English Dub Review: The Gymnastics Samurai “Ninja & Samurai”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

In flashbacks, we learn that Leo was at the match on the fateful day that Aragaki had his accident, but also that this was because he learned just minutes before that his wife had died in a car wreck. In the present, Aragaki continues to perfect his next signature move for the upcoming tournament, but an incident capturing a lost owl causes him to twist his ankle. Thankfully it’s nothing serious, but Leo worries that he may end up messing up his body again. However, Aragaki is committed to seeing this tournament through, and even encourages Leo to go home and face his own issues with ballet. And so Leo does just that, causing a bit of a rift between them as the big day arrives.

OUR TAKE

Okay, now we’re cooking with gas. After spending a good portion of this series futzing around and taking our sweet time, we seem to finally picking up the pace with the character development. A shame it had to be so close to the end, but I’ll take what I can get at this point. And thankfully what I can get here is quite a bit for both Aragaki and Leo. We finally get to see a bit more about the day that Aragaki injured himself and overdid things, which turned out to be the day he learned his wife died, leading to his poor performance and pushing him ever closer to retirement. A bit of a convenience that Leo was also there, and kinda weird that it ended up being something to reveal this late in the game, but it’s still a neat detail to bring into things that further connects these two characters. Honestly, it might have been worth it to reveal it earlier on since then we’d have a better sense of why Leo is here at all.

But speaking of Leo, we also get a very important scene laying out why he’s on the run in the first place. As a prodigy in dancing, he was originally greatly praised for his talent, but as this became expected of him, people stopped seeing has much more than a great dancer, judging him on even the slightest mistake and soon treating him as some sort of genius who could never fail. As the pressure grew and continued to feel isolated, Leo turned to ninja movies, hoping to escape into the shadows and get some alone time. Not sure exactly how this connects to how he showed up in the first episode, but the point now is that he is about to finally confront his…grandmother I think? About dancing. Though obviously without being there to support Aragaki, things could turn bad, which seems to be where things are headed for the final two episodes. But honestly I’m just glad that we’ve gotten so much more to talk about and delve into with these two after feeling like their characters were bone dry this entire time. Two episodes to go, but now we see if this series can truly stick the landing. I mean, it didn’t start off great in my opinion, but a strong ending would certainly turn some things around.