Sword of the Demon Hunter

Episode 24

We're at what may be the end of Sword of the Demon Hunter in anime; as of writing, there's been no word that it'll continue. Taken as an “ordinary” episode, this one is passable, but it's thin and unconvincing in the show's own terms. Taken as a series finale, it's next to nothing. Remember all the set-up with the demon sisters and Suzune's return two episodes ago? Here they're glimpsed in just one shot, meaning that if you want to know how things will fall out between Suzune and Jinta, you may have to go to the source light novels by Moto'o Nakanishi.

At least the series spares us a cheesy flashback montage. Instead, there are a couple of neat callbacks to the opening episode, as Jinya reminisces on how he and his sister were saved from the wilderness as kids. Later it's revealed that the middle-aged woman, Chiyo, who tends the shrine housing the fox mirror, is actually Jinya's childhood playmate Chitose. That's itself a reminder that Jinya's post-Kadono adventures have spanned nearly three decades, excluding the flash-forwards to 2009.

Much of the episode is spent rounding off Kaoru's already rather tiresome jaunt to the 1870s. We're asked to believe than an ordinary girl from the twenty-first century could fall in such instant love with the past – in a couple of days! – that she longs to stay there always. If Kaoru had been set up as a character with an obsessive fascination with the Meiji era, and an encyclopedic working knowledge of what life then entailed, then maybe we could have bought into it. But otherwise, it's nonsense. Is Kaoru really fine with 1870s plumbing and hygiene, and the level of medical provision, and the life opportunities for a young woman (vanishingly few), and the small matter of never seeing her friends and family again? Beside this, InuYasha feels like gritty historical realism.

Okay, so maybe I'm underestimating how little an impulsive teenage girl might think about the future when she's been shot into the past. We might also conjecture that maybe she's harboured such a huge crush on Jinya that the loss of everyone else she knows pales into insignificance. Even so, such foolish feelings make a flimsy basis for a story.

There's little else to say about the episode, which is blandly animated at best – some drawing in the talk between Jinya and Chiyo/Chitose is painfully awkward. Much more could have been made of the two summer festivals, more than a century apart – why not interweave them to depict Jinya's memories? We hear Jinya has finally learned to be happy in 2009, despite presumably losing Nomari and nearly everyone else he cared about in the interim. And yet he's consoled because he gets to meet a ditzy twenty-first girl again? Give us a break.

I'll end on a more generous note. Until late in the series, I found it interesting and often touching, even if it never regained the dramatic heights of its first episode. Often it felt strongest when it was depicting kindness mixed with magic, as with the backstories of Ofu (saved by a mortal who willingly grows old in an otherworld) and Nomari (saved by a spirit who pretends she hates children). I found the last four episodes to be a sad decline, but I've mostly enjoyed my time with Jinya. Farewell, demon swordhunter, and I hope you sort out your family issues in the end.

Rating:

Sword of the Demon Hunter is currently streaming on HIDIVE.