Yaiba: Samurai Legend

Episode 4

Growing up on battle shonen anime that spent a lot of their time spinning their wheels, like Naruto or Bleach, I got used to the idea of these shows only ever having maybe one or two events going on in any particular episode. As such, I appreciate parts of the modern trend towards trimming the fat with these shows in favor of getting to the point faster, and I think the first couple of episodes of Yaiba: Samurai Legend worked pretty well that regard, since its brisk pace seemed like a good fit for its near literal Saturday morning cartoon energy. That all mostly still applies to this week's episode, but there can be such a thing as trimming too much fat, and even without having read the manga, it felt like this one was juggling a few too many plots at once.

Having met the master swordsman Miyamoto Musashi and unsealing the Raijinken, Yaiba starts training with Musashi to get strong enough to use it. This seems like it would be the start of a training arc, and we do see Musashi trying to teach Yaiba how to better control his movements, but this has surprisingly little to do with the episode. Instead, we shift back to Onimaru, who seems a lot more ready to live up to his name, and raises a powerful ogre army to begin his conquest of Japan. This makes for a fun little sequence, and it's especially great seeing him smashing into the Japanese Diet Building and declaring himself ruler, but as good as it is to see him fully embrace his status as a cartoon villain, this takeover is over way too quickly, and I wish we could have gotten a few scenes of him bullying the Prime Minister into obedience or something.

While all this is happening, Onimaru sends a couple of his minions, known as the Eight Ogres, to track down Yaiba and retrieve the Raijinken. It doesn't take long for two of them to track him down, and although they try to disguise themselves, it's clear these two aren't up to any good, and it's funny seeing them barely manage to hide how suspicious they are. Eventually, they drop the ruse and reveal themselves to be a frog man by the name of Gerozaemon Geroda and a snake guy named Julius Zuppopotamus III, which are both the silliest villain names I've ever heard and had me laughing at them nearly as hard as Yaiba did. Since the show has already been riffing on historical figures with Miyamoto Musashi, and Kojiro Sasaki (the latter of whom is name dropped as one of Musashi's apprentices with a magic sword of his own), I'm assuming that extends to the villains too, and the snake guy here is supposed to be a play on Julius Caesar, but the last name is so distractingly goofy that it kinda draws attention away from anything else. I can't pretend it wasn't a highlight for the episode. If this is the theme going forward, I only hope that the names get even weirder from here.

Great as Gerozaemon and Julius are, their presence only points to how weirdly paced the rest of this episode is. While it doesn't take too long for a fight to break out between them and Yaiba, it quickly gets interrupted when Yaiba suddenly loses control of the Raijinken and starts going berserk. This leads Musashi and Gerozaemon to quickly put aside their differences to take him down, and it's a pretty jarring shift considering this all happens within a few minutes. This isn't even the end of odd pacing. Once they manage to remove the magic jewel from Yaiba's sword and calm him down, Julius attempts to resume the fight with Musashi, only for Gerozaemon to feel conflicted and switch sides. When Julius attempts to kill Gerozaemon for betraying him, Yaiba reawakens and, having mastered a new sword technique, he transforms Julius into a regular snake and, together with their new frog friend, goes to track down Kojiro Sasaki in the hopes that he can help Yaiba gain better control of the Raijinken.

Needless to say, this was a lot, and even for how straightforward most of it was, I had a hard time keeping track of it all. I'm all for speeding a bit through training arcs since they usually drag the story to a crawl, but this moved so quickly that it hardly felt like Yaiba learned anything, and the rest of the episode suffered from cramming in a bit too much at once. Moments like Yaiba going berserk, or Gerozaemon feeling conflicted after briefly fighting alongside our heroes, could have worked if they had more breathing room, but it all happens so quickly that there's barely any time to digest it, and I think it's doing the story a bit of a disservice. This episode probably would have worked better with its content split between two episodes. While I'd rarely advocate for a battle shonen moving slower, I definitely could have seen some of these moments being a lot more fun or impactful if there was more time to play around with them.

Having said all that, I wouldn't call this episode outright dysfunctional. Since a lot of this show is on the simple side, the manic pace does at least sort of mesh with the zany energy of the animation. Since it still delivered on some impressive-looking action scenes, I can't say I wasn't entertained. Still, as amazing as the presentation here is, I really would like to appreciate Yaiba just as much as an actual story, so it'd be nice if it could slow down a little bit, or at least strike a better balance with its pacing. Since Yaiba seems to be a pretty long manga and the staff have presumably don't have the 100 or so episodes needed to handle that without compromises, I don't imagine we'll see many changes on that front. But with how much of this adaptation feels like a labor of love, I think it can do more to communicate why this series has remained a beloved classic.

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Yaiba: Samurai Legend is currently streaming on Netflix and Hulu on Saturdays.