Ninja Scroll: The Series

Ninja Scroll (The movie) was the first anime I ever watched and when the series came out I bought it. So I guess what i'm getting at is...take my review with a grain of nostalgia salt. Anyway, big fan of violent bloody Ninja anime based in feudal Japan... and this is that. In closing Ninja Scroll will always hold a special place in my heart, 5 Stars. P.S. Thanks for getting me hooked

This show is old (2003), 4:3 screen, weird music, but I enjoyed anyway. FIY: HIRUKO means "child of leech (or worm)" in Japanese. It is told in ancient Japanese saga that, HIRUKO was the very first human born between the original God (IZANAGI) and Goddess (IZANAMI), however he was put on a boat and cast away because of his incomplete form. Apparently HIRUKO saga is backbone of this show. It explains why HIRUKO clan is weird monster-like semi humans, proclaim themselves as "descendant of ancient shadow empire".

Every single episode is filled with cool and interesting characters with unique and interesting abilities. The designs in this series are top-notch, the fights are engaging, and the animation quality is high. Unfortunately, I'd still give this a 3/5 for the mediocre-to-awful writing and story. Among other things, many concepts that you would think would be very important to the story are touched on one single time, and never mentioned again. Or shown one single time, and never actually addressed. The main characters are also all unfortunately pretty one-dimensional, including Jubei himself. It feels like nearly every character Jubei clashes swords with is more fleshed-out than he is. If you just want to watch a classic violent anime with cool characters and fights, and don't care if the story ends on a total wet fart, I definitely recommend this series to you. Don't go into it expecting a great story, and you'll enjoy it!