the show fails to explore Shichikas morals and reasoning in any meaningful way. It raises the question as to why shichika thinks its alright killing all these people and both times its squashed with the silly rhetoric that its for Togame. How about we explore Togames conflicted feelings towards killing anyone who gets in the way of her goals or whether or not its right to kill people even though Shichika is doing it for Togame; sadly this topic is never explored past the surface and that's such a shame for a show that goes out of its way to basically kill all of its characters. Even at the end Shichika goes and kills hundreds of guards climbing the tower and literally for what, these are just people doing there jobs why is this okay to kill all of them. Even then the show goes past this and states that killing the shogunate was pointless as the next in line took his place anyway, so why was Shichika killing all these people if none if mattered and why is this never explored as an issue. A lot of people like to spout nonsense about Shichika stopping the cycle and breaking free from the legacy and all that and that's why hes alive at the end, but this is just a cover up for poor writing. If the show really wanted to make a statement about breaking legacy then shichika should have just moved on after Togame gets killed, but no he has to go on a giant murderous rampage and attempt to overthrow the shogunate and all that jazz. My point is the show fails to explore potentially its most interesting aspect which is questioning whether or not its right for Shichika to be doing what hes doing past surface level.

This leads me nicely onto my largest gripe with the show which is its failed attempt at subversion. As a teenager watching Togame get shot and seeing Shichika go on a rampage was genius but looking past the spectacle that it creates the underlying writing is incredibly poor. Its not the fact that they attempted to go for a subversive ending, it's that the execution in doing so was incredibly lackluster and lacked the required set up for it to feel justified. You can take Togame's last words in 2 ways: a) she was actually
still going to kill Shichika after collecting the blades and falls victim to her own legacy as she cant let go of her own ambition or b) shes lying and no longer wants to kill Shichika as she loves him but is saying all these things in an attempt to save face and act like this was all part of her plan. The problem with these options however is that the show doesn't decide which one it wants to go with and ends up with a strange jumble of the two. The issue with option A is that this is never hinted at prior to the ending, at no point does Togame hint that Shichika is going to die at the end or that she's going to cross him. You literally have an episode of her getting madly jealous as she thinks hes falling for another girl and a scene just before the last episode in which Togame states that she wants to stay with Shichika after they find the blades to write a map which is her way of saying that she wants him to be her partener as she loves him. So this completely contradicts option A which is why it feels so jarring when Togame does a 180 in episdoe 12 saying that she was still going to kill him as there was no set up for this anywhere else in the season. Next with option B) if this is the case which it should be then why on earth does Shichika not kill the princess when she literally ordered the death of Togame. Killing the shogunate shouldn't matter at all, why would Shichika care about that when Hitei has literally murdered the love of his life. She doesn't just completely get away with this, but actually gets to follow Shichika after he kills the shogunate, I'm shocked that as a teenager i thought this was a cool twist ending and that i didn't realize how stupid and illogical this is. So the only reason you can draw for Shichika not killing the princess is if option A is actually correct as then Togame would be a victim of her own ambition and hence Shichika would decide to break the cycle by not killing Hitei, but as said previously this doesn't work as there's no setup to option A prior to it happening so there's a natural contradiction in the writing. Not only that but the strange mix of options A and B that the show decides to go with completely takes any meaning out of the story. By choosing to have Shichika kill the shogunate yet spare Hitei and at the same time have Togame die yet decide not to kill Shichika as she loves him and also have the shogunates lineage take over so that Shikizakis plan fails there's literally no point to the show. Of course the argument draw here is that its not about the destination but about the journey, yet the problem with this is that the journey itself was warped right from the start, look at all the people who have died along the way and for what? nothing is accomplished in the end apart from the destruction of the blades, but even that surely can't be warranted due to the lives that were lost along the way. Look no further than the shrine in episode 3 and all the victims that lost their curing blades and literally for what. Why is Shichika given a happy ending when he kills numerous people, all these lives have been lost in vein.

Those were my main issues but i also have a gripe with Shikizaki. The whole part about seeing the future was so forced and unnecessary, if killing the shogunate was ultimately pointless then why even include Shikizakis future seeing ability, its better to leave some things unknown and i think it would have been better if that aspect was left out as it felt super out of place in the show, especially the battle with Shichika. You have a blade smith who knows mystical forging techniques from the future he used to craft the deviant blades, yet he doesn't know any fighting techniques to last even for a few minutes in a fight against a weapon he created. Perhaps I'm being excessive here but watching Shichika just punch the legendary blade smith and win was incredibly underwhelming, like you brought such a silly premise into a fight and do absolutely nothing with it, very disappointing.

