Every five minutes or so I had to wonder that. Why would you have the sword collector and not give him swords? Why have over the top techniques and not show the name painted across the screen? Why reanimate and exclude the animation intensive scenes? Why have Kaoru and Yahiko if you take out all their scenes? Why have Kenshin's master and super fast Soujiro if there is no secret super fast final technique? Why have Soujiro loose his calm over a moral issue if you don't show whis moral issues? Overall this feels like someone with a plot synopsis was asked to highlight the plot points on their first read without take backs.
(For example you'd assume at first that Chou is filler, and he originally was, but his character developed enough to put him in charge of the epilogue. Actually, all the characters that earned an epilogue are no longer part of the story.)
Ruroken always had some rhythm issues with Watsuki improvising way too much along the way. The artwork of the manga and some great episode directors made the originals work, but if there's a remake that changes events they could had fixed a lot of stuff.
So, what's the point of it? Was there really a need to do it this way? I think they wanted to capitalize on the live action films to promote the original, so they took out some sort of middle ground to motivate people to check it out. But the movies can do whatever they want because they are for a new audience and being live action you have a lower limit to push the fights before you lose the audience. There's nothing gain in this adaptation of an adaptation.
I would had been happier with 90 mins of the final fight, but that would make it exclusive for fans who still care about it and are willing to rewatch it. Maybe a retelling from Shishio's perspective would had been attractive to people who watched the anime/movies while being significantly shorter. But Ruroken without fights is just really boring, and there are literally no fights for more than an hour. And the ones there are after that fall flat because the motivations are said out loud 2 minutes before being refuted if there's any build up at all.
Usui constantly cock blocking Shishio was probably the only extra content that I sincerely loved. All historical elements were taken out (the burning of buddhist temples, prostitutes officially being defined as farm animals, the british economical control through Hong Kong, and so on) with all the great dead scenes. How do you dumb down an action show for 12 year olds? What's even the point?
