Review for Samurai Girls (Review)
Tuesday, 17th January 2012, 16:38

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Extras
Place a disc in to your player and you are offered up the choice of French or English menus. The menus are pretty to look at, very nicely animated although the options aren’t all that clearly labelled. These being Kazé discs, they will lock up your player tight with UPOPs. You can’t change audio or subtitles on the fly, you’re stuck with Japanese audio with English subtitles or English subtitles with signs from the English menu, French audio with signs or Japanese audio with French subtitles from the French menu, and your player’s time elapsed display will also be inalterable during playback.

Disc 1

This offers you two of the OAV episodes for Samurai Girls, running to about 3 minutes apiece, and focusing on the comedic raunchy aspects of the set-up. First Jubei comes to Muneakira for a breast exam, and then Princess Sen finds Yukimura’s guide to kissing. The only audio options here are Japanese and French.

You’ll also find 12 audio dramas set to manga art, divided into 6 selections running to around 11 minutes in total. It’s more silly comedy, and the only audio option here is subtitled Japanese.

Disc 2

Here you’ll find two more OAV episodes, again running to about 3 minutes. Kanetsugu goes bikini fishing at the beach in one, while in the other, she shares a bath and compares breast sizes with Yukimura.

This disc also offers two Japanese trailers for Samurai Girls, and the textless credits, with the option of English or Romanji subtitles. Thankfully, this is one place where the UPOPs are disabled. After all, you can’t call a credit sequence where you are stopped from switching off the subtitles truly textless.

Disc 3

You get the final two OAV episodes here, this time running to 3½ minutes apiece. Gisen and Jubei’s innocent game of hide and seek loses its innocence in Gisen’s imagination, and then Muneakira is confronted by the girls over some of the images stored in his camera.

This disc’s extras conclude with the Promotional Video for Samurai Girls, and a Video Clip, both running to 2 minutes in length. That weird shimmer that I noticed in the main programme is absent here.

If you want to experience pure jealousy, select the French menu options at the start of each disc, and you’ll also see the Kazé adverts for the French content that the company releases. Whereas the UK menus load straight away, on disc 1, the French get to sit through trailers for KZTV, the One Piece: Strong World movie, and Redline, while on the disc there are trailers for Kazé home video titles like Roujin Z, Pandora Hearts, Bleach: Fade to Black, and Le Pauvre Coeur des Hommes, Wasabi Records offerings including soundtracks for Arriety and a rock album from Anna Tsuchiya, Manga titles including Sprite, Gale 7, and Beelzebub, and France’s VOD service offerings including Tiger & Bunny, Blue Exorcist, and Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan. Most of the trailers are on disc 1, but there is also a little extra French only promotional material on discs 2 and 3. Almost makes you wish that Napoleon had kicked Nelson’s butt!

Conclusion
Samurai Girls is going to sell and sell well, if prior precedent is any indication. Its staple ingredients are sex and violence after all, and if there is one thing that UK fans latch onto, its sex and violence. It doesn’t even matter if the content is any good, as long as there is sufficient boobage to keep a young, teen, male mind bubbling away in its own hormones. Samurai Girls has breasts in excess, and it has girls beating up on each other until they are naked. And it’s got a masochistic lesbian in... I believe the word ka-ching is appropriate at this juncture. It’s only a bonus that it has a budget behind it. Not for Samurai Girls the static shots, and triple pans of something like Ikki Tousen, and not for it the hideous character design and inconsistent artwork of something like Master of Martial Hearts. This has had some serious Yen spent on it, and you can see it all on screen, with a very striking design ethic, appealing character designs, and a high quality and consistency in its animation that makes it a delight to watch, as long as you don’t think about it.

I thought about it... Samurai Girls is really only just another in a long line of these shows, a rapidly put together reason for a bunch of girls to engage in cloth rending combat, a harem to form around a hapless teen male, and a legion of fanboys to sit slack-jawed in front of their televisions for 5 hours. Jaws will be slacker than usual as Samurai Girls isn’t shy about nudity, and it doesn’t need much of an excuse to reveal ample flesh, buttocks and boobs. It’s also not shy about sexuality, if you were thinking that it’s one of those shows that looks but doesn’t touches, where guys are prone to faint at the slightest hint of an actual relationship. In that respect alone, Samurai Girls is a little refreshing compared to most other shows of its genre, but not by much. It does deserve its 18 rating from the BBFC though.

