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vexed_writer
Reviews
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)
Better than the Disney trilogy, but falls short of what it needed to be.
This is my opinion on the prequel trilogy as a whole: Good ideas, bad execution.
The prequels suffered from a few problems. They came far too late after the release of the originals. They relied too heavily on what was at the time the burgeoning new field of CGI. And, I'm sorry George, poor direction. My biggest complaint, however, is the fact that these movies did not, as far as I'm concerned, accomplish what they needed to - namely, skillfully show Anakin's fall to the dark side.
There isn't much to say about the first point other than waiting so long almost ensured that the idea would either fade in popularity (which it did not) or expectations for it would grow to the point that satisfying them would prove daunting for any director.
I believe the next three points are all tied together. George Lucas was never the greatest writer of his age, and this is coming from a long time fan of his work. He wasn't even all that inventive. Most of the concepts he brought into Star Wars were directly taken from the works of Isaac Azimov: droids (robots), hyperspace, Coruscant (Trantor), even the force is just Azimov's concept of a fully realized galactic Gaia. If you told me that Star Wars was originally concocted as a fanfiction written by a young George Lucas then adapted (slightly) to be an original work, I'd believe you. The point is, his imagination and writing ability weren't what made the original movies work. What made them work was his presentation. Unlike Azimov, whose works were often very heady and dry, George's version of what was essentially the same setting was far more engaging and exciting. It was simplified, and not at all to its detriment. This made it more approachable than Azimov's books, easier to digest. But this also meant that George often needed help from others in making his dialogue and plot really work, and in the original movies he got this help whether or not he liked it because he wasn't all that big yet. People weren't too intimidated by his reputation to tell him when his dialogue didn't work or a plot point raised eyebrows. This wasn't the case in the prequels. Nobody questioned his decisions and the difference was palpable. This was why we got Jar Jar, and angst filled cringe inducing teenage Anakin, and clunky forced romance between Anakin and Padme. And while the movies looked pretty (for their time), the pacing was often too slow, often got lost in minutia, and wasted much of its runtime in unnecessary amounts of setup with little payoff.
These movies were meant to show how Anakin, Luke's father, became Darth Vader, and why his redemption in the last act of the original trilogy was meaningful. However, much (if not most) of the ground the story covers over three long movies barely touches this, and when it does, it does so clumsily. The best opportunity for this descent into darkness would have been the war around which the plot circles, but then barely touches. War is often brutal and emotionally scarring. A young, bright, talented Jedi could easily encounter many experiences in a war which could cause them to descend into the darker elements of their humanity while still clinging to a spark of deeply buried virtue. Instead, the war begins at the end of the second movie, and by the beginning of the third it is all but over. Anakin is depicted as a hormonal teenager who waffles between misguided, honorable, and big sad, culminating in the slaughter of children. He goes from essentially good to comically evil with all the complexity of someone having flipped a switch, and the method of doing so left his redemption in Return of the Jedi soured. A man who becomes jaded through the horrors of war can be saved. A man who slaughters children with his own hands cannot. It was clumsy and rushed, and could have been avoided if the flow of the three movies had been more skillfully written and executed. If the second movie had actually covered the clone wars and its impact on a young and impressionable Anakin in a similar fashion to All's Quiet on the Western Front, taking a idealistic youth through the realities of warfare, the loss of his wife and (as far as he knew) is unborn children, the failure of the Jedi code to ensure peace and prevent tragedy, *that* would have been the story Anakin needed. But this is not what we were given.
I would say that the animated Clone Wars series helped bridge this unfortunate gap, but after finally getting around to watching it, I can't honestly say that that series did any better at showing Anakin's fall. Nothing can undo his actions in the third film, and the series, for it's run time, didn't do much better than the films in depicting his fall.
In the end, George Lucas is great when he has the right people helping him. Star Wars would never have been what it was without him, but these movies showed that it wasn't him along that made the original movies great. He had an idea, and it was a good idea, and he was a good showman, but he needed other people to handle the plot and the dialogue, and sadly no one had the backbone to speak up while these movies were being made.
