Samurai 7 - Reviews

Samurai 7 redeemed its self/ showed its value with the character interaction. I actually watched this some time ago as well as recent to this review. I had things to say about it but wasn't on this website anime planet.

I could have fully kept on watching this and it is watchable, just entertaining enough. I give it up because of ill suited characters, design flaws  and lazy animation. But as stated it is slightly and just enough entertainment value and quality.

STORY: Samurai 7 tells the story of a village named Kanna. Every year during the harvest a group of bandits come and steal away almost all of the rice that had been harvested that year. Not only that, the bandits are becoming more demanding, now taking women and children in addition to rice.

The elder of Kanna Village has decided that to protect the village they must hire samurai to fight against the bandits. However, the village has no money and thus must find samurai willing to protect the village for a payment of rice. Three members of the village leave to attempt to recruit samurai. They travel to the city and search for samurai willing to work, and after finding several samurai and having a few encounters with the local government they return to Kanna village to prepare defenses against the bandits.

WARNING SPOILERS BELOW!!!!!!!

The samurai train the villagers in the use of bows, building walls, and construct a giant ballista to defend the village against the bandits. After successfully defeating the bandits, the samurai then launch an attack upon the capital to defeat a power-hungry ruler who has recently risen to power as Emperor. After heavy casualties for the samurai, and the near-destruction of Kanna village, the capital is finally defeated.

ANIMATION: The animation in this anime is superb...SOMETIMES. The creator blended the CGI really well....but it did kind of fall off in the middle.

SOUND: The voice acting is extremely well done....both in the dub and the original Japanese. The music is perfect for this genre.

CHARACTERS: The Characters in this anime are awesome. 

Kambei is a wise samurai who has survived many battles, though he feels no joy from them. Many of his friends have died in those battles. He constantly lives in the shadow of his painful and violent past, rejecting Kirara after stating that his heart is dried up. He leads the group during their battles and usually plans strategy.

katshiro is a young and inexperienced samurai who wishes to be Kambei's student, calling him sensei almost from their first meeting. He idolizes the principles of bushido. He promises to protect Kirara no matter what, and seems to be attracted to her. He grows stronger and more skillful throughout the series, eventually becoming a worthy student of Kambei; and he also comes to terms with killing enemies, after reacting in shock the first time.

Gorobei is a skilled samurai who has made his living since the wars' end by entertaining people on the city streets. He is also a veteran of the Great War, so he knows Kambei by reputation. He is very skilled at dodging blows and can pluck arrows and darts from the air. He often makes light of rather serious or dangerous situations. He is also quite smart, in his own unique way. He is the first to be killed. To him, all the world was a stage and the people, merely players. He will be well remembered after his curtain call.

Shiroji in the Great War with Kambei, and is often referred to as "Kambei's old wife." ("Mate" in the English series) He temporarily leaves behind his successful post-war business at the Firefly Inn, and with it, his beautiful girlfriend/fiance, to join Kambei in battle once again. He has a prosthetic left hand which has a grappling hook capability with his index finger. His girlfriend, Yukino, has nicknamed him Momotaro, from the traditional Japanese tale, because she found him, badly injured after a battle, floating down a river inside a capsule reminiscent of a peach.

Kikuchiyo is a cyborg with a mechanized exoskeleton. He is originally a peasant until becoming a samurai to help others. He is often looked upon as a clown or a bother, as he gets angry easily and often causes trouble with his loud noise and clumsy ways. He is accepted as the seventh samurai after revealing he was also a farmer, like the peasants of Kanna. He carries the largest of the swords, which also acts as a chainsaw. He is fiercely loyal to Kambei, and, when given recognition, he returns favors fourfold. He is well liked by the villagers, especially by little Komachi, who asks him to become her husband when she grows up, a request that he accepts in return for her keeping his fake family tree. He is the last to be killed, he died protecting Kanna from the crashing capital.

