Blade of the Immortal First Impressions: A Cross-Eyed Bandit Pretending to be a Priest Shooting You in the Face

Didn’t see that coming, did you, Manji?

Summary:

The scene opens on a (young?) Manji killing some samurai, and some kid throwing a rock at him. Later, Manji is known as the “Killer of 100”. While talking to a (fake) priest about his sins (he killed his lord who betrayed him), the priest tries to kill him but Manji heals immediately and returns the favour. Elsewhere, some girl who is at someone’s grave flashes back to when her father met the (apparently “infamous” though their leader’s a complete pretty boy) samurai group, the Itto-ryu; the father wishes to employ their services for the protection of his dojo. Back to Manji; he walks along a road to meet a young girl named Machi (who I thought was wasted or something as she was acting very LOOPY) and an 804 year-old woman, who apparently gave Manji “worms” which will not allow him to die and are also within her.

We flashback through Machi’s dream to see that Manji has in fact killed the her husband and driven her insane. She wakes up and runs off in the middle of the night (laughing maniacally) and is captured by a group of bandits to which the fake priest belonged to. After failing to negotiate peacefully (during this time, a tied-up Machi is being tickled -_-), the bandit leader pretends to let her go but then kills her (complete with with a purple, flowery background still). He tries to kill Manji but that doesn’t work (the whole invincible thing) and through a series of HIGH SPEED ACTION SCENES more flowery background stills Manji embeds at least 6 swords in the leader’s body. He proceeds to slaughter the rest of the twenty or so group (off-screen). A blond-haired woman comes across the scene, talking about Manji’s fate. Manji declares to the old woman that he’ll atone for the sins of killing a hundred samurai by killing a thousand villains. That’s fantastic logic there Manji. We cut back to the girl who was praying.

Thoughts:

The first thing I noticed was that I loved the style of the OP. Despite a certain sub groups karaoke, the style of the music and the animation were great. At least, up to the last 4 bars where for some inexplicable reason it sounds like someone trying to break a piano withe their face. The ED was quite good on the other hand, having the same style as the OP with less of the action and a more reflective mood.

The animation was good but not great. The first couple of action scenes were well done. The final one was a complete copout; if an invincible 12 sword wielding samurai is involved in a fight with 20 opponents, I WANT TO SEE SOME DAMN FIGHTING. And flowery background stills kind of take away from the drama of the whole scene; the death of the leader was literally just the camera rushing towards his face (plus stills) with some slicing sounds and then this:

OH MY GOD…

It must take real skill to cut the kanji “manji” into someone’s face.

Didn’t really care at all about Machi until this happened:

…then I… still didn’t really care about her, but she seemed like a nice girl who didn’t deserve to see that happen and have her spirit broken. Her death was kind of undercut by the fact Manji didn’t even mention her afterwards; he was holding onto a bloody severed leg while talking with the old woman and then he fainted, which was just odd.

Blood red moon says otherwise.

The music…I didn’t mind the music itself (I’m quite open-minded with those types of things) but the fact that the BGM was louder than most of the character’s voices just made me glad that I could turn it down and read the subs. Otherwise, it would have been painful. The plot is fragmented at the moment but this is understandable as its the first episode but it seems it will be intersting as they go beyond him just slaughtering a thousand villains (What the heck will he do when he’s finished with that anyway? Kill a million?) and let him meet up with the girl involved with the samurai group (who is kicking serious ass in the preview). Plus the random blond-haired woman talking about “Manji’s fate” at the end.

Overall, I won’t blog it and I’m on the fence about watching it. I just didn’t care about anything going on in the show and I’ve already got my fill of great action with Birdy. The amount of blood may please blissmo enough that she’ll follow it no matter what though :p.