In closing, it's easy to look back on these films through the lens of nostalgia and the absolute dumpster fire that was the Disney trilogy and see them as perhaps better than they were by comparison, but I was disappointed with the prequels when they were first released, my reasons for this disappointment have stood the test of time, and even though The Phantom Menace grew on me a little since then (but not by much), the following two entries have not at all.
Make My Day (2023)
It's the attaaaack of the killer water bears~
Spoiler Free TL;DR: It's not great, but it isn't terrible. I was entertained, and only started rolling my eyes near the end.
The Good:
The animation. I like this animation style that Netflix has been using on a few of it's shows now. Make My Day is basically a CGI anime but the wax figure/animatronic-looking CGI that usually comes out of Japan is replaced with the same style used in Arcane and a couple other Netflix projects I've scrolled past without watching. It looks pretty good.
The characters. They do a decent job on the characters. They have fairly fleshed out and believable personalities and motivations. Each character has their shades of gray, with some behaving selfishly or cowardly and others more heroically with various degrees of jadedness. They felt human, and, at least in the first half of the series, characters behave intelligently, thinking their way out of situations or struggling hard enough to make it through. This gradually gets replaced with increasing amounts of plot armor and deus ex toward the end, but at least initially the characters' survival felt like something they achieved rather than something that was handed to them by the plot.
The setting. I felt like the bleak colony world setting was skillfully established and used to decent effect throughout the story. The world is essentially a penal colony trying to make something of itself before hibernating hostile aliens are uncovered by their mining operations. A frigid climate and toxic atmosphere provide additional challenges for the characters to work around, and the story uses the setting well enough.
The Bad:
Ham-fisted redemption of irredeemable characters. There are several characters in this story who deserve to die by the end of it. Characters directly responsible for the deaths of many others or who do everything in their power to save themselves at the cost of everyone around them, and there is no comeuppance. Each one either does some token nice thing at the last minute which in no way makes up for what they did or tried to do before, or, less than that, they just sort of show a little regret or meloncholy over it and offer an apology and the story treats them like they've been fully redeemed. It leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
The monsters. So. Yeah. They're giant flying water bears. I understand taking inspiration from real life, that's great, but you have to do more than just enlarge a tardigrade, make it yellow, and have it eat people and poop out corpses. It also feels strange that none of the characters comment on the resemblance, given how exactly like water bears these things look. I get that water bears are very resilient, and that's kind of the theme with these monsters, but the animators could have made the resemblance a little less on-the-nose. I kept humming the theme song to Attack of the Killer Tomatoes every time they came floating at the camera in a big hoard, and while this was entertaining for me, I don't think it was what the show was trying to accomplish.
Last few episodes. 'Member when I said there wasn't too much plot armor or deus ex in the first bit of the series? Well they do a 180 on that in the last few. The plot starts dropping exactly what they need in any given moment near the end, and the main cast increasingly benefits from main character invulnerability. A woman gives birth in record time with no complications while a hoard of aliens apparently decides to hold back politely out of respect for the new mother? Debris falling from orbit falls just slowly enough for the main characters to escape the devastation. Bullets fired from a lethally precise robot wiz harmlessly past the protagonist on all sides without so much as grazing him. Because. Flying water bears which previously attacked military aircraft are blocked by walls of short, squat crates they can't seem to fly over for some reason. A complex mass accelerator still functions perfectly after the ground literally collapses beneath it, making it lean like the Tower of Pisa, which also happens to help the protagonists out of a different problem.
Missing scenes? The last two episodes both had moments where the story seemed to jump very quickly from one point to another with a feeling of disconnect. At one point they see debris falling from orbit and someone tells everyone to "get away from the windows." This implies that they don't have time to get out and are going to attempt to hunker down. Then, in the very next scene they are racing away in an armored vehicle, which apparently they were able to get to. Did they change their minds on the best course of action? How were they able to get a newborn baby, a mother who had just given birth, and two wounded people geared up and into the vehicle in time? Don't know, and evidently it wasn't important enough to show. Again, in the last episode, we go from being launched into space, to suddenly the doctor is administering CPR to the baby who I guess is choking on something? It felt like the scene, which must have existed, wherein everyone should have been relieved to have escaped but then discover there was something wrong with the baby was cut to save run time. Maybe. These transitions left me feeling like I must have missed something, but rewinding revealed that there was nothing in between the two discordant scenes in either episode.
