Sword of the Demon Hunter

Episode 14

How would you rate episode 14 of
Sword of the Demon Hunter ?

Community score: 3.1

For anyone wondering, Sword of the Demon Hunter wasn't rated highly when it started this spring, so the first cour didn't get weekly reviews, but its episodes enjoyed good ratings over the season. That's why it's getting weekly coverage from now on, while I've reviewed the first 13-part cour here.

My thoughts on it were mixed: an extended opening with some excellent tragic drama, followed by episodes which were stronger as period slice-of-lifers than as action shows, lifted by engaging characters and nifty twists. Now the series enters its second cour with… a bizarrely pointless episode that doesn't have much more story substance than a clip show.

I was wondering if the episode might skip ahead a decade or so, which would be perfectly possible with a non-ageing protagonist. Instead, most of it's a flashback, set in the timeframe of the first episode, while Jinta – as he's called at this point – is living in the village of Kadono. That's when he's serving as the bodyguard to his foster sister Shirayuki, who herself serves as the village's shrine maiden.

I would have been more interested to have learned more about the off-screen fate of Shirayuki's mother, the previous shrine maiden. She fell victim to a demon (at least, that's what we were told), which must have caused her daughter and the villagers great trauma. However, this episode's focus is the rivalry between Jinta and his fellow bodyguard Kiyomasa, son of the village chief. He harbors his own feelings for Shirayuki and isn't shy about making cracks about his lady's bedchamber.

He's not very interesting, though there's an implicit contrast between this portrayal and how Kiyomasa was shown in the first episode – still as Jinta's love rival, but older and more complicated. There was a scene where Kiyomasa actually got furious that Jinta would give up on a life with Shirayuki so easily. In this week's episode, Kiyomasa makes a left-field suggestion that he empathizes with Jinta's kid sister Suzune, because she can't be with who she loves either. But it's poor storytelling. We haven't seen Kiyomasa and Suzune exchange a single word – when did he get this perceptive about her?

That angle's forgotten as Jinta comes up against an ape-demon which capitalizes on his suppressed hatred for his rival. The ape doesn't look as bad as some of the show's low-rent monsters, but it's still pretty poor – look at how it “sproings” weightlessly into the air during its first skirmish with Jinta. Our hero eventually works out the beast's trickery, slays it, and that seems to be that.

The obvious problem is that we've seemingly already seen how everything ends between Jinta, Shirayuki and Kiyomasa. Jinta even seemed to have got over his grief for Shirayuki by the end of the first cour. True, Kiyomasa's fate was left ambiguous - he got dragged away by a demon woman and we never saw him again. Perhaps he'll turn up as Suzune's demonized servant in a future episode, but I'm skeptical that his arc has anywhere interesting to go.

The episode's last minutes skip back to the present, with glimpses of some familiar characters, though there's no indication if Natsu's still in Edo after her meltdown last episode. There's talk of a cursed sword from Kadono, being purchased by some Japanese bigwig… and then the episode is out of time while we're wondering where all this is heading. Is the sword linked to Suzune, or to new adversaries, and should we care either way? Honestly, the episode is a very poor way to start a new cour. Rating: Must do better, and fast!

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