Hayashida Heihachi is a genial samurai who wishes to avoid fighting as much as possible and prefers to eat rice instead. During the Great War, he took a position as a combat engineer, which kept him off the front lines but also used his mechanical skills. He is discovered chopping wood in exchange for food or devices that interest him. He is most helpful within the group as their mechanic, and orchestrates the construction of medieval-type weapons. However, he harbors a deep hatred for traitors as he was one himself, which resulted in his whole unit being killed. He is crushed by a huge iron bar. Before dying, he shouts out: "I'll be in the rice" or "Find me in the rice". Within the series, he talks about the old tradition of the "seven rice kami" inside every grain of rice.

Kyuzo is originally a nearly silent, mysterious bodyguard for Ayamaro. In that role, he fights with Kambei, and he later joins the group with the stated intent of saving Kambei's life so that he can later fight Kambei to the death. Kyuzo is an incredibly skilled fighter, wielding double blades that fit into one sheath on his back. He's accidentally killed by Katsushiro when Katsushiro used a gun to protect Kambei because his sword was broken.

Kirara  is a mikumari (water maiden, a village priestess) of Kanna. She decides to go to help find the samurai to bring back to her village, and she admits that she also wanted to see something of the outside world. She possesses a dowsing crystal on a necklace which allows her to detect the flow of groundwater and to read others' hearts. She falls in love with Kambei, though he rejects her.

Komachi is Kirara's little sister, who follows along with her and Rikichi to see the city as well as help locate the samurai. She likes the boisterous Kikuchiyo and asks him to marry her when she grows up. After the death of Kikuchiyo, Komachi is seen with her sister's dowsing necklace hinting that she inherited her position as the Mikumari of her village.

Rikichi  is a peasant of Kanna, who travels with Kirara to locate the samurai. He can be often rash because of his hatred for the bandits. He blames himself for the loss of his wife, Sanae, who has given herself up to the bandits to save the village. Kambei promises to rescue Sanae, and Rikichi is eventually reunited with her.

OVERALL: Samurai 7 is a truely great series. I highly recomend it to any anime fan.

Overall the character were great, each was equally important. The fights didn't take lots of episodes. The soundtrack was magnificent, it make it more dramatic. The story......... genius.

I know that everything is above a 6 but I would not waste your time with this one.  It seemed way to pointless in the end, very unsatisfying. 

Story:  The story was alright, it kept me interested for the most part.  They were always somewhere new or doing something important.  So I give it an 8 for being solid.  HOWEVER, its rather annoying that the ending was so damn blazay.  It seems like no one can end an anime in any kind of good way.  frustrating to say the least.

Animation: needless to say, nothing special will be found here in terms of animation.

Sound: some of the voice actors were legit as hell, some were lame as hell, the rest were pretty solid.  the soundtrack was comprised of like 3 songs though, or thats what it seemed like.

Characters: Ergo Proxy, Wolf's rain, Samurai 7.  These anime all have a special place with me as different.  Not in a bad way, they have a strange environment and story and it really made me want to watch more.  However all of them had one major problem.  Either their plot, or characters became too difficult to understand.  The situations became so . . . "complex", if you can even call it that, that it was hard to follow what the message or goal was.  In Samurai 7 it was the characters.  In particular Katsushiro, Kanbei, and Kirara.  The relationship between them became weird, then strange, then impossible, and completely hopless.  I think the character building between these characters was the most important part and by the end of the anime it was just a massive trainwreck. This gets a 7 because of the other awesome characters, there were some pretty damn good ones, and they really made it worth watching, but it could have been much better had they focused on the right characters to build up.

Summary:  The epic fail in the character building between the 3 characters that needed it really ruined it for me.  Everything else was fine, but it gets a 6, this anime left me with an empty hole when it was all done.  Everything they did seemed pointless and all the hype about Kanbei was just dumb.  He made more mistakes then most, they made it seem like he was always right, when I found that much of what he did and said didnt really make sense.  Some characters that needed to die didnt and some that didnt need to die did.  Some characters made mistakes for the wrong reasons and then never made amends for it.  And frickin Kirara done f*cked up.  So for those reasons I would not recommend Samurai 7, too much pointlessness and emptiness in the end.

Samurai 7 was an anime that was full of great highs, and horrible lows. I have not seen the original "The Seven Samurai" movie (which is nuts, considering I'm such a cinema lover), so don't expect me to draw any similarities between the two.