Despite these complaints, it's not a bad show. Maybe my standards have been lowered by years of mediocre entertainment, but I finished the series without feeling like I had wasted my time. I was entertained, and most of the bits that really bothered me were only in the last few episodes, and I felt they were mostly forgivable issues. The show isn't something to write home about, but it's not bad.
Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
A movie that dares to be great in the face of modern mediocrity
There is an unspoken rule that sequels are almost always worse than the original, and, as you might expect, Maverick breaks that rule with style.
This movie is a throw back to a time when most of the people involved in making a movie were in the business of entertainment and storytelling. It's fun, it's gripping, it's awesome. Practical effects return to show how much better they can be than soulless CGI. Legacy characters are respected and developed rather than being torn down. The audience is entertained rather than preached to or lectured.
Movies like this have become an endangered species, and until bankruptcy starves out the media industry's current ideological infection, they are not likely to come along often. So, if you haven't already, treat yourself to this masterpiece, spend a couple of hours being reminded of what good storytelling can bring to the table, and enjoy that rarest of treats: a sequel that actually builds on and surpasses what made you love the original.
Naruto (2002)
Read the manga, watch the handfull of good fights, and skip to Shippuden
TL;DR: The story behind Naruto is great, and I highly recommend that, however, after going back and watching the anime, I can't recommend suffering through it to get the story. The juice just isn't worth the squeeze.
Essentially, this anime is the love child of good writers and bad network practices. A byproduct of the old network television business model. Each and every episode (save a small minority) are primarily designed to pad out the run time and milk each story arc for more advertisement revenue. More runtime = more episodes = more commercial brakes.
In order to accomplish this, an event which should only take 5-15 minutes to show is stretched into an entire episode or even several episodes via many, many scenes in which characters stand and stare at one another while doing and saying nothing. A reed flute plays and absolutely nothing happens. Characters also stand and stare while talking about whatever it was they may have done prior to this particular session of standing and staring. It's inexpensive for the studio because only one image has to be produced for around 10-20 seconds of runtime and little or no voice actors have to be paid (depending on if they are talking or not while they stand and stare at one another). In the meantime, we are dragged closer to the next commercial brake so the studio can cash in on those ads in exchange for next to nothing on their end.
Episodes also employ a tactic of unnecessary flashbacks to accomplish the same goal. Nearly every episode contains at least one flashback to some earlier event, and while this may have occasionally been thought necessary for a series which aired one episode per week and which could not be binged as easily as modern streaming products, namely in order to remind the audience of events relevant to the scene, it is overdone and likely intentionally in order to pad out run time using recycled animation which costs the studio next to nothing to insert into episodes over and over. Episodes will flash back to the previous episode, flash back to flashbacks from previous episodes, and sometimes they will even flash back to events of the episode you are currently watching. It gives the impression that the studio's target audience were concussed goldfish, and it mostly just serves to inexpensively fill time.
There are a number of other little ways the show deliberately wastes time with what amounts to many small injections of micro filler, but they are all essentially the same tactic: save on animation budget and fill time until the commercial brake. Characters often repeat information the audience already knows, stand and talk when they are allegedly fighting to the death, stand and stare silently, and flash back to flashbacks of flashbacks. Then, occasionally, something will happen to advance the plot a little.
There are also entire arcs which accomplish nothing and are filler. A few episodes in between the chunin exams and Sasuke's escape, and then every season thereafter (the second half of the entire series is irrelevant and entirely skippable filler). The anime caught up to the unfinished manga and so decided, as so many do, to churn out low quality filler in order to keep their viewers watching while also giving the manga time to produce more story, kind of like pausing a video to let the rest of it load and buffer.
In the end, the only way this show is watchable is if you can do so on a platform that does not interrupt the episode with commercial brakes and allows you to freely skip over all the standing and staring, stretches of unnecessary exposition, and flashing back and essentially cut the small morsels of narrative meat from all the filler fat it's marbled in. It's a bit of a chore, and you'd be better served reading the manga which includes none of these troublesome elements.
