Gintama

Gintama is an ongoing manga by Sorachi Hideaki. From 2006 to 2010, Sunrise, the same studio behind the Gundam franchise, did an anime adaptation which lasted for just over 200 episodes. So, does the anime manage to stay entertaining for that long, or even be entertaining at all? Let’s take a peek and find out.

Story:

There isn’t a single cohesive narrative to Gintama. There are some loosely connected arcs, and a whole lot of episodes that have nothing to do with those arcs, but there is no single narrative. The basic setup is that the world has been conquered by aliens, referred to in Gintama as ... “Amanto” and the government is still subservient to them. Samurai are no longer allowed to carry swords except for a few who work for the government or who have wealth and connections. In this world a samurai named Gintoki works by, in theory, doing odd jobs. Although that largely consists of him doing nothing. His crew consists of a youngster named Shinpachi, an Amanto girl named Kagura who possesses super strength and is highly vulnerable to sunlight, and a giant dog named Sadaharu, our cute character who requires ear scritches and belly rubs. Hijinks ensue as this group and the people around them get into shenanigans.

Let’s begin by looking at the problems with the series, shall we? By far the biggest issue is that the writing aesthetic is horribly inconsistent. Most of the episodes are highly random and intended for humour but when they get to the more story heavy arcs things take a huge shift into serious territory, sometimes including really heavy topics like sex trafficking, and it creates a huge tonal clash between episodes. You can’t segue from jokes about testicles and bloody rectums into a story about an underground city where children are sold to be raised as sex slaves. There is quite literally no way to make that transition so that it isn’t painfully awkward and completely disrespectful to the serious issue. It’s worse than that Captain Planet episode that dealt with AIDS. Sure, that was way over the series’ head too, but there wasn’t such a radical tonal problem. The tone isn’t the only thing that has problems with consistency, there’s also the continuity. There are three basic ways to do continuity. The first is having a strict, coherent continuity where everything matters. The second is to have a basic progression from one episode to the next but the details aren’t that important. The third is to toss continuity out the window completely, like Galaxy Angel. The problem with Gintama is that it does all three. Some episodes deal very much with continuity as being super important, others follow the more fast and loose route where there’s a progression but the details aren’t important and there are other episodes that don’t fit into any kind of continuity and will never be mentioned again after they’re over.

Now that we’ve been over that, let’s talk a bit about the comedy in this series that is, mostly, comedic. A lot of it is pretty puerile humour where someone defecates in their pants, or someone’s anus bleeds or where the punchline is something involving testicles. There are also a lot of bits where the characters will make loud references to some other piece of media and there are some other random bits of humour. The trouble is, a lot of it really isn’t funny. For example, there’s a running gag about one of the characters eating too much mayonnaise which is funny because… if he ate that much mayo in reality he’d weigh two hundred kilos and have to get around with a motorised scooter? There are two characters who pretty much exist for stalker jokes and there’s another running joke about Katsura getting annoyed by people calling him the wrong thing. There are times when the randomness can work and there are some points where they parody something competently instead of just making reference to it but they’re few and far between. I will give the series full credit for having some surprisingly clever deconstructions here and there, particularly when it comes to its treatment of trans-gendered characters.

Characters:

Gintama has a large cast of reoccurring characters, but very little in terms of complex ones. Most of them are used for one or two jokes and that’s pretty much it. I will say that there’s nothing wrong with that for a comedic work. You can have a bunch of fairly one-note characters as long as they have dynamics that provide good comedic possibilities and you can take advantage of that. The problem is the more serious episodes. This cast would be perfectly passable if the series didn’t have those largely serious story arcs but when you take a bunch of relatively shallow comedic characters and try to do something fairly serious with them it just quickly loses any sense of tension and the characters come across as heavily under-developed, if not as completely out of place.

Art:

The artwork and animation are pretty decent. There are some cases where they recycle footage or show a background with nothing happening, which they will almost always lampshade, but it’s competently done. The action sequences can be pretty strong, both when they’re doing something largely serious and when they’re doing a jokey action scene.

Sound:

The actors are pretty capable and no one does badly. However, the level of over-exaggeration in the series is really high and you might very well find yourself growing weary of listening to people shouting. The music varies. Sometimes it’s pretty good, sometimes it’s kind of annoying. Mostly, it’s just kind of bland.

