Ranked #3634

Samurai Spirits

If you ever wanted to torture someone, lock them in a room with this anime for a few minutes. When you open the door, if they have not slit their own throat with their fingers, then you'll just find some poor shell of a human huddled in a corner with tears running down their face. Yes, this anime is that bad.

I am reviewing what is possibly the worst anime I have ever had the displeasure of seeing: Samurai Spirits (or as it has been dubbed in the English as Samurai Shodown). This anime was based off a popular 90s arcade fighter, that featured historical warriors from all over the world, most notably, Japan. Having played the game, I was rather excited to learn that there was an anime adaptation lying around somewhere. Watching this was possibly one of the worst decisions I ever made.

This movie ranks up there with the Top Ten worst anime ever made and inflicted upon humanity. I know when the apocalypse is near, this anime is going to be jammed in my DVD player having its rubbish blasted out of the TV, so I'd pretty much know that the end is nigh.

The story is undeveloped and just plain stupid. It is tough for writers to come up with a plot to a video game when adapting it to anime. But you can clearly see there was no thought behind this, and that the anime was only meant to saturate the market with more Samurai Shodown. A young warrior tries to... what was it now...? Save the world, that's it! With the aid of warriors from all the world who all just happen to be in Japan despite time period and geography! Their greatest enemy is a drag queen who wants to take over, and while he is a strange psycho with Ridiculous Amounts of Power, it appears that his power was not enough to stop the dubbing company from giving him a sex change and turning his character into a woman.

However, despite there being butchery conducted on the English adaptation, the dubbers had very little work to do in order to make this anime a mess. It was already bad when it was just Japanese. So the problem comes directly from the source. No developed story, no coherent plot, and just utter pointless crap and lame fight scenes for hours. It seems like the creators told the animators, "Well, to hell with the story--as long as the pictures move, we're covered."

Which brings me to another horrendous thing: the art. The drawings are bad, and the animation is terrible. Honestly, there is a battle scene that plays out like this: the camera focuses on a still-shot of one of the baddies screaming or war crying, and then a knife appears out of nowhere, stabbing him in the stomach. And it just... sticks there. No blood, no piercing. It's like sticking a knife in a stick of butter and just watching it. Awful, awful animation. The fight scenes on the whole were pathetic. So don't watch this if you want to see a good fighting anime.

Ugh, the soundtrack is utterly dreadful. Cheesy and uninspired noise. And if you have access to this in English, please, PLEASE spare yourself. Some of the worst voice-acting in history can be heard. Everyone sounds like they are ad-libbing the entire script. Totally kills the effect of line-delivery and of "emotional" or intense scenes.

And the characters here are about as deep as the sand in a litter box. They are all cardboard cut-outs posing as real characters. They only serve to move the intensely awful plot along. You cannot and will not come to care for any of them, and most are annoying anyway since they have zero personalities. Heck, their CLOTHES have more character than they do. I suspect if you're a fan of the video game, you'd either be happy or traumatised to see your favourite characters in this anime. I go with 'traumatised'.

This anime inspires nothing but hatred and tears. It is boring and painful to watch. I kept waiting and waiting and waiting for it to end. It felt like it dragged on for an eternity. I'd gladly take fire, brimstone and snakes over this torture.

Seriously, avoid this like the plague. Actually, no, take the plague because it will be so much better than watching this anime. read more