Basilisk: The Kouga Ninja Scrolls

Some desire love. Some desire peace and freedom. Some others want to protect their beloved ones. Some desire to temporarily achieve honor to enable further accomplishments or to justify their existence. Some finally simply want power to rule other's destiny in sight of their own perspective. And human history is just a huge conflict involving these major needs. I'm not going to list what's good and what could be better in this anime: it's 10y old and technology and tastes are different. It deals with great topics and it does it in a great way: animation, graphic, SFX and character design is top notch. I'm in my 30s and I cried a lot: ancient Greek tragedy sounds just like this and you can't avoid to feel what is deep in our souls when watching this. Watch it alone: your children won't like it apart from the battles. But let your grown children watch it if they don't want to read Euripide instead. I looked at all the serialised animes around in the last 20 years and found no one more deserving: this is great. Maybe just 3-4 other animes are of this level for our western perception. Buy it. Support it. Let this anime survive over the "consume to get something new" policy of these days. This will make you cry and dream and will motivate you to believe in human kind. In 5-20 years something better will be there but as per now anime poetry can be found nowhere else.

Just when I thought I'd seen the worst anime of all time I try watching this boring, useless, poorly written and sloppy animated garbage. This is truly the worst anime I've ever seen which is saying a lot. Not only is the action not in the slightest bit exciting but there is literally no storyline, no plot, no character development and no clever dialogue. It's got all the making of an award-winning "worst anime of all time" title. DO NOT WATCH THIS GARBAGE!!!

The animation is good and the character design are great but it was so boring if you are looking for fights there is not much and even when it happen it does not last long. For me this is one of the worst animation i have ever seen.

Basilisk is a very good looking, serious and very well animated action packed ninja version of 'Romeo and Juliet' set in ancient Japan. It tells a compact and solid story about two rivaling ninja clans and their ninja. The story is pretty fast paced which kept me interested at all times and makes you care about the great characters in it. The animations in the series are one of the best-looking animations i have seen so far. Overall Basilisk is a pretty realistic anime for a ninjanime and has a lot of cruel, bloody and violent scenes, and a pretty good build up to the righteous violence climax, which makes it that much better.

Definitely worth watching!!!

rate it 8,4

It is simply an amazing show. Very well written. The story is about two ninja clans, the Iga and the Koga, who are ordered to assemble their ten best warriors to kill each other until only one side lives. Apparently there are two illegitimate heirs to the shogunate and whichever side wins will determine the next shogun. Meanwhile, the plot addresses a beautiful love story that is doomed, politics, martial arts, and philosophy. The artwork is superb. The music is decent. It is very similar to the script of the live action movie called Shinobi that came out not too long ago. It also has an association to the classic Ninja Scroll movie, where there are these ninjas who each have different mystical powers that are unique to them alone. It does great justice to Ninja Scroll, unlike a few other attempts to recreate that great story which is culled from myth. Of course, the myth was created because of the disappearance for many years of the real Jubei Yagyu when no one knew what he did during that time. He was the son of Munenori Yagyu, who was one of two or three instructors in the martial arts to the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu and his family. Munenori's father Muneyoshi had learned the Shinkage-Ryu or "shadow art" based on psychological martial skills and created the Yagyu Shinkage-Ryu. In roughly the same part of the mountain ranges in the area where the Yagyu village still is was an area that had practitioners of the occult arts or voodoo. Many mythological traditions like to combine the two together because it makes for a wild array of skill combinations one person might have had. These stories are mostly fiction based on myths but they do have connections to real people and real events in Japan's history. Munenori left behind some writings about his art. In his book 'The Life Giving Sword' he says that you must make your mind clear like still water reflecting the full moon so that whatever thoughts are directed at you are reflected back upon the attacker and then you will be able to react with the proper counter measure to anything that comes at you and he says that this concept can be applied to more than just physical combat but also to business and politics and any walk of life. (or something along those lines)