Ho-yay:

There’s some in the series. There’s an openly lesbian character who shows up on a semi-regular basis and there’s a guy who is heavily implied to have romantic feelings for Sougo who shows up for a couple of episodes late in the series. There’s no reciprocation for their feelings, but they also aren’t used for jokes based on their sexuality. Some of the other characters act like asses about it at points, but the series itself doesn’t treat it as an issue. So, I’ll give Gintama some credit for treating its gay characters no differently than it does its straight characters. It is pretty refreshing, especially when you have “comedies” like Baka to Test that have to be as mean-spirited as possible about things like that.

Final Thoughts:

Gintama has a real problem with consistency. Its tone is wildly inconsistent which can lead to some really awkward and stilted moments. It’s inconsistent with what it wants to do with its continuity. If you like humour that’s more than a little puerile and pretty random then you might still enjoy the series in spite of that and there are some things it does pretty decently but it’s honestly not my cup of tea in that regard. I just don’t find ninety percent of the attempts at humour to be amusing. As such, I have to give the series a 4/10. Next week we’ll have this year’s film festival. Starting with Kara no Kyoukai 6 on Sunday. Because I’ve looked at that franchise first during the last two years and I might as well do it this time as well.

Gintama is overrated trash. It has a slow start, corny parodies, lame repetitive gags, no concise plot and has "serious arcs" when it's supposed to be a comedy first and foremost. What a complete mess of a series.

Plot: (1/10)
The comedic episodes that take up 80% of the series is just there to flesh out the characters, the world and repeat the same jokes over again. It’s unnecessary padding that has no affect on the actual plot, hence why it’s filler. You can skip them, look up the serious arc episodes and watch those and you’d still be caught up with the story.

The serious arcs ... are short, overdramatic, have fake deaths, bland sword fights and are filled with the same overused shounen troupes like: nakama power bullshit or villains giving long cliche monologues. None of the arcs are even better than your average shounen arc, especially the overrated Shogun Assassination arc.

The whole structure is a mess. Some episodes are dedicated to the odd jobs, then the shinsengumi, one moment is serious then half way through it’s comedy. 3 episodes would be comedy, then the next 4 would be “mini serious arcs”, the plot’s all over the place!

Characters: (1/10)
The characters are over the top, unrealistic and have barely any development. Seriously, if you compare the Odd Jobs Trio from the first episodes to the latest episodes in the final season, you’ll see that they’re pretty much exactly the same characters.

The worst part is the comedy is terrible. It’s as if it was written for 12 yr old weebs. The constant abusive punches/kicks, repetitive gags, overused references to other shows, cheesy dialogue, childish parodies and poop jokes are shit. Also, there’s so many references to Japanese culture that even the average viewer wouldn’t get the humour.

Overall (1/10):
Seriously, if you want to watch a episodic comedy series then you might as well watch Spongebob instead because it at least doesn’t take 60+ episodes to “get good” like Gintama.

How should I put this... Gintama is incredibly disappointing.

Story: 2
Art: 6
Sound: 6
Character: 4
Enjoyment: 2
Overall: 2

The basic plot about the Aliens (the West) colonizing Edo Japan in the end of the 19th century could have been exploited nicely, but all I got was childish humour relying almost exclusively on inscrutable references and monotonous slapstick. I only watched season 1, but I just can't go any further. I smiled sometimes at first, but then it grew tiresome and eventually too painful to carry on watching.
The characters are not very interesting from what I've seen, which is a pity considering the character design is one of Gintama's strongest ... points. The animation was homogeneous, but totally lacked ambition. The dub was very good, the soundtrack was ok, the OP/EDs were quite generic.

Considering the huge amount of references, I totally get why this show is popular in Japan. However I cannot explain such a global, unanimous acclaim. My guess is this series is so popular on MAL because it did not get much attention in Western countries, and it might be a way for some weaboos and tryhards to distinguish themselves from those they call Narutards.

Or maybe I am just too old for this $#!†.

PS: I will still watch the movies though, hoping they deliver more than the series.

My first review ever, and unfortunately a negative one, but i'll do my best to explain why i'm giving it such a score.

* Story * [2/10]
Since this is a comedy anime most episodes are loose and don't really have any important conection with each other, but sometimes there are some 'serious' arcs where story develops, so my rating is of those arcs.
Story is generaly weak with no mindblowing twists, it wasn't as bad to watch as most episodes, but it was mostly the same formula as everything we have seen before, strong bad guy and good guy takes a good beating and then defeats the ... vilan, nothing special, even though the art is quite great, but i'll talk about that later.
Then we had some single episodes with a story within them, and these were realy poorly done, they broke the whole feels train by making a dumb unfunny joke while in the peak of the drama, and while the story of the episode was really good it was just plain ruined by them breaking the rhythm.