The only parts really worth watching are the fight between Gaara and Rock Lee, the first bit of the fight between the third hokage and Orochimaru, and the fight between Naruto and Sasuke. It is clear that much of the animation budget saved in other parts of the series were then dumped on these few fights and the effect is fantastic. When you get to those points in the manga, take a brake to look up those fights, and then move on to Shippuden, which, while still suffering from most of the complaints I've voiced here, is not as egregious and generally a better product.
Super Crooks (2021)
Trite and mediocre at best
The first episode was decent, but everything after that was a cliche heist plot. Imagine a promising new track runner taking off from the start, really giving it his all for about ten feet, then quickly slowing to a casual jog and never picking up the pace again. That's what this show feels like. It's formulaic and despite adding superheroes to the mix it will do nothing to surprise you. If anything, given how burnt out I am on superheros at this point, it just added another set of worn out cliches to the mix.
In the end I was bored. The entertainment value of Super Crooks is about the same as taking a walk because you have nothing better to do. It's better than doing nothing, but you know you're just killing time while you wait for something interesting to happen.
Ni no kuni (2019)
Less Than Mediocre Story With Nice Animation
Another halfhearted attempt to capitalize on the isekai trope, Ni no Kuni tries to cram a story that needed at least a twelve episode series into an hour and forty minutes.
As a result of the short run time and unskilled execution, characters often benefit from deus ex and behave illogically in order to move the plot along and fabricate conflict quickly. Why not call an ambulance for your friend who has a knife in her stomach? Because then the characters wouldn't carry her into the street, thus putting them in a position to nearly get run over by the stereotypical "send you to another world" truck fans of this genre will be well acquainted with. Why assume that killing a person in one world will save their counterpart in another when literally every example of this dynamic suggests the opposite? Because the story needed more conflict. Why not simply bring up the point to your friend that everyone who has died in the fantasy world has died in real life? Because that would resolve the conflict without a flashy dramatic sword fight. Things happen because the plot needs them to happen and happen quickly, and not because they make sense.
Characters are cliche and will not surprise you in any way. Innocent princes, kind but overly trusting king, goody-goody hero and angry shouting hero, shady advisor who (of course) turns out to be the bad guy - and no I'm not counting this as a spoiler as you'd this would have to be the first movie you have ever watched not to see it coming. I will, however, label this review as a spoiler in case this is, in fact, the first movie you have ever seen.
The movie isn't hard to look at. It's Ghibli-esque, and it looks nice, though that does set expectations that the movie does not deliver on.
Essentially, a worn out premise unskillfully executed, riddled with tired tropes and obvious cliches; a story that would have struggled to be interesting even with a proper series to flesh it out crammed into less than two hours; and hack writing that wasn't up to the task of making it work.
Boku no hîrô akademia (2016)
It's okay.
This is a widely popular anime, and despite it's issues I can see why so many like it. The protagonist and the concept of his powers are interesting, and that is the main draw. The voice work is also decent, the animation is high quality, and the overarching story isn't bad. Plus, the music is pretty damn good. For glowing reviews of its better qualities, however, see the 10 star reviews. If you're reading this, then chances are you want to know where it falls down.
1. It's superheroes. It's a bit of a played out trope and unlike series like Invincible or The Boys, Hy Hero Academia doesn't do anything to break the mold.
2. The powers. People start developing super powers in this world a la X-men and mutants but with much less impressive powers on display. All of the main tropes are covered from shape shifting and super strength to flight and shooting fire or ice. But they show now restraint or thought, really, in coming up with these powers. If you can think of it, no matter how dumb, someone in this show has it as a power (called quirks in this setting). Watching this series give one the impression that the studio locked a bunch of starving writers in a dark room and told them if they wanted dinner then they each had to come up with one hundred different super powers by 5:00. Bathroom breaks required at least twenty. Most of the main cast's powers are interesting enough, but the side characters suffer. One guy shoots tape from his elbows while another girl has aux cables for earlobes. Too bad about apple phasing those port out, huh?