Oh yes and of course a minus mark for not showing the battle against Japans greatest samurai for the needle, the show literally had him appear in the episodes before, yet he dies off screen what a waste of a set up, instead they gave us 45 minutes of pandering emotional garbage from the maniwani squad

overall i have to ask myself one question, what was the point. If the destination was meaningless as the shogunate just reforms after Togames death, then was the journey the focus? If so how is Shichika given a happy ending after mindlessly killing loads of people when this accomplished nothing. I believe these are questions that a lot of people have thought hard about in an attempt to come up with some smart hidden meaning to justify their enjoyment of the show but the reality is that the writing especially at the end is pretty poor.

Edit: I wrote this review at like 5am and I think I did a poor job of explaining my thoughts in places so I have a few things to add here but I also want to leave what I originally wrote intact to highlight how confusing the ending is to watch

If it truly was Togames plan from the start then why is this never shown in the show, this 180 twist is jarring because there’s no set up before it happens. Constantly we are told how cunning and ruthless Togame is yet all we see in the show is a soft girl who falls in love with shichika with none of the above mentioned signs. If this is the case then it’s poor writing for not giving that outcome the setup it deserved as everything we have seen on screen up to this point would contradict with Togames final words. I think people become too distracted and emotional upon seeing Togames death and fail to realize how poorly developed the twist is, I know I did the first time I watched the show.

Secondly stating that Shichika is ok with not killing Hitei as it shows him breaking the cycle and moving on with his life, then what was the point in killing the shogunate if it accomplishes nothing. Once again this is an idea proposed by the fans to try and explain and cover up for the plot holes in the show. Killing all the guards and all the people along the way was that shichika moving on with his life, I don’t think so. Shichika is a cold killer, for him to kill the shogunate yet spare Hitei is completely out of character and let’s be honest it only happens so that the show can attempt to set up a happy ending with the strings it has left.

If the point of the story is the journey not the destination then why have shichika survive. What reasoning is there to keep schichika alive after killing the shogunate, the answer is there isn’t any. How about having shichika who is already full of bullet holes by the time he reaches the top of the castle die after killing the shogunate and Hitei, that would bring a resolution to all the remaining characters whilst providing a satisfying end to shichika. Shichika is not a hero and you could make a solid case for shichika being a villain, so for him to die once reaching the top of the castle would have been much more satisfying. He is a blade of shikizaki after all, why destroy all of the deviant blades but not destroy himself, he doesn’t bring an end to the legacy that way. A Spike Spiegel bebop ending would have been much more satisfying here, not the attempted contrived fake and illogical end that the show actually decides to go with.

It should be obvious but why not cement the idea that Shichika has decided to end the cycle and to demonstrate his growth as a person by having him storm the castle and brake the deviant blades without killing anyone. This would give a stark contrast to his character at the beginning of the show who was a mindless weapon to the actual human he becomes towards the end of the show; bring an end to the legacy by destroying every blade without killing the shogunate or Hitei as neither would have any effect as we know the next in line of the shogunate just takes over in his place. This would have been the smart ending. Demonstrate Shichikas growth as a person and make a point to show that Shichika survives because he chooses to end the legacy, but no this is not what we get. Instead we get a murderous psychopath who butchers hundreds of people on a rampage only to arrive at the person who ordered the death of his only love and decide meh no biggy, I'm changed, ill spare you to demonstrate how cool and grown up i am (as he walks away through the mountain of dead bodies of innocent people that were cast aside without any thought along the way). Having Shichika choose to not kill anyone whilst storming the castle and braking the blades would have been unarguably a much more satisfying ending, providing a tangible arc to Shichikas character whilst also providing a somewhat cohesive message about legacy and goals. Instead we get a contrived and meaningless ending that lots of brainlets decide to over analyse in an attempt to find some hidden meaning and justify through nonsense like 'its the journey not the end' and 'he spares Hitei as hes a changed man' or whatever other pseudo intellectual garbage is spouted over the internet to attempt to defend the fundamentally flawed and poorly written conclusion that we are left with.