* Art * [9/10]
Can't complain about anything, it was really good, the fights were very well animated and great artstyle.

* Sound * [8/10]
Here im only going to talk about soundtracks, openings and endings, and i have once again nothing to complain here, openings were great, endings it has one of the greatest endings i have ever seen "samurai heart", and ost was on point most of the times.

* Character * [2/10]
This was one of the greatest downfalls for the anime in my opinion, let me state the anoying trifecta : Shinpachi, Otae and Sarutobi.
Shinpachi: you know when you are telling a joke and the other person doesn't get it and you have to explain it making it really anoying, yeah, now imagine someone screaming the joke in your ears everytime a joke is said... yes, not very fun is it?
Otae: Typical strong femaly character beating up the MC, not much to be said.
Sarutobi: It was an original character i'll give them that, but boy did it get repetitive, and when i say repetitive i mean repetitive, not to say the screaming wich seems to the only thing the anime thinks its funny for the viewers.
Buuuuuut, there were some funny characters that were *not* anoying in the little screen time they did manage to get, the shogun, hijikata, and gintoki, those were the characters that truly were funny whenever they were on screen, shame was that gintoki was many times overshadowed by shinpachi's screaming, ruining most jokes.

* Enjoyment * [1/10]
Screaming, unfunny jokes, punching other people and such, unfortunately this was most of the episodes, out of the 300 episodes i've seen, i've only enjoyed and laughed at probably 20~30 wich is very bad, the reason why i kept going will be explained after. But it's not all bad news, some of the episodes i did enjoy i REALY enjoyed them, but they were so rare that watched gintama very very slowly, just when i had nothing else to watch.
The humour was also very simple, no real complexity and as i stated before all the jokes are explained to you via screaming, wich as i said is not enjoyable.

* Overall * [2/10]
Why did i watch it you ask? Well, bunch of reasons, first it was very high rated here and everyone seemed to love it to death, second i very rarely drop a show, third, people always said it would get better as time went by and unfortunatly it did not. I stated watching from episode 3 with an open mind and it was just a pain from begining to the end. Unfunny jokes, screaming and punching is this show in a nutshell. In the end i think you either love or don't, as simple as that, if you plan on watching this, start on episode 3 and watch 3 or 4 episodes, if you simply did not enjoy at all, don't try watching this, if you liked go ahead, you won't be disapointed.
For anyone wondering if i simply don't enjoy comedy shows, while not directly related i have watched simpsons, american dad, cleveland, southpark, and while yes these aren't anime, they are very well known comedy shows, and i thought for myself if i really liked all of these then i'd like gintama too, i didn't.
Another thing i did was watch a youtube video of funny moments and most of those i laughed really hard, and those were basicaly the episodes i liked when i watched the whole thing, disapointing.

One of the worst series i've ever watched. No plot, no historical basement, only comedy. Shinsengumi, which is a fundamental part of japanese history, is a parody and a group of idiots. Inexistent historical basement ( no contrast between shogunate and imperial army).

only comedy without serious elements. Historical names changed.
Okita is officially way more psychopatic than this parody, Hijikata is way more serious, Kondo is not a stalker nor a womanizer.
Shinsengumi flag completely abset. Important events like Aburanokoji and Ikedaya totally absent. No Shinsengumi importance.

"Protagonists" without serious features at all.

A disgusting series, more than pathetic or appalling.

This show is not for everyone, The high ratings that this series gets is honestly not reflective of the niche audience it actually has. I personally don't want to be mean to any fans of the show, however I personally did not find it to be funny or enjoyable. I only made it about 15 episodes in and was not impressed. The 'straightman deadpan' humor that permeates many Japanese shows is really not funny to me. and that is about 90% of the humor in Gintama.

tl;dr If you like Japanese humor read another review, if you don't care for it I'd pass

Absolute shit on a stick. To me. 100 something episodes in (watched over several years because i can only stand so many brain tumors at once) and it hasn't gotten better in such a way i wish to keep watching. Imagine if Naruto filler was all you got out of watching Naruto and that is what watching this feels like. Many of the jokes and humor go a mile over my head, the story is purified shit (although it has outburst' of decency) and i personally don't care for the characters. If you aren't enjoying the series from the beginning don't bother continuing. Watching this ... as an American makes me feel like a Japanese man watching Family Guy or something.

