I would almost be willing to rate Ninja Slayer a 10/10 based purely on entertainment value. One thing though. The most entertaining part about Ninja Slayer isn't the dub. It's the audience reaction and kids who absolutely don't get the joke. Here's your warning: if your idea of entertainment is purely based on pretty colors and flashy animation, PSST, you're doing it wrong.
Artwork and Animation:
Query:
Is a black and white movie inferior to one in color? Is a color movie inferior to 3D movies because OH MY LAWD THEY LITERALLY ADDED ANOTHER DIMENSION!? The answer is no.
So, to anyone who says that Ninja Slayer sucks because of the animation- just because it uses a different visual style than you've come to expect from the typical T&A anime you watch, it's time for something new.
Ninja Slayer is essentially Inferno Cop 2.0- now with a budget!
So, if you saw Inferno Cop: you know what to expect from the style here. It's an Adult Swim-styled in betweener short if you haven't. Lots of iridescence, reds, explosions, and booms, bangs, and fire.
Sound and Voice Acting: 10
YEEEAARRT!
AUUUUAAAGHHH!
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAARRRTTTT!
AUUUUUUUUAAAAAAAAAGH!
RECITE YOUR DEATH HAIKU!
SAYONARA!!!!!!!!!!!!!
BOO00000OOM
The rest of the cast recites their death haikus appropriately, also with a lot of explosions. These voice actors are great at producing explosions on the mic. It's basically like listening to the collab mixtape I did with Papa Franku.
Sound and Voice Acting: F'real this time
Christopher Sabat does the best cool macho man there's ever been. He's been a suave black dude, a pedophile priest, he's been several violent psychopaths, an enormous muscleman, a lot of various anthropomorphic beasts, and probably most famously Vegeta.
Add kickass badass superpowered ninja slaying monstrosity to the list. Couldn't ask for better.
Characters:
Too many to count. Ninja Slayer dispatches about 5 ninjas of various thematic origin per episode, plus a thousand clones, meaning at least half a million ninjas eat it by the end of the show's run. However, we do have some standouts: the sexy IRC hacking blonde: Nancy Lee, Ninja Slayer's partner in dispensing sweet, sweet justice to the asshole ninjas that rule Neo Saitama. Her superpower is directly connecting her consciousness to IRC via an ethernet port on her head, where she hacks everyone's life and Ninja Slayer just rekt.exe 's them.
There's also Yukano Dragon, the young amnesiac granddaughter of Ninja Slayer's master, Dragon Sensei, Forest Sawatari, shellshocked leader of the Survival Dojo fresh out the jungles of 'Nam, Koki Yamoto- the ubiquitous schoolgirl that every show must have, Shogo, white boy sporting a rad-ass afro and no shirt, because he's a punk ass, too.
Story:
As nonsensical as one would believe Ninja Slayer to be, it does actually follow a plot. Kenji Fujikido's family was ruthlessly torched by ninjas sent by the Soukai Syndicate, run by the 30 foot tall giant Laomoto Khan. On his deathbed, he accepts a ninja soul, Naraku Ninja, and with his newfound power vows to kill all ninjas, ESPECIALLY whoever it was that killed his family.
The first half or so is a set of really disconnected threads featuring a lot of different characters who take over the main spot for a short arc, and then in the second half, it's all brought together by their interactions and various confrontations with Soukai ninjas- kind of like a Tarantino movie, taking a lot of random unassociated people and tying up their motives and actions together, except with a lot more YEEEART. (There is a lot of hilarious and clever dialogue, courtesy of the narrator though.)
Enjoyment and Overall:
It's hard to really nail down what makes Ninja Slayer so much fun. If one is not amused by absurdity and parody of parody, Ninja Slayer is probably not going to be a lot of fun to watch. However, absurdist humor is popular with anime watchers. I know this, because besides the ubiquitous "guy falls on girl and ends up grabbing her boob" joke that's in every boob and butt show now, anime is a medium that lends itself to absurdity and being far removed from realism. Why am I laughing at a cross dressing shark and a bunch of 13 year old girls with superpowers blowing up giant robots covered in tons of food, all while hopping from planet to planet and throwing galaxies like baseballs?
Because it's ridiculous, that's why.
And that's why Ninja Slayer works. It's ridiculous.
YEEEAAART/10
10/27
Unnecessary Clarification:
The whole idea of Ninja Slayer (and I left this out because my review was crap already) is that it was written by two Japanese dudes posing as American weebs writing a parody of 80s ninja action schlock in the schlockiest way possible.
Expository Statement:
That is, it's a parody of a parody, parodied in a parody style of animation with double layer parody dialogue and, well, actually a fairly decent plot. I don't want to call it Tarantino-esque, but... Tarantino-esque. You have a bunch of disconnected random characters who all end up tied together in the overarching plot. It's not The Usual Suspects or anything, but it gets the job done well. Revenge tales historically have been fairly easy to write (because there's a specific goal) with a lot of wiggle room for inversion, subversion, and likewise. It's a very flexible narrative.
Commentary:
Whacking Ninja Slayer for the story is a bad point to pick, at any rate. (not that I would). I mean, I know not everyone liked the animation style, that's personal preferences. I know that it seems like there's basically no character progression (there's not much), but the fun isn't in analyzing it for its literary depth, because that's not its bag, baby, yeah.
I read some of the translated part of the novels, and the show is basically a 1:1 visual and auditory recreation of the dialogue and scene setting. Whoever wrote it had to have given Trigger permission to animate it like that, and probably thought it was hilarious that something that's a parody of a parody looked as bad as it read.
Statement:
You just gotta see Ninja Slayer for what it is, and that's up to the individual to make of it- but to me, it's just plain laughable ludicrosity.
