“Brief” articles are copied directly from my tumblr, and are shorter and more off-the-cuff than their full length counterparts.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
To be brief, my oft-mentioned-on-this-blog-friend Josh and I watched this premiere after having caught a few stray episodes of the original Samurai Troopers on PlutoTV several months ago. Essentially, we did this as a bit of a gag? We watch lots of premieres together every season and most of them aren’t fantastic. This though was a huge surprise, being one of the best premieres of anything I’ve seen in recent memory, full stop. It’s an absolutely cracking action anime with a simple but solid “sentai show but fucked up” premise with some really incredible animation to back up that action, in its best moments, it reminds me of, say, a prime-era Studio TRIGGER series, to make an admittedly pretty basic comparison. (Although the actual staff here are from Sunrise, and the project is being spearheaded by Fujita Yoruichi of “a bunch of Gintama stuff” fame. I’m not super familiar with Gintama, so I can’t speak on any possible resemblance there.) Visually, that is.
In terms of story I don’t entirely know what we’re doing yet. I mention the sentai thing, and that is about as far as I’ve gotten in terms of picking up what the show is putting down, narratively. It reminds me a bit of Go Go Loser Ranger in that least one of our protagonists is from the antagonistic faction, the so-called Ten Warriors. He spends this episode firmly in the bad guy corner, slaughtering civilians while humming 80s pop-rock, so god knows how we’re going to turn him into an antihero, but I’m very interested to see the show try.
Our hero, folks.
Our other protagonists mostly aren’t protagonists at all, as we’re introduced to a whole slew of rando, fake Samurai Troopers who actually all die toward the end of the episode except for the blue-haired, sweet but timid Musashi, who seems like he’ll be a bit of a Shinji-lite sort of figure.
And his, I dunno, future boyfriend?
More than anything, I’m just stunned that this is as good as it is. I’m also not entirely clear on its relation to the original Samurai Troopers, as it was apparently being billed as a reboot but it seems more like a distant sequel or something of that nature. The only real downside, I’d say, is that they throw a lot at you here to get you up to speed with the general premise, but even that is honestly pretty entertaining, and if (admittedly a big “if”) it keeps up this level of quality, I think it has a real shot at anime of the year status. I don’t like the term “hidden gem” but if you want to apply it to anything that’s airing this season, it’s probably this. I only sometimes actively recommend my readers check something out but I think if anything I’ve described sounds interesting to you, you should at least give it a shot to see if you click with it.
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