Why is this one of the highest rated anime, clogging up half of the top 20 spots on MAL? This is a mediocre shounen and mediocre comedy anime put together. It does neither very well. I cannot comprehend how a comedy show that has not made me laugh once in the 50 or so episodes I have slugged through is one of the highest rated anime of all time. I do not care about the characters, or the shounen battles. What is there to care about? All of the characters are so bland and cliche it makes me want to gouge my eyes out. I ... simply cannot understand the hype or love for this anime.

I have been trying to watch this anime since high school, around the time it came out. I always go back thinking there must be something wrong with me, as it seems to only get higher ratings over the years. I watch a couple episodes and it is so dry and unfunny it makes me dizzy. I feel physically ill whenever I watch it these days, it seems like I have developed a deep seated hatred for this anime. The only reason I don't rate this anime 1/10, is it seems to give other people joy.

Oh boy, Gintama. The so-called "masterpiece" of comedy anime that’s really just a mess of forced jokes, cringe characters, and lazy parodies. Let’s break it down.

First off, the comedy is not funny. It’s just loud screaming, toilet humor, and the same overused gags repeated a hundred times. Half the time, the jokes drag on way too long, like the show is begging you to laugh. And when it’s not trying too hard, it’s shoving in random anime parodies that only work if you’ve seen every show ever made.

Then there’s the tone. One second, they’re making dumb jokes about Shinpachi being irrelevant, and the next, they ... expect you to take a dramatic sword fight seriously. It’s whiplash at its worst. None of the emotional moments hit because you know the next episode will have Gintoki making a poop joke.

And let’s talk about the characters—cringe incarnate. Gintoki is supposed to be a badass lazy samurai, but he spends more time acting like a clown than actually doing anything cool. Shinpachi? A walking punchline. Kagura? A violent gremlin who eats like a pig because haha, isn’t that quirky? The so-called villains? Half of them turn into running gags.

At the end of the day, Gintama is just a chaotic mess that throws everything at the wall and hopes something sticks. If you like it, great, but let’s not pretend it’s the pinnacle of anime.

In short, don't waste your time watching this shit.

A rant explaining the insane ratings and the behind the scenes reasons of its popularity( nothing aggressive, atleast I dont think so):

Gintama is a show that everyone wont like, and thats fine, comedy is the most subjective genre imo. However due to its ratings in combination with moderate overall popularity some might believe that its a show thats for everyone, Its not. In order for someones score to count one needs to watch 20% of a series, which, for this show, means 41 episodes!!! So those who dislike this style of comedy drop it before they even reach that point. Those who stick with ... it already like it and so rate it highly. This is evident by the number of people who have dropped it or have put it on hold. A large portion of its "Popularity" on this site comes from the aforesaid people and those who plan to watch it (just look at the stats in desktop mode). So basically due to MAL system, only the ratings of the people who like the show is counted. Thus blowing up its ratings. Its even more prominent in sequels.



My thoughts: I dont like this weird style of comedy. I have nothing against it, its just not my thing. Usually I would give this a 5 as I can see why someone might like it, but as its ratings are already inflated...


This show has no specific story. Its art is normal and I personally dont like the particular noisyness of the show. I like the characters, specially Gintoki and Kagura, both being a farcry from their counterparts from other shonen series, in a way I like. But it was not enough to keep me interested, so there is that

It's just not funny. I can only watch so many dozens of episodes of a comedy without a single joke landing. The "humor" is childish poop jokes, dick jokes, violence, etc. and I suppose references to other Japanese media that actually did something with their time rather than just saying "remember that?" Where funny?
Barely any plot beyond dumb filler of the week nothings that never matter and go back to comedy jail of irrelevant status quo after wasting your time.
Barely any character depth of any substance beyond Shatner over the top cringe and dumb caricatures.
The art/animation is low quality and uninteresting in s1.

1/10 (where 5/10 ... is average)

This anime lacks any kind of cohesive story it instead opts into this episodic nature where basically every episode is not connected to the other, this is fine in any comedy anime or animation but Gintama tries to be more than that and have serious arcs at time which sometime are good but most of the times are to random and goofy to take serious. The other glaring problem with Gintama is compared to literally any other animated media meant to be funny it's the weakest one by far i can go dozens of episodes without finding a single thing worth laughing about genuinely the ... most overrated anime ever to exist.

There's a reason why most people think that if Gintama didn't have the "serious arcs", it wouldn't have been as popular.

So, this series has a lot of jokes that would DEFINITELY get it cancelled if it released currently.

And you can't even use the argument of: "it's a comedy bro, anything can happen..." when we're talking about uncomfortable borderline predatorial sexual comments, stalking jokes and annoying fan service that get MUCH worse as episodes go by in arcs where nothing happens. And those arcs are very common btw, in fact they pretty much constitute 90% of this series.

