Yaiba: Samurai Legend

Episode 11

Despite not always being on board with everything this show does, I was pretty excited going into this episode. If there's one thing this series does well, it's action, and a big climactic battle between Yaiba and Onimaru was bound to deliver plenty of it, so I was looking forward to seeing just how much energy the animation team ended up pouring into this. On that front, this episode certainly delivers, but when it comes to much of what ends up surrounding this fight, I found myself feeling a lot less enthusiastic than I was hoping to be.

Although Yaiba and Onimaru are within easy striking distance of each other, it ends up taking a few minutes before we see them going at it. In the meantime, Onimaru decides to throw a few more of his minions at Sayaka and the others in one last attempt to steal the Thunder God Orb from Yaiba, and while there's a good enough mix of comedy and action here to keep that from feeling boring, it does come off as needless padding. For a show that has otherwise been keen to move as swiftly as possible, it's a bit jarring having an episode that felt like it was stalling for time, and while I would otherwise be happy to see it slow down a bit, this is one instance where I would have been fine with the show being quick to the point.

The fight between Yaiba and Onimaru is pretty spectacular. We're treated to a buffet of flashy special attacks, kinetic battle animation, and incredible-looking action smears all smacked on top of some blood-pumping insert music blaring in the background. As far as sheer presentation goes, this is about as good as it gets for an action and even in a year with wall-to-wall action showcases like Solo Leveling s2 or the Dragon Ball Daima finale, if Yaiba hadn't already made a case for the being the best looking action show of the year before, it certainly has now.

As fun and gorgeous as everything looks, some of that high energy is dragged down by its lack of substance. I haven't taken too much issue with Onimaru's abrupt journey from being a victim of Yaiba's pranks to literal cartoon supervillain up to this point, but that's mostly because his minions have been silly enough to pick up the slack, and the handful of evil acts we've seen him commit have been so over the top that it was hard not to find his newfound villainy at least a little funny. As far as being a serious villain goes, he's just not that interesting, and most of the exchanges between him and Yaiba in this episode are comprised of fairly bog-standard speeches about wanting to rule together or thinking that Yaiba is far too soft for all the power at his disposal.

I don't necessarily need Onimaru to be some tortured soul with tragic motivations or anything. Villains don't always need a ton of nuance to work effectively, and even relatively straightforward bad guys like the ones seen in the similar retro revival of Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai can be genuinely compelling if they believe their hype enough. The problem here is that Onimaru doesn't have much going for him beyond a vaguely defined desire for conquest, and while this episode could have been an opportunity to fill in the blanks on his motives, or at least provide a clearer idea of his mindset now that he's obtained so much power, all we get is a cool fight. I can't pretend that the show's execution on that end isn't almost worth the price of admission on its own, but I couldn't really find much of a reason to get invested in this fight beyond how it looks, and it just left me wanting to like this episode way more than I ultimately did.

All of these issues are only further compounded by the fact that this battle ends without much of a conclusion. Mr. Spider crawls back from the pit just in time to steal the Thunder God Orb, and with that accomplished, Onimaru flies off into the sunset as he turns his palace into a giant airship and calls it a day. After all the buildup we got for this fight, it's a pretty anti-climactic conclusion, and given my complaints in the last paragraph about Onimaru not being too interesting of a villain overall, I was kind of hoping that the usual laws of shonen power escalation would see him replaced by a bigger (and perhaps more compelling) threat, or otherwise put to the side for awhile. If he's gonna stick around as the main baddie for the long haul, I hope the series eventually finds more to do with him. While the high-quality action scenes and solid gags are still keeping me strapped into this show, it would be nice for it to provide just a bit more to cling onto than that.

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Yaiba: Samurai Legend is currently streaming on Netflix and Hulu on Saturdays.