Story: 9 out of 10.
Story was, to me, the best of the entire series. Very classic samurai tale, told in a very interesting Miyazaki-esque future. The story plays out as a group of farmers head to the big city to hire 7 samurai, with nothing but rice for payment. All the samurai have fun and interesting personalities, but what really makes the series stood out was the relationships amongst them. 
The story goes through different arcs, the first being recruitment, the second is defending the village, and the third is the final battle. The first and last were really interesting, and fun to watch, but the middle arc was horrible. Seemingly confused with some budgeting issue, many technical errors appeared in these episodes (Namely episode 16, the WORST budgeting episode of an anime I've EVER seen.)
There were also consistency errors, such as "Small bombs are outlawed, but giant crater-making canons aren't? That's retarded. And also I hated how some of the characters progressed. I suppose Gonzo thinks every character just has a small speech, and immediately gains year’s worth of training. One fiery speech and a bumbling robot turns into a samurai killing machine? Don't insult us Gonzo.

Animation: 5 out of 10.
As heartbreaking as it is for me to say, I have to give animation a 5 out of 10. Yes, the character designs are fun and vibrant, and the landscapes are gorgeous, but there is a catch; these things are only true MOST of the time. There are quite a bit of insultingly bad artwork on some of the episodes, and outside of the fight scenes, the anatomy swayed in and out of correct, and outlandish. 
And now the real awful part. Enter Studio Gonzo. A studio well known for not only butchering excellent animes, but REFUSING to hear out how much we hate terrible anime CG graphics. The Bandits were laughably bad, and most of the explosions were horrible.
Another thorn in my paw for animation was the technical errors in the series. Just to list off one episode I jotted notes down on, on episode 16, Manzo fires an arrow with a bomb on it (although in the next scene it's a regular arrow, because only the bad guys had bomb arrows.) Kiku is seen several times with a sword that is red (His handle is red, the blade is supposed to be the color of steel, obviously. someone did a botched job painting there. 
However, the VERY worst was the fight scene for episode 16. Rain rolls in, setting the scene for a PERFECT samurai fight... only to be quickly ruined by shite budgeting. There is a small fight scene, and then there is a slow motion montage of fighting. However, if you look carefully, you'll notice something... familiar. They literally took the exact fight scenes from the previous episodes, and changed the background to a raining village. There is even a scene where Kambei slices somebody in episode 16 on the right shoulder, and his left shoulder explodes in blood instead. Why is this weird? Because in the previous episode, he did this EXACT same scene, but to a guard that was holding him, and the guards left shoulder actually bled. One of the WORST episodes of anime I've ever seen.

Sound: 6 out of 10.
Sound was a let-down for me, however, not entirely bad. Whenever I get in the mood for a good samurai flick, I always like to hear traditional Japanese music. This is taken advantage of very rarely. Music is usually slow and ominous, and never takes you out of the edge-of-your-seat feeling. This is tough when you are trying to watch a romantic, action, or comedy scene obviously. 
Voice acting was a different story. Everyone had wonderful voice actors, besides one person. Kiku may very well have the MOST annoying freaking voice I've ever heard in an anime. Like nails on a chalk board. Also, Okara (the little friend of Komachi) had this peculiar laugh that I can only describe as "scooby doo" in nature. Very annoying.

Characters: 7 out of 10.
Characters was a tough section to judge because of how I judge it personally. I like to rate it on two aspects. 1. The characters themselves, and 2. Their growth. As far as characters go, they started off interesting, and ended wonderfully. However, as far as growth is concerned, they were absolutely butchered. 
Katsushiro was the biggest offender of all. He starts off as a child who can hardly swing a sword, and as soon as he kills one person, he becomes essentially the biggest badass swordman of all the lands. WHAT? How does one just get a little pissed off and learn YEARS of mental and physical training? Ridiculous. Kiku is the same way, but not as bad. And then cherrywise, people like Kyuzo and Shichiroji do not change one bit. They have absolutely no depth to them whatsoever.

Overall: 7.5 out of 10.
Overall, the storyline was enjoyable and an epic of sorts, but it's like looking at a beautiful painting covered in small cracks. The series is weighed down by lazy artists and a tight budget, and I only wish the series could have fully gotten the outcome it deserved.