Review of Samurai Champloo

First the positives: The show has high animation quality with badass fightscenes, a kickass soundtrack, and decent delivery on comedic elements. It is a very amusing satire on feudal Japan with a lot of style. Its gimmicky but in a fun way. I honestly recommend it if you just want to have a fun time. This anime delivers. Now on to the negatives... And boy this anime has a lot of negatives that made disappointed in what the anime could have been. All 3 main characters are underdeveloped and never really had a reason to stick around. It was kept very vague and underthe spotlight. As a result
the characters would often part ways with a very weak reason to come together
besides for the sake of plot.

Many of the episodes in the series had very interesting ideas and set ups
but they felt cut short and underdeveloped. It is like the opposite of
the problem of pacing. The fights and encounters with the more interesting enemies end in
2 minutes because of some cheap trick or assery. Nothing changes about our main characters at the end of the episode. They don't learn anything.

Many characters are just introduced as gimmicks and just never mentioned agian.
Which is fine but this pattern is repeated for even non comedic characters. They are just there as speedbumps slow down the characters or for plot conveniance to save the characters.
Which makes certain moments feel unearned or cheap.

Now on to the main characters:

Mugen is meant to be this uneducated carefree "badboy" as a foil to Jin
who is this formally trained moral "goodboy". It is simple but it works and is entertaining.

My only problem is that outside of Mugen's comedic moments he is a really sketchy
character. A lot of the fights he starts seem to be purely out of a whim.
Sometimes he doesn't even need to be even badly provoked to straight up murder 20 people.
Nearly half of his violent encounters I ask myself "why dude? wtf why are you doing this?". They expect us to just accept that this psychopath will continue to tag along and be goofy when
the man is a bloody serial killer.
And this is NEVER brought up despite a show trying to achieve some sense of self awareness. It is lightly dismissed as him "acting like an monkey" which is honestly tone deaf.

Jin and Fuu are a bit more redeemable. But altogther they are barely developed as characters. They just seem more like charicatures.

This could all have been fixed with a longer series length and fewer one off episodes/subplots. Samurai Champloo ended feeling more like a charming anime concept than a fleshed out shonen.