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EP. REVIEW: Shinobi no Ittoki


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L'Imperatore



Joined: 24 Mar 2014
Posts: 936
PostPosted: Sat Oct 22, 2022 8:35 am Reply with quote
I'm still falling behind with the latest episode. Has the quiet bodyguard lady taken off her mask yet? Wink
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Akcoll99



Joined: 28 Feb 2011
Posts: 280
PostPosted: Sat Oct 22, 2022 9:29 am Reply with quote
Your mileage may vary, indeed. Mine ran out halfway through episode 3 and I turned it off. That's something I almost never do. I just found myself so frustrated at so many aspects of the storytelling.

- Ittoki not being told that he is a ninja, much less a ninja leader, makes no sense in any way the scripting has tried to frame it.
- His further acceptance of the whole situation with not much more than a whiny "huhhhh?" also frustrated me. I would personally be a lot more upset and have a LOT more questions. But instead, he just blithely goes along with pretty much everything.
- The school sequences were the nail in the coffin. I got tired of the mask wearing 'childhood friend' character who offers no help, only scoffs and rolls her eyes at him, despite knowing that he knows nothing about the ninja world. I guess that's supposed to be funny, but the general lack of support he got from EVERYONE AROUND HIM is borderline abusive, not funny or engaging.
- The big storyline of the season, "Who killed the Koga leader?", seems so painfully obvious I couldn't handle it much more than I could the show's mistreatment of its main character.

The sad thing is that the show isn't completely terrible. I liked some of the action sequences, especially the convenience store fight in episode 2. And I have made it through some BAD anime before (I watched all of Knight Hunters!) But this show just got under my skin in all the wrong ways. Easy drop for me this season.
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everydaygamer





PostPosted: Sat Oct 22, 2022 1:31 pm Reply with quote
It looked interesting but I couldn't get past the stupid set up. It makes no sense to train him to be a ninja without telling him. I'd give it a chance if they at least offered up a reasonable explanation but it sounds like that doesn't happen.
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b-dragon



Joined: 21 Apr 2021
Posts: 496
PostPosted: Sat Oct 22, 2022 2:50 pm Reply with quote
I definitely dropped it at episode two. "Back to school ninjas" didn't sound particularly interesting, on top of the prior narrative fumbles. That said, I will keep an eye on the reviews: there is potential here, and I can see it potentially moving into something interesting.
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FilthyCasual



Joined: 01 Jun 2015
Posts: 2367
PostPosted: Sat Oct 22, 2022 3:24 pm Reply with quote
It's a shame that Ittoki didn't buy the ramen. Perhaps halfway through the season, presumably after he wins a fight.
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Takkun4343



Joined: 19 Jul 2007
Posts: 1567
Location: Englewood, Ohio
PostPosted: Sat Oct 22, 2022 4:13 pm Reply with quote
This show should be better than it actually is, even by just a little bit. Episode 2 gave me hope that it could be good and get even better - the bold decision to kill off Satomi at the end of the episode instead of keeping her on as a recurring villain (at least, that's how it looks) was easily their most original course of action in the overall sea of boilerplate plot beats - but then episode 3 came along and nosedove the subjective quality at speeds I haven't seen since episode 7 of Nyaruko-san. Akcoll99 makes a very valid point when he says that Kousetsu sucks for not helping Ittoki when she has more reason to than Ryoko, who he literally just met and is still nicer than the f*ckin' childhood bodyguard. It's a shame it's so hard to like her, she and her OTN mask are the only reason I gave this show a chance to begin with! And even I think it's annoying that she hasn't taken it off yet. (Coming from me, that's a real indictment.) But hey, at least she's better than Himura and his goon squad, the first characters in a long while to make me scream at my laptop in visceral anger. What a douchetoboggan. Hope he experiences legitimate suffering later on.

