English Dub Review: Basilisk: The Ouka Ninja Scrolls “Everyone Gathers at the Battlefield”

Well, not exactly everyone, but some of them.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The assault on Murakumo 2.0 continues, while Hachirou fends off some attackers of his own. We get another flashback this episode, this time for Rui’s past, and see some new developments with Rui and Utsutsu. Things are making headway, and Hachirou is slowly getting closer to duking it out with the Joujinshuu as he overcomes their efforts to place him under their control.

Our Take:

Well, here’s an episode of Basilisk Ouka that’s significantly less “shlocky” than I’m used to. This time around, we’ve got a handful of decent moments that make up for some of the more problematic failings this show brings every week.

Hibiki’s confrontation with the hallucination of her dead mother was something that really worked for me, and was one of the more raw and meaningful moments we’ve had with her character thus far. On that same note, Rui’s confession of love to Utsutsu was decent as well, but sort of comes out of left field, so it carries an element of confusion with it. The confrontation between the Joujinshuu and Hachirou takes something of an interesting turn when Hachirou stands his ground and threatens to use his eye magic in an “I’ll take you with me” sort of fashion. But one also wonders why they couldn’t just use the same mind controlling technique that they used on Hibiki on Hachirou. The assault on Murakumo itself is also somewhat bizarre, with the visual of the Kouga and Iga ninjas climbing up the castle walls looking quite silly. I’d have to say, though, that the real MVP moment of this episode is seeing Negoro’s badass wheelchair tank he’s just been hiding in the basement for all this time. Maybe if the show encouraged more fun elements like that, things would be less dry, but here we are.

The insistence of this show to keep putting flashbacks in the middle of its episodes is really starting to wear on me. These flashbacks come basically out of nowhere and just stall the plot so we can get (Somewhat important) information on character backstory. Trouble is, the show doesn’t do a good job of connecting most of these flashbacks to the plot at hand, dissolving any kind of unifying thematic structure these episodes might have had. Not to mention, the flashbacks aren’t exactly subtle; everything basically goes about how you’d expect. And of course, this being Basilisk, we always have plenty of time to interrupt action scenes with poorly-delivered dialogue.

Visual-wise, there are some glaring animation difficulties and cheap fixes that are quite noticeable. It’s pretty obvious they’re trying to save money on the animation budget by including a lot of still images and intrusive scenery shots to pad out the episode. All this is pretty standard for what we’ve seen so far, and I can’t see any reason for this show to start changing things up now. Another one bites the dust.