English Dub Review: Senran Kagura “LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL”
And this episode is as ugly as it gets.
Overview (Spoilers Below)
Fubuki has unleashed a horde of youma unto the sleepy hot springs town all the ninjas are staying at. Everyone gathers on the rooftops to fight this new menace. Homura struggles to keep her forces from destroying the youma outright, despite their earlier agreement to try not to kill the youma without cause. Meanwhile, various hijinx ensue, including some of the girls being used as bait by Kasuragi until Asuka comes and rescues them using her new technique. Everyone starts to worry about Asuka and the strain her move places on her body, but she insists on carrying things through to the end.
Without warning, Fubuki and her youma arrive to do battle, and crush Asuka’s hands so she can’t use her sealing technique anymore. Yumi shows up to save everyone, along with Miyabi as well, who take on the youma while Yumi fights with Fubuki. We then see a flashback where Fubuki watches her father and mother fight each other in a blizzard. Her father, being a ninja, feels it is his duty to kill youma, which her mother happens to be. The two fight until Fubuki’s mother is defeated, but instead of killing her mother, he uses Fuma Korin to seal her away, which causes her father to die. Just then, a group of ninjas arrive to kill Fubuki, but the youma she grows up with comes and saves her at the last moment. From there, she gets dropped off with the master who trained Yumi. The two grow up as siblings, though Fubuki holds her hatred for all shinobi close to her heart. Before they depart each other, the master tries to impart the value of love and forgiveness into Fubuki, creating her conflicted feelings towards Yumi.
Back in the present, the duel between Yumi and Fubuki reaches its climax, but leaves us in suspense as to who is the victor.
Our Take:
This is easily one of the most scatterbrained shows I’ve ever reviewed. It spends all this time undercutting itself with braindead episodes that are just hackneyed scenarios to get our characters into the nude, and then it drops this melodramatic “Naruto”-esque tragic backstory to Fubuki at the last minute. Honestly, its not the worst thing I’ve seen, but its tonally grotesque, and feels completely out of place in this show. The problems of this episode are the issues that have plagued this anime since the beginning, but here they are more apparent than ever.
In regards to Fubuki’s backstory, the plot is all over the place and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I find the arbitrary “Ninjas kill youma” conflict to be too simple and half-baked to make logical sense, especially when the youma in question is your lover. A “Forbidden love” tale can work, but it doesn’t here because their relationship goes entirely unexplained except for “It happened and ended poorly.” Not to mention, it takes a particular kind of stupid to think that any father would just kill a child’s mother and then die in front of them willingly. It’s as if they were trying to traumatize their own offspring, which makes the emotional impact of that moment pretty null. Not to mention, Fubuki’s upbringing with Yumi is really strange, in that I don’t understand why she still has these sinister motivations now. You would think all that time with Yumi would change her goals or complicate things, but she still ends up just wanting to “Destroy all shinobi.” It’s a gross oversimplification of personality, which is fitting in a plot that is made for grade schoolers.
The animation has improved in this episode, though it is still too choppy for my taste. There weren’t any animation errors (At least not that I could see) and the impact and action of the fighting were decent enough, if not more boring since I don’t care about these characters.
There just isn’t anything that this mess of a show can seem to do right. I don’t know what kind of show it wants to be, and I don’t think the creators do either. This melodramatic puke of emotionality done at the last moment feels cheap and undeserved. You can’t just make a pointless ecchi anime and then expect the audience to care about your bizarre plot.
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