English Dub Review: Rurouni Kenshin – Kyoto Disturbance “The Ten Swords Summoned”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Kenshin manages to save his master from death and heads to the final battle, while the remaining Ten Swords meet with Shishio to get ready for the big day as well.

OUR TAKE

More set up for bigger episodes to come! I mean yeah, a lot of the past few episodes have been just set up. Heck, the only big battle Kenshin has been in was the one where he fought the literal weakest of the Ten Swords, and that guy got replaced pretty quickly after! But that’s been for good reason, as this episode sees Kenshin finally complete his training with his master and, in a twist on what last week’s episode implied, he actually managed to learn this super new technique WITHOUT killing him! I mean, I saw that coming a mile away and probably said as much (I don’t actually remember much about what I say in these reviews week to week so forgive me for repeating myself here) but it was easy to predict because Kenshin managing to not kill is perfectly in line with the moral balance and emotional journey his character has been on since the beginning of the story, so it’s nice to know him killing someone does not end up being rewarded, and in fact, it was the NOT killing that was rewarded! And now he can move on into the fight with a new attack that will hopefully be useful!

Meanwhile, in the other major part of the episode, the villains are finally all together in one place and ready to set off a bunch of fires and take over Japan in just a few days! Some of these arrivals are ones we already met like the guy who helped Sannosuke get that new punching move, but others are totally new, though it’s hard to really make much of them at the moment. Most of them are just scary or cool looking character designs until we get more details about how their fighting moves work or their backstory, though we also have one who is basically just a joke about trans people made into a person, which was sadly not uncommon in shonen manga at the time (a minor character in Yu Yu Hakusho comes to mind but I’m sure there were definitely more). Point is, the episode is yet more build up, but we are closer to the pay off, so we’ll see how it all shakes out.