Spoilers below

This review uses the old (Kino's Journey 2003) titles for certain episodes. The only difference being the use of "Land" instead of "Country".

There's really only so much you can do with a reboot. You can try to re-create the original series faithfully, you can try to update it to better suit a modern audience, or you can split the difference and try to do a bit of both. Broadly, all reboots fall into one of these categories. The 2017 adaptation of Kino's Journey is very much in the third.

Kino's Journey if you're not familiar, is a traveler story (a genre defined by a protagonist who goes place to place, untethered to any locale they visit, who is usually superhumanly skilled in some area, often combat-related, and serves as a hero or antihero to the places they visit, usually solving the locals' problems or at least, meaningfully impacting things in a large way) revolving around Kino, an androgynous traveler skilled with firearms of all types, and Hermes, her talking motorcycle (for reasons that have never been explained and maybe don't need to be, the German term motorrad is used unilaterally throughout the Kino franchise). Kino is actually a surprisingly large franchise, consisting of the original light novels, a very well-regarded anime from 2003, two separate manga, several visual novels, a handful of animated movies, and late last year a second TV anime. Kino herself even appeared in a fighting game at one point, as an assist character. So there is no shortage of material to choose from when deciding to take a dive into the world of Kino's Journey, and unfortunately, the 2017 anime does not make the best case for itself as a starting point, as a sequel, a reboot, or as really, much of anything.

Let it be said though, that it cannot be accused of lacking love for its source material. In addition to the fanbait trivium that is the fact that Kino is here voiced by Aoi Yuuki--the very same VA who voiced Sakura in the closing episode of the original series--and that the stories to be adapted were (apparently, hard information on this is surprisingly difficult to find) chosen via fan-poll, it goes to great lengths to try to seem Kino-y, sometimes to a fault. While it could never capture the visual charm of the original adaptation--a scratchy, muted look that most modern anime don't really try to pull off (though the contemporary Girls' Last Tour by sheer coincidence managed to rather well)--standards have after all changed, it does often try to recapture the spirit of the original and in three instances straight up remakes three episodes from the 2003 anime. This makes it all the more frustrating when it fumbles the ball.

"Land/Country of Adults" is arguably the only episode improved in the reboot, certainly at least up to par, the more grim lighting (closer to the 2003 show's palette) and various changes (such as Young Kino's "school" being more like some kind of gothic church) nicely playing up the cultlike nature of the country. A lack of subtlety actually serves it well here, making Young Kino's parents and entire society seem all the more psychotic with cramped camera angles and shouted, blunt voice acting. In particular, a sequence near the end of the episode where Young Kino pulls away on Hermes for the first time and rushes through the city gates to escape, and the entire world suddenly explodes into bright colors as Kino sees the natural beauty of the world outside her country for the first time, you get a real taste for what this reboot really could and should have been throughout. Kino's Journey refined and distilled. It's also an interesting juxtaposition with the previous episode, "A Kind Land". In the 2003 anime the two were quite far apart ("Land of Adults" was only the fourth episode in the '03 anime, and "A Kind Land" was the last), but here they form interesting counterpoints. Kino attaining the same freedom that young Sakura would later be denied (it's also vaguely implied that Kino's original name may have also been Sakura, which is interesting certainly).

Sadly, the rest of the episodes aren't quite up to this bar. Very few are outright bad (aside from the clipped retelling of "Colosseum" that omits most of the changes made in the 03 adaptation for a story that is shorter but certainly not more impactful) but for the most part they stick to one of two formulas. Either, Kino enters a country, is faced with some moral quandary, and handles it--or doesn't--in her own Kino-y way (almost always in a way that leaves the question of who was right up to the viewers to decide the answer to, the only episode that actually takes any kind of stance itself is "Land of Adults"), or, the episode doesn't focus on Kino at all. The latter in particular are hit-or-miss, and it sometimes feels like Kino's Journey doesn't quite know what to do with its title character. The b-side adventures of the swordsman Shizu and his talking dog (and, later, a soft-spoken girl they pick up who has sociopathic tendencies and a fondness for grenades) are entertaining enough, but they seem a bit out of step with the rest of the show, and since combined with other episodes that focus on non-Kino characters, they take up almost half the episodes, it gives Kino a bit of an identity crisis, even as two of those very episodes ("In The Clouds", about a slave girl who somewhat inadvertently breaks free of her chains, and "Historic Country", about Kino's mentor)--consecutive ones it must be mentioned--are two of the series' most interesting episodes.

All in all it's rather hard to decipher who, exactly, this particular telling of Kino's adventures is aimed at. It's far from bad--certainly not the trainwreck some fans of the 2003 adaptation have claimed it to be--but it certainly doesn't reach the impact of that series, and really it barely stands on its own at all, seemingly most suited to being a sort of visual companion for the books, which western fans are unlikely to own. At the same time, it's hard to recommend anyone to watch the 2003 anime and then this, since doing so is likely to spoil them on this series' lesser but certainly extant merits, and the other way around is likely to leave viewers confused (witness any number of Crunchyroll commenters cooking up convoluted fan-theories beneath any given episode on that website to explain what seem like plotholes. Though really for the aforementioned reasons it's a bit hard to blame them). Combined with other more minor quibbles; the often distracting CGI (which has no excuse to be so lazy, given that it aired alongside Girls' Last Tour and Houseki no Kuni, both of which made great use of CGI in very different ways), the somewhat generic soundtrack, and Crunchyroll's sometimes choppy and occasionally outright bad subtitling (blatant typos are not a good look on any show), this rounds up to a show that while certainly having merits, is kind of hard to recommend to much of anyone. Certainly, Kino diehards--those who don't hate it for not being Kino 2003 at any rate--will find something to like here, and it does open the doors for more Kino in the future, which is hardly a bad thing (and the ending of the final episode, the supremely bizarre "Fields of Sheep", does nod toward that fact. With a long shot of Kino and Hermes relaxing as the two discuss journeys ending), but on its own it's a rather confused series. With tighter direction, more focus, and less CGI, it could've been great, as it is, it's something that can only be recommended with a lot of caveats, which is a serious shame, Kino deserves better.