The premise itself is quite interesting, an alternate history where the Japan of the Shogunate survived and prospered into the modern day, mostly because of the bonds that form between the Generals and the Master Samurai. The Master Samurai are the ultimate warriors, and we see them introduced in the prologue to the show, fending off Admiral Perry’s fleet in the 19th Century, and cutting B24 bombers from the sky at the end of WWII. It’s this pact between the generals and the samurai that have kept Japan inviolate, and drive the story in this series. For where there is the ancient pact, there is an ancient menace that threatens Japan when the outside world cannot. And as we begin the story, it transpires that tradition has developed that the pact can only be formed between the Tokugawa Shogunate and the Samurai. For reasons that become clear as the story unfolds, the number of Master Samurai in Japan has been on the decline.

When Samurai Muneakira Yagyu returns to Edo to be reunited with his childhood friend, Sen Tokugawa (princess and sister to the next Shogun in waiting) he gets thrown straight into conspiracy and intrigue when a flash of light heralds the arrival of a Master Samurai named Jubei Yagyu. Of course at first she’s just a naked girl that falls into his arms, but it’s the kiss that seals the pact between them and reveals her warrior personality. Her arrival, coupled with the ominous prognostication from a couple of would be rebels, Yukimura Sanada and Matabei Goto puts them in the middle of various factions and groups struggling for the fate of Japan. It’s down to Muneakira to understand his strengths and abilities as a General, as well as awakening other potential Master Samurai, that will decide the fate of the nation.

What that means in actuality is that he quickly gathers a group of girls around him, Jubei who fell in love with him even before she appeared from the sky, Princess Sen who’s been secretly sweet on him since childhood and her bodyguard Hanzo (the lesbian masochist), Yukimura, the Lolita character who also develops a crush on Muneakira, and Matabei (modelling an intriguing line in loincloths), and for two-thirds of the series a harem comedy ensues. They’re soon joined by a clumsy, idiotic, hammer wielding spy named Kanetsugu, and then Muneakira’s powers call forth Jubei’s little sister Gisen, who would love to get Muneakira’s sword between her assets. The usual jealousies, conflicts, and friendships of the harem apply, with the guarantee that at least once during an episode, Muneakira will be caught in an awkward situation with one of the girls by all the other girls. This being Samurai Girls, there’s a bit of action as well, and in the background the story unfolds.

It’s in the final four episodes, when Sen’s brother Yoshihiko returns to Japan that the overall tale comes to a head, the threat to the nation is revealed, and it’s up to General Muneakira and his warrior harem to save the day.

Despite it being a staple of the anime medium, made to exceedingly high production values, I didn’t like Samurai Girls all that much. I’m probably picking nits when I say that the striking visual style actually distracted from the base comic elements of the show. It’s like a SHAFT comedy gone wrong, where the insane and crazy visuals overpower the narrative. I found the inkblots used to excess at times. Perhaps they were actually meant to distract me from the thinness of the characterisations, in which case they failed. Jubei is the central female of the harem, Muneakira’s ‘true’ love, and as such is devoted to him unconditionally. All the other female characters embody some form of tsundere, the hard shelled, soft centred archetype. We have the classic tsundere, the quiet tsundere, the loli-tsundere, the idiot-tsundere, the slut-tsundere... It gets pretty tiresome, pretty quickly. Add to that the sheer blandness of Muneakira. The hapless teen male in such situations is meant to be a cipher for teen male audiences to identify with, but it helps the story if there is a little meat to the character, a little back story at least. There’s nothing to Muneakira, he may as well not be there.

That’s Samurai Girls' whole problem, there’s just nothing at all beneath the surface. It’s animated brilliantly, a unique visual style, with a whole lot of production value, and it’s definitely fun to watch once. But the idea of a ‘general’ forming a ‘pact’ with a ‘warrior’ isn’t a new one. Sekirei has a similar premise. The production values may be lower, it’s much more traditional looking an anime, but the characters have more depth to them, the visual style doesn’t hamper the comedy, and above all that show has heart, which Samurai Girls lacks. I cared about the characters and the story in Sekirei. I didn’t in Samurai Girls.

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