We’ve been blessed with quite a few good to great anime original series in this decade so far, ranging from Odd Taxi, to Lycoris Recoil, and even Do it Yourself this anime season. I suppose this is a grim reminder that not every single original can be done at an elite level, but even so, this show was quite the abhorrent showing, oozing of generic storytelling, mixed with a lot of contrivances, questionable ideas, and very inconsistent character writing. I’m not one to lambast things often, but this show needs to have its fair grilling.

STORY:

You’ll see this in the synopsis already, but essentially, Ittoki, the main protagonist, is just living his daily life, although heavily surveyed by his mom, Kousetsu, his childhood friend, and Tokisada, his uncle. Someone called Tsubaki tries to seduce him and kill him in the process, but he is protected by ninjas? The shocking truth is then revealed that he is the supposed heir to the Iga ninja clan, and to train up at a ninja academy immediately. The moment I found out an academy would be involved, I just rolled my eyes and waited for Ittoki to probably get a harem, and to gain insane levels of plot armour. Did that necessarily happen? Not exactly, but the plot got more disappointing to me than that.

Turns out, the ninjas aren’t your typical ninjas, with the jumping, the shurikens, the mental dexterity, but instead, “ninjas” are powered by ninja gear, something resembling mechs. I thought this show was about ninjas! Yep, with ninja gear, you can be a ninja whenever you feel like it, how about we just don’t train at all? Then what was the academy even for, to learn how to beep boop beep boop and press buttons???

Honestly, this show just doesn’t have any sort of identity, it’s simply a story about “ninja” wars, with contrived plot twists, or twists that had NO prior build up to it. It even sort of gave up and just gave us a beach episode in the middle of the series. “Hey Ittoki, which of us is hotter?” Imagine if anyone even cared to discuss that.

ART:

The animation was not very impressive overall, very bland and boring. The character designs for the most part were generic, perhaps only Kousetsu had the passable design.

MUSIC:

Except for the ED which is fine, the OP and the soundtrack are very bland as well. Just a poor showing of audiovisual direction overall.

CHARACTERS:

Needless to say, the characters were also very laughable and not memorable at all. Ittoki is your typical dumb protagonist, with a sense of justice and morality I bet no one else would even care about, and did I mention he was kind of dumb? He’s constantly out of the loop, whether it’s with the ninja gear, or the knowledge of ninjas in general. So why didn’t y’all just tell him about the ninjas from the very beginning if he’s the heir of the Iga clan? Now this poor child has to figure it out all on his own with that brain of his.

Now to the girls. Ryouko is just kind of there, the cutesy girl who knows all the academy stuff, and of course ends up liking Ittoki. Kirei is also just kind of there, with some twists and turns of her own. Kousetsu is also just there, though the ED would signal she has a bit more depth to her character.

Now to the villains. LOL, imagine the political discourse was actually interesting. Yeah, I’m going to be honest, I forgot who the villains were. Some bozo from the Koga clan or something. Not even going to discuss this.

ENJOYMENT:

It really had potential, but not only was it rushed, any sort of twist wasn’t very well done.

THEMATIC EXECUTION:

Like I said, these ninjas aren’t really even ninjas, so any sort of ninja theme was a failure. There were some weird rules around the “way of the ninja”, and they say that rules are meant to be broken, but yeah, there weren’t any real rules were there? Any sort of romance was a waste of time as well.

OVERALL:

Probably one of my least favourite anime from this entire year, as this was not only generic, but thoroughly contrived, uninteresting, and the entire premise of ninjas was squandered by horrid ideas. There is nearly nothing to praise here at all, and I’m glad my watching of this has come to an end.

Oh, and did I mention Ittoki is not a good ninja? Don’t remember if I did.