3. The characters. In the first season or two the characters are all painfully two dimensional. This is the angry yelling kid. This is the goody-two-shoes. This is the saccharine love interest. And here he was the uptight, straight laced one. Oh, and let's not forget the perv, the village idiot, and the broody kid with the tragic past. Hell, one of the characters is basically just modernized Zuko from AtLA. As the story progresses, the writers seem to put more and more effort into fleshing these characters out, and they make strides toward this, but as a result of this being necessary a lot of screen time is devoted to flashbacks in order to retcon a personality into each character. Even with the most recent season, many of them struggle to break out of the two dimensional mold in which they were first cast.
4. There's a lot of filler in this series. If you cut out all the episodes that contribute nothing and don't really advance the plot, the series would be half it's current size. This often makes the show's pacing feel ponderous. At times if feels like the writers couldn't decide if they wanted to make a show about superheroes or yet another anime focusing on the idealized slice of life of Japanese high school, and rather than weave these elements together skillfully, the show waffles back and forth between these two elements, with the latter often feeling like empty fluff.
Over all it's another "What if high school, but with (insert gimmick)" in this case super powers, because Marvel is popular and anime has always suffered from a sort of copycat syndrome. It isn't all that poorly executed, and aside from all the filler, the episodes that actually move the plot along are enjoyable enough.
Watch it if there's nothing better on.
Kujira no kora wa sajô ni utau (2017)
Interesting premise, but underwhelming
This show doesn't do anything egregious, but it also doesn't do much to hold your attention. It's colorful, the animation is pretty good, the voice acting isn't terrible, and the writing is tolerable in most respects. The mysteries it tries to tease you with are predictable. Unless this is the first story you have ever experienced, you'll be able to pick out the archetypes and tropes at play in short order, and if you pay any sort of attention (a struggle at times) you'll easily guess the big reveals at the end of the season.
One major flaw is that the protagonist is a nothingburger. He is irrelevant to the overall story. He has no significant impact, and merely decorates the background in nearly every scene he is in. If he were removed from the story, nothing significant would change. Everything that moves the plot forward in any appreciable way is done by supporting characters while the protagonist whose name fails me after twelve episodes stands there alternatively crying, yelling someone's name, or droning on in some pseudo-philosophical internal monologue.
I would say that the supporting characters help make up for what is essentially a lack of real protagonist, but the more interesting a character is, the less screen time they get. Not to say any of the occupants of the Mud Whale are particularly interesting, but still.
The worst part of the show, bar none, is the pink haired psychopath character. Again, the name fails me and I honestly can't be bothered to look it up. He is one of the most obnoxious characters ever written. The story's attempts to make him a tragic figure are laughable, and he is kept alive throughout via an unending stream of deus ex and plot holes. Even if this series ever received a season 2, just knowing he would be in it is enough to prevent me from ever watching it. He alone reduced this rating from a 5 to a 4.
This show will kill the time if, for whatever reason, you cannot find anything better to do or you are procrastinating on something like I was, but don't go into it with high expectations. The story isn't concluded by the end, as it was clearly intended to have multiple seasons, but the anime was produced five years ago as of this review, and I don't see there ever being a season 2.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008)
Ambitious, but largely wasted potential.
It took me a long time to actually sit down and watch this series, and when I did I was left wondering what it was that most people saw in it.
When I first heard of the clone wars series, I was a kid, and I remembered the cartoon miniseries which had aired on Cartoon Network. I had always felt that the prequel movies had been something of a letdown, failing to really show Anakin's fall to the dark side. In the movies, Anakin's fall felt like a hormonal teenaged tantrum culminating in the slaughter of children. He went from angsty to full blown evil in a jarring transition that left me unsatisfied. So, when I heard there was going to be this animated series to fill in the gaping blanks and focus on the war that took place largely between Episode II and Episode III I thought, "okay, now we'll see how the war affected Anakin and we'll get a much more satisfying demonstration of how he falls, including Palpatine's influence on him."
What we got instead was a trademark of Filoni which I first identified from those few episodes in the first season of Avatar: the Last Airbender with which he was involved. Namely, disjointed, episodic fluff which barely advances the overall plot. Each episode is largely self-contained and irrelevant. The characters are no different by the end of each than they were at the start, and the overarching plot of the ongoing war has either stood still or barely advanced. It felt like a Saturday morning cartoon whose purpose was to entertain for 30 minutes without doing anything that might prevent them from making episodes indefinitely (like advance the plot toward some kind of conclusion).
