Golden Kamuy Review

Saichi Sugimoto came home from Port Arthur with a nickname, Immortal Sugimoto, and nothing else. In Hokkaido he hears of a hoard of Ainu gold whose map was tattooed in pieces across the skins of twenty four prisoners in Abashiri, who killed their guards and scattered when the prison tried to move them. He teams up with Asirpa, an Ainu girl whose father is said to have died over the gold. The hunt puts them between Lieutenant Tsurumi's faction of the Seventh Division and Toshizo Hijikata, the Shinsengumi's vice commander, supposedly killed in 1869 and very much alive.

The show's real subject is how people live in the north. Asirpa teaches Sugimoto to trap, skin and cook, the Ainu language is checked by a specialist linguist, and a meal can halt a chase for half an episode without anyone minding. The tone swings from slapstick to atrocity inside a single scene, and critics count that as the signature rather than a flaw. What they fault is the first three seasons at Geno