So, besides the younger audience, who is supposed ... to laugh at these?
This series gives me second-hand embarassment like no other with some of these jokes, and everything around it is just so childish.

Yes, it's a product of its time (even though there are older anime that don't have any of those problems...), but I genuinely only cared about the "serious arcs" where characters ACTUALLY ACT LIKE THEMSELVES, the plot develops and the story automatically becomes better. It's a genre problem maybe, but drama also exists here.

Well, unfortunately the first "serious arc" appeared after 50+ episodes of watching this...
I'm sure you can enjoy Gintama by only watching the "serious arcs", and that's probably the best way for an adult to experience it, but at the same time it's only 10% of the series content, so that sucks.

Overall, this was such a colossal disappointment and I don't know if the more serious arcs can save this.

Gintama is the Japanese equivalent of Family Guy, a disgustingly long-running cartoon show held together with eighth-grade dick and fart jokes, paper-thin reference humor, contrived slapstick and people making loud, horrible noises, with the very occasional glimmer of something kind of resembling good content if you squint.

The show stars Gintoki "We Have Kenshin Himura at Home" Sakata, a manic underemployed diabetic who stops mugging for the camera long enough to do all the cool fight scenes everyone remembers and not a second longer. Joining him is Kagura, whose humor can best be described as "what if girl... but she beat people up?" and Shinpachi, who's ... humor can best be described as "what if we had somebody who just explained the joke at the top of his lungs, every time we told one?" Together, they work a job that deliberately lets them do whatever the writers want them to do, in a setting that facilitates whatever the writers want to happen.

I am going to attempt to be at least a little bit nice, in order to placate the people who put the "confusing" reaction on this review. The setting of Gintama works for what it is attempting to do. In an alternate universe feudal Japan, Edo has been taken over by alien invaders. Samurai rub shoulders with robots, skyscrapers sit next to traditional wooden houses, and in general the whole thing is a chaotic mish-mash of historical, science fiction and modern day that really does allow for anything to happen. This is useful for the show's primary genre of wacky woo-hoo action-comedy. The jokes are blistering in their delivery, and while at least half of them boil down to "we changed literally one letter in a recognizable character's name and that's the whole joke," the rest manage to at least reach such vaunted heights as "would probably have been really damn funny if I were thirteen" or "Oh, hey. I can see you did a joke there. That's neat."

The thing that separates Gintama from Family Guy, of course, is that occasionally Gintama will do a "serious" arc. These are almost universally the thing everyone wants to remember about the show, and to their credit they are pretty consistently above average. The problem is twofold. One, the original run of this show is over 200 episodes long, and the real serious arcs didn't start happening until maybe 100 episodes in, so you need to sit through a *lot* of mediocre slop just to get to something the writers and animators actually cared about. Two: every single "serious" arc is exactly the same. Almost beat for beat. Side Character is threatened by the emergence of New Villain, who has a Big Plan that will Destroy Edo/Kill Side Character's Friends/End in Side Character Getting Married to a Trans Man. You know, all the stereotypical "Worst Possible Things That Could Happen." Gintoki and company go to a place and do Big Fight. They beat New Villain. Somebody comes in from off-screen to explain that New Villain is actually Very Sad, and the reason why they're doing bad guy things is because "Squidward's father never hugged him as a child." Everybody looks forward to facing a New Tomorrow. Roll credits.

Strictly speaking, the "good" content IS better. Ask me if I want to watch crazy fight scenes or if I want to watch the writers try and make jokes about the Nintendo Wii despite obviously never having played a video game since the SNES, and... well, I'd probably watch the Wii episodes again, because they're so stupid I actually still remember them. The problem with this show is that, when the people behind it are inclined to care, it can be pretty decent. Dare I say, it can be good. However, the show is legacy television. It's a serial comedy shonen, squatting in a timeslot on mid-2000's network television, concerned first and foremost with meeting deadlines and keeping content going for money. You can tell when the writers are just phoning it in to pad their numbers, and when they're actually proud of the thing they're doing, and the moments they're proud of the thing they're doing tend to all be clumped at the end of a 201 episode show, in three to five episode chunks, with blatant filler in the middle.

In short, Gintama is Japanese Family Guy if Family Guy decided to make entire arcs centered around the "Peter Griffin fighting a Chicken Mascot" running joke. As a result, I give it a "Hey, Lois, do you remember that time aliens turned my penis into an allen wrench?" out of 10.