So yeah, Shinobi no Ittoki is generic as hell for an original project and I hate half the characters. It fails the three-episode test, but I'm going to continue watching it anyway, because c'mon, it's me we're talking about.
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moozooh



Joined: 30 Sep 2022
Posts: 151
PostPosted: Sat Oct 22, 2022 7:37 pm Reply with quote
Shinobi no Ittoki tries to spread itself thin across many themes and woefully underperforms—if not outright sucks—at all of them. Definitely feels like less than a sum of its parts, couldn't have described it better. Drop for me as well.
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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 11580
PostPosted: Sat Oct 22, 2022 10:57 pm Reply with quote
Yeah, it's definitely failing hard for all the reasons everyone has already described, especially Childhood Shadow-chan, but I'll give it one more episode to do something, anything, to keep me on board. More screen time for Tokisada might do it... Maybe just shift the whole story to the Shinobi Adventures of Tokisada. Smile
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FilthyCasual



Joined: 01 Jun 2015
Posts: 2367
PostPosted: Thu Nov 03, 2022 3:32 pm Reply with quote
I wonder how Suzaku's gonna pay back all of his goons who he convinced to blow themselves up for the sake of killing the FILTHY IGA SCUM when he didn't even do it himself. It's nice to see Kousetsu care under of all the tsuntsun.
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vgiannell5



Joined: 10 Jan 2012
Posts: 90
PostPosted: Thu Nov 03, 2022 6:30 pm Reply with quote
L'Imperatore wrote:
I'm still falling behind with the latest episode. Has the quiet bodyguard lady taken off her mask yet? Wink

Not yet. But I’m sure she will at the end of the series.
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thedarkemissary



Joined: 07 Apr 2010
Posts: 88
PostPosted: Thu Nov 03, 2022 7:54 pm Reply with quote
What I don't understand is; how can you have hundreds of years of professional ninja-ism in a modern setting where ninja fiction does exist and when you have the sudden death of a clan leader, the immediate suspicion isn't instantly on the 2nd in commander. Seriously. Expecting the most disappointing reveal ever at the end of this one.
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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 11580
PostPosted: Fri Nov 04, 2022 12:15 am Reply with quote
Yeah, when they were laying out what happened and police girl asks, "What possible motivation could there be?!" I just kinda threw up my hands. At least we did get a bit more Tokisada last week, as requested, but then he was awol for most of this.

Also, kinda wearily sighing over a ninja top-secret lab (and all the ninja buildings, for that matter) that has no defenses in their human-sized air ducts. Normally, that sort of seeming security lapse would scream "trap" but nope, it's just genuine stupidity.
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Takkun4343



Joined: 19 Jul 2007
Posts: 1567
Location: Englewood, Ohio
PostPosted: Sat Nov 12, 2022 10:02 am Reply with quote
And strange as it is, those lapses in plausibility aren't the kind of issues I have with this show. At this point, it's mostly just "F*ck dem Koga", the occasional disappointingly predictable plot beat, and that's it.

After watching last episode, I came up with a probably insane theory about Kirei: she's actually male or at the very least trans. A boyish haircut in her flashback, her aversion to showing off her swimsuit (something even Kousetsu did), and it wouldn't be out of place with her village's "deceive everybody" philosophy. Silly? Yes. Idiotic? Yes. But with a show this steeped in lack of common sense, I can afford to get a little crazy with my plot twist predictions.
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FilthyCasual



Joined: 01 Jun 2015
Posts: 2367
PostPosted: Sat Nov 12, 2022 10:10 am Reply with quote
The moral of the anime so far is clearly "Don't entrust deadly ninja stuff to hormonal teenagers." Suzaku whiffs his mission of killing Ittoki and injures a bunch of his comrades in the process because he caught empathy. Kirei immediately softens up from being a hardened traitor the moment she's shown genuine kindness and a functional family.
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Takkun4343



Joined: 19 Jul 2007
Posts: 1567
Location: Englewood, Ohio
PostPosted: Wed Nov 16, 2022 8:53 pm Reply with quote
Forget everything bad I said about Himura. After this most recent episode (the best one so far, BTW), Karajishi is now my least favorite character, and I hope he dies brutally.
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