Yasuke

This is a pretty MOR anime, but the soundtrack is incredible. I watched about two minutes in English and was relieved to be able to switch to Japanese. For some reason, every anime just sounds much much better in Japanese and so I found it easier to parse the deliberate anachronisms and tried-and-true anime tropes. I did find the lead character quite likeable. I definitely consumed the album soundtrack a number of times on Spotify before watching. Perhaps that led me to like the film more, as the music connected me first, then the visuals and story. Now I'm going to watch Princess Mononoke.

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.

I had high expectations after watching the trailer. Therefor I was very dissappinted when watching the first episode. The English voice acting didn't sound good to me and it was a strange mix of short fragmented scenes and music that didn't seem to fit. I wasn't sure I would want to continue watching it. However, I decided to give it at least one more episode and I also watched it in Japanese this time. What a difference. I ended up enjoying it a lot more and enjoyed the story and the characters.

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.