English Dub Review: Basilisk: The Ouka Ninja Scrolls “The Cherry Blossoms Scatter”

Nobunaga is back, baby.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Joujin is dead and it’s Hachirou vs. The resurrected warlord, Oda Nobunaga, possessing the body of Tadanaga and maybe being a demonic entity. The two fight for the fate of Japan, clashing steel against steel until Hachirou tries to end the fight by using his eye magic to make Nobunaga kill himself.

Unfortunately, the old corpse can’t seem to die since he’s basically a zombie. Hachirou and Hibiki appear to be beaten when Namenba jumps into the fray and sacrifices herself in an explosive attack to kill him. Everything seems to have ended well until Kujaku throws his time magic hourglass in frustration and sends his magical time sand all throughout the castle.

This alters time and space for Hachirou and Hibiki, who try to leave the castle but end up traveling through time instead. As they step out of the castle and into the world, they see the harrowing sight of an alternate present where the Joujinshuu succeeds in their plan and never messed with the Kouga and Iga ninja clans. Hachirou and Hibiki then stand determined to take down the Joujinshuu once and for all, since now they have the element of surprise on their side.

Our Take:

Basilisk is almost coming to a close, delivering us episode 23 to tie up all the loose ends and weird turn this wild trip of a show has been. As you might expect from this anime at this point, this episode doesn’t do a whole lot to improve on the many, many troubles this show has. Regardless, its got a couple of interesting moments that set up for what might be a decent finale.

After seeing the unfortunate demises of the rest of the Basilisk cast, it was hard for me to see Namenba’s death as anything other than another obligatory body count. Admittedly, Namenba has had more screen time than most of the other ninjas, so her death should have more of an impact, but it’s marred by this truly awful sequence of animation that hamstrings any emotion it might stir in me. The excessive use of tweening and slow motion is the problem here. Anytime there’s motion on screen it seems like the anime is going to crack from all the pressure. Which, of course, means we get to enjoy lots and lots of people standing still and fish-lipping their lines.

All this business with Nobunaga still has me confused; so much so that I can’t really take him seriously as a villain. Joujin’s murky motivation aside, the vagueness with which he is discussed leaves me clueless as to just what is going on with this weird shogun zombie. Of course, Nobunaga as a historical character has enough significance that I can understand the importance of his revival, but the attachment of this demonic presence just muddies everything up.

The amount of random twists and turns, especially in regards to Kujaku’s time magic, gives one the impression that the showrunners are just making things up as they go along. Everything is permitted because of how vague and undefined the nature of magic is in this show. Where it comes from, how it works, what its limitations are; these questions are never answered. All I can do when something surprising happens is shrug my shoulders and accept its development. You can find the same sort of random behavior in the character focus of this show as well. None of the characters feel very defined, so they don’t feel alive.

And for what it’s worth, while I definitely didn’t see a time travel twist coming, it feels like a cheap move to stir things up. Just because something is surprising doesn’t mean its good, and having Hachirou and Hibiki get an obligatory second chance to save everyone “just because”, makes the prior deaths of their friends basically pointless.