Ninja Kamui

Episode 6

I was feeling a bit more optimistic about the show's trajectory after last week's episode, but I guess I might have spoken a bit too soon there. This was easily the weakest episode of the show yet, and one that was as disappointing as it was slow. For the most part, only two major things happen in this episode: We learn that Aska was Emma all along as expected, and the two of them get attacked by Lil after he manages to track down where they've been hiding. That's already not a whole lot to run with for a whole 20-minute episode, and unfortunately, neither development is as cool or interesting as I was hoping for.

We learn that Emma has indeed been playing both sides in Higan's one-man ninja war as she was originally tasked by the organization with spying on him to learn his secret techniques. However, she chose to side with him for her reasons and was not only his secret helper in breaking into Auza City but was the one who resurrected him the first time. She is also currently in the middle of making him his robot ninja suit for the fights ahead. While this all sounds cool enough, the problem is all of this somehow ends up requiring half an episode's worth of exposition, and almost none of it feels substantial. It also doesn't help that Higan is starting to feel a little too one-note at this point, as rather than being grateful for her saving him, he's angry that she didn't save his wife or kid instead. While that sounds pretty reasonable, there are only so many times the show can flash back to the memory of him seeing his wife get a katana through the neck before it starts getting grating. He's not interesting enough to carry the show beyond mowing down ninja mooks in bloody vengeance.

For as sluggish as all that was though, the big fight this week might be the bigger offender for dragging this episode down. For one thing, it involves Emma and Lil duking it out entirely in their silly tokusatsu robo-suits and while it's certainly not a bad-looking action sequence, and even manages to get some decent mileage out of the 3DCG used on the suits themselves, it's not anywhere near as frantic or kinetic as the action cuts from the first couple of episodes, and since that was the style of action I was hoping for the entire show, it seems like we'll be seeing mecha suit fights for the rest of it.

The bigger issue is the fight's conclusion as Emma loses and gets (presumably) killed off as she confesses that the real reason she helped Higan was that Mari saved her back in the day and that she actually tried to stop Higan's family from getting frigged, but only arrived in time to save him. While this is framed and directed as being a pretty emotional moment, it doesn't quite work for the simple reason that the show never shows us exactly what it was that made Emma so indebted to Mari, so it just feels incredibly cheap, and I can't help but wonder why none of the heavy amounts of exposition earlier in the episode couldn't have been used to flesh out that connection. Although even if the show had done that, this would still be pretty lame. It's one thing for the show to fridge Higan's family for motivation as that's pretty much par the course for the kind of revenge movie aesthetic it's going for, but it's another thing to do the same to Emma when she has at least a bit more presence as a character, and hasn't had enough interactions with Higan up to this point for her sacrifice to feel like it means anything beyond making Higan even angrier. I'm willing to take back most of these complaints if it does turn out she survived, but I'm not feeling too optimistic about that, and for the time being, it's easily the lamest stunt the show has pulled so far.

Having said all that, I probably shouldn't be wishing for the show to spend more time on character set-up when that's not what it's going for. It's already moving way too slowly as is. This feeling's been creeping up for a while now, but while Ninja Kamui is set for 12 episodes, it doesn't feel like it has quite enough going on to justify that run time, and it probably would have worked better as a more condensed 4-6 episode OVA that could better play to its strengths (with most of those strengths being high-octane fight scenes) and could have made for a really fun time. As it is, there just isn't quite enough actual substance to last for a whole season's worth of anime, and the more the show spends time away from its primary mission of bloody ninja action, the more that lack of substance drags down the whole experience.

Rating:

Ninja Kamui airs on Adult Swim and streams on Max.