As a result, the Clone Wars early seasons accomplished very little despite the number of episodes it showcased. Anakin is shown as a typical hero, and though his character is a vast improvement over the edgy teen depiction the movies gave us, there is very little time spent fleshing out his fall to the dark side. The vast majority of the series is spent telling the story of the clones instead. They are given much more personality than in the movies, which isn't a bad thing per se, but it does cause certain narrative problems later on. It also spends a great deal of time showcasing certain original characters this show invented, such as Anakin's never before seen padawan Ahsoka Tano, a bounty hunter named Cad Bane, and a pirate who's name fails me. These characters are fine in their own right, but the series suffers a problem with its OC cast that I typically associate with amateurish fanfiction, and that's that they often steal the spotlight from the legacy characters. By the end of the series, we are well acquainted with these characters and their capabilities and motivations, despite their mysterious absence in the films. The series then has to jump through hoops to explain these absences which often feels clunky and unnecessary. Worse, by the end of the series, I felt that Anakin's story had been no better fleshed out than it was in the movies. He still goes from good to bad in .6 seconds. It felt like the writing team got distracted by their original characters, then remembered that they were supposed to be telling another story at the last second.
Which brings us to the last couple seasons. The second to last season (the last to be hosted by Cartoon Network) was the only point in the story that any effort to tell a cohesive overall story manifested. As I understand it, the series had been put on the chopping board, and this motivated those involved to put more effort in that previously in an attempt to save it. Most of this storytelling focused on Ahsoka and the clones, and while it was decent, it wasn't doing what the series ought to have done and focused on enhancing the central story of Anakin and his fall to the dark side. So, while it was more interesting than the proceeding seasons, it still felt largely pointless. At this point I was ready to wash my hands of the series as a disappointing kiddie show.
Then Disney picked up the series for a final season. Honestly, if the whole thing had been produced with the quality and pacing of this last gasp, then I would join everyone else in singing the Clone Wars praises. Sadly, even in this season, Ahsoka the clones are the central characters. Anakin is relegated to a glorified background character, and that sucked, but to my surprise, for the first time in the entire series, I actually cared about Filoni's OCs, and the finale was truly moving.
In the end I was left wishing that the series had showcased the quality I only saw in the very last season, and that it had focused more on Anakin's story rather than all the forgetable side characters. The Clone Wars was, overall, a missed opportunity with a handful of decent stories to tell.
Nothing to write home about.
The Mandalorian (2019)
Great start with diminishing returns.
I absolutely loved this show at first. The mystery and intrigue surrounding the protagonist, the surviving mandalorians, and the post-imperial setting were all fascinating, and the pacing and storytelling were exciting and enthralling. It was like a Star Wars western, and I was loving it. By the end of the inaugural season I was one of many who believed that "this is the way" and that maybe Disney Star Wars was on track to pull its head out of its proverbial backside. Sadly, by the end of season two I'd lost nearly all enthusiasm for it. The finale was great, and if it hadn't been for the proceeding episodes I might have better things to say.
Unfortunately, most of season two was devoted to a seemingly endless parade of cameos from Filoni's animated Clone Wars series which came across as a series of hollow attempts to launch various spin off series. It seemed like Favro took a backseat to Filoni in this most recent season, and as a result the season suffered from several Filoni hallmarks: namely disjointed, episodic storytelling and a shift in focus from the Mandalorian's central characters and plot to a series of fluff pieces which hardly advanced the plot and mostly served to draw attention to Filoni's legacy characters. These Clone Wars characters had their stories told already, and inserting them into The Mandalorian felt forced, cheap, and distracting. If every episode in which they were inserted were to be removed, the story would neither change nor suffer, and could be bridged with one decently written episode to replace the lot.
I'm hoping season 3 will put things back on track, but after the lackluster filler series that was The Book of Boba Fett, my hopes aren't high.
Joker (2019)
Exceptional movie, painful to watch.
This is not an underdog antihero story, if that's what you were expecting. This movie makes no attempt (as so many other movies do these days) to put a positive spin on a villain or invert morality to make its protagonist secretly good or make the audience root for him. Despite this, the film elicits empathy for the broken man it holds in its spotlight in the same way one might feel empathy for a diseased, mistreated, but ultimately unsalvageable dog. In the end, your heart goes out to him, but you still feel like someone should put him down, and that's exactly how one ought to feel for one of Gotham's most well known psychopaths.
Dororo (2019)
Enjoyable, with a few problems
The story is interesting, the animation is good, and the characters are interesting enough. You can shut your brain off and enjoy this for what it's worth. Still, Dororo has a few issues, and by the end I felt it was only "okay."
First, the setting: The protagonist of the series (who, much like Link in the Legend of Zelda series had the title of his story stolen by a side character) is Hyakkimaru - a cursed child who had most of his body devoured by demons in a deal made between these entities and his father, a feudal lord, in exchange for prosperity in a war torn and chaotic era. With the help of a doctor who provided him with prosthetics for his various missing body parts, Hyakkimaru sets off to slay the demons and regain his body in doing so.
As premises go, this isn't bad.
My gripes are as follows.
1. The prosthetics which replace Hyakkimaru's arms, legs, and *spine* are all fully functional and articulate. It must be assumed that these prosthetics are magic, since they appear to have been simply carved from wood by the doctor who claimed to have learned to make them in a foreign land. It is never expressly stated that they are magic, and so relies on the audience to their assume this or suspend their disbelief a little further to pretend a feudal era doctor could surpass modern prosthetic technology with carved wood - again, including a fully functional spinal column made of wood and string which somehow functioned just as well as a real spine despite the lack of nerves or tissue. A small enough hurdle given the setting regularly employs demons and ghouls and other magical entities. Still, addressing the issue would have been beneficial.
2. Most of the fights between Hyakkimaru and the various demons which restore his missing parts were extremely underwhelming. He typically dispatches these imposing monsters very quickly and with very little effort. You never get the sense that these monsters are particularly threatening or that killing them is much of an accomplishment. There are episodes where normal humans attempt to kill demons, and here we see that they can be a threat, but by and large, watching Hyakkimaru face off against one of these demons (events which should have been major milestones for the series) felt a bit like watching someone go about a tedious little chore in between points of character interaction, dialogue, and development which mostly takes place outside the action sequences. This is even more glaring when you get to the rare instances in which the protagonist faces off against human opponents, which completely outstrip the demon and monster fights in choreography, tempo, and emotional tone. Getting his body parts back from these demons *is the heart of the show* but, due to the execution, it doesn't feel that way, and that's a shame.
3. The sword issue. This was, by far, the most annoying part of the show for me, despite being a relatively minor flaw. From his youth Hyakkimaru is shown to have been trained with a traditional wooden sword. He carries an actual sword on his hip throughout the entire series. Despite this, with only one encounter in one episode as an exception, he never uses that sword. In each an every encounter, the protagonist resorts to the two blades built into his prosthetic arms, going through the hassle of removing his false arms at the elbow with his teeth to unsheathe them. Even after (Spoiler Warning) he regains his real arms, the protagonist chooses to cut his hands using the hilt-less blades from his prosthetics rather than draw the perfectly functional sword on his hip which he supposedly performed most of his training in mastering. I was sitting there watching, and thinking, "Finally! This is is! He's going to use his real arms and draw that stupid apparently decorative sword." But he doesn't. Not even to spare at least one of his hands from being cut on the un-hilted blades. This was by far the most jaw droppingly stupid narrative decision in the entire show, and it almost kept me from finishing the series. It honestly felt like they just forgot he had that sword, despite some poor animator having to draw in banging around on his hip uselessly from episode one. In that last fight I was alternatively laughing at what was supposed to be a serious scene and shouting at the character to just draw the damn sword.
Those quibbles aside, it's not a bad show. Nothing groundbreaking or outstanding, really, but not terrible. Despite my rant, I did enjoy it overall, and I did make it all the way to the end. I don't think I'll ever re-watch this series, as there isn't anything about it that I feel would benefit from a second viewing.
As a parting shot: Remember folks, if you ever feel useless, remember that Hyakkimaru caries a sword on his hip.