English Dub Review: Basilisk: The Ouka Ninja Scrolls “The Demon Revives”

Love! Combat! and Betrayal!

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Things begin to escalate in the fight against Joujin. Rui and Utsutsu are out of action, having suffered grievous wounds in their previous fight, while Hibiki has regained her senses and stands with Hachirou and the newly arrived Hodaibo against Joujin.

They go at it for a bit against the Joujinshuu, until Rui and Utsutsu arrive and use their powers to turn the tides of battle in their favor. Joujin still lives though and prepares to counterattack when suddenly Kujaku stabs him from behind in a shocking betrayal.

We then see Kujaku’s past which reveals he used to fight against Joujin under his former lord, Nobunaga, before he joined the Joujinshuu. After this flashback, Joujin bleeds out and is thrown by Kujaku onto the skeleton of Oda Nobunaga.

With Joujin’s blood as the catalyst, Nobunage is soon revived and awoken back to life. Nobunaga’s first act in his life is to crush Joujin’s skull, and soon, the warlord turns his sights on Hachirou and Hibiki as well. Just then, Namenba soon arrives to try and save the two, but find that Nobunaga is too powerful to escape from. Nobunaga kills Kujaku as well and leaves everyone wondering just what he’ll do next.

Our Take:

It’s been a series of increasingly strange episodes of Basilisk the past few weeks, which has left me wondering if this series just wants to keep topping itself in terms of weirdness. This episode follows suit with this trend as well and continues to push the envelope in making an anime that’s a confusing, jumbled, awkward mess.

From a plot perspective alone, this episode lacks a sense of coherence and focus, trying to do way too many flashbacks and big moments without having actually built up to them. This generates a sort of emotional whiplash that distances me from the characters and finds their plight to be more absurd than anything.

As the fights go on in this episode, all sense of logic and consistency went right out the window. Hibiki’s eye magic is inconsistent with what we’ve seen it do in the past, and Joujin’s explanation for why it doesn’t work on him is because he’s really calm. There comes a certain point in the episode where you have no idea what to expect because this show could do whatever it wants with its dodgy and insubstantial plot. Powers can change or be generated at random, adding more evidence to the theory that this show might be a comedy anime in disguise.

Special note has to be made to just how awkward some of the editings on this episode is. The shot will often hold too long on characters who aren’t doing anything, while at other times it cuts too early and ruins the flow of dialogue. The dialogue which also baffles me with its inability to convey what these characters are trying to say.

There were a few moments in this episode I felt were genuinely compelling, though they were spaced too close together to reach their desired emotional impact. Kujaku’s betrayal could have worked if his relationship had been explored earlier in the series, but comes completely out of left field. The same with Rui and Utsutsu’s admission of their love for each other. It took up too much time from the main plot and muddles the energy of the episode.

There is a good episode buried somewhere in here, underneath all the crap and refuse surrounding it. If certain things were pushed to the next episode and given a little more time, maybe it could’ve turned out differently. But it seems that the series is only considered with ending itself quickly, cramming all together so they can wrap this disaster up and call it a day.