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Gabimaru is the typical protagonist who starts out cold but ends up warming up to people and becomes more kind. For the female characters, there is a sense of empowerment that they were trying to go for, especially with Sagiri looking to escape gender norms and become a samurai, instead of the “norms” that this anime instills upon women. While on its own this would be a cool concept, the fact that all the female characters were so sexualized, and somehow getting saved via princess carry, defying all logic of physics by the men just felt a bit hypocritical to the potential message the show was trying to convey. Furthermore, people died before we could even really have a chance to know them, and adding a sad backstory to try and make us feel emotions just felt like such a weak way for characterizing them. At least the backstories weren’t too saturated after the first few episodes.
From a production standpoint, the show looks fine, but disappointing by MAPPA’s standards. Some of the fight scenes were genuinely very decent and tense, but the other moments of the show had this very weird filter where the characters didn’t really “fit in” with the background art. The compositing was awful at some points, and characters went off model a lot. It was clearly the product of rushed production, as most episodes were outsourced to between ten and twenty different anime studios and animation directors, which signalled how poor the production schedule was. It more or less just felt like MAPPA gathering up all their buddies to finish their homework just as the teacher was coming to collect it every week. This might feel a bit harsh and nitpicky, but if we’re comparing it to other MAPPA works, this is probably one of their worst productions, but from a wider perspective outside of MAPPA, the show looks average to fine visually.