Yasuke

Yasuke is one of the most intriguing historical figures that I can think of and as a black African man who lives a fascinating life as a noble samurai warrior under the shogunate of Oda Nobunaga. His story can be easily turned into a fantastic historical anime series and in 2021, we finally got one under the hands of studio MAPPA and I cannot stretch enough how god-awful this piece of mess is. To keep the review short, I just gotta say this anime contains about 5% of the actual story about Yasuke and the rest was your usual anime extravaganza that makes little to no sense other than to let people know that it was in fact "AN ANIME SERIES". I don't want to talk about race politics when it comes to entertainment media cause I believe that anyone can make any kind of story about any people that they want if they got a good story to tell and sadly despite how much back talents behind the anime, they still don't believe Yasuke can stand on it own two feet as a historical piece of series without shoehorned in a bunch of old and tired anime tropes that plague the medium right now. One positive thing that I can say about this one is it look and feel like something Yoshiaki Kawajiri would make back in the late 80s and that is also the reason why I don't drop this series right after episode 1.

Binged this as soon as I could. Wish there was more than 6 episodes. It's absolutely amazing, Lakeith Stanfield is awesome in everything he does so I was so happy to hear he'd be a part of this project. My only complaint is that it is only 6 episodes. WATCH THIS!

I was pretty excited to watch this show, especially after the intro scene with a Demon army, superpowers, mechanicals soldiers and good fights.

Then, I lost interest after 3 episodes. The story id really bland, uninteresting and predictable. You have nice character design and potential great character developpement, but eventually, it's just to show off and tick cases.

That's not the first "international" anime-like series from Netflix and they're all very disappointing. But I guess Netflix is more interested in mass producing easily watched-easily forgotten series, rather than quality and long-term series.

Netflix made sure to inform everbody that Grammy Award Winning producer Flying Lotus executive produced this series, and provided its entire OST.

Yet when the show released it took minutes to realize something is wrong.

Some of the shots, including stills, look beautiful, yet the animations are stiff and lifeless The english voice acting is not very enjoyable, gladly I could switch to German which is better in my opinion.

The trailers painted this as a grand epic with incredible Lo Fi beats, akin to cult classic Afro Samurai, great action and an interesting supernatural touch.

But the series itself goes nowhere. Episodes end at random, the pacing is not great and the production quality is all over the place.

I wanted to make this review to call Netflix out on this.

They went out of their way to advertise this with the FlyLo OST. Yet the trailer music isn't even in the series, nor on the album. They put all of the best action and shots in the trailers.

I expected to at least get some enjoyment from anime fights with a good soundtrack from this, sadly it doesn't provide anything of the above.

Stay clear of Yasuke. Just play the album on Spotify and watch something worth your time.

Yasuke is best viewed as an Onimusha or Afro Samurai reboot so a real retelling of Yasuke´s story continues to elude us. He even feels like a side character in his own show and don´t ask me why this wasn´t produced as a 2-part movie. The plot is a bit all over, almost like a videogame as villains come and go at random. The miniseries most importantly would have been better off without the badly explained sciences fantasy elements (why is The Force in this?) but the overall picture is better than its assorted elements and the anime works well enough as a one and done pulp adventure. The music is what I will remember the most and a lot of the animation is well done for a TV production. Another "Good Enough" production by MAPPA and reminiscent of the ultra-random OVAs we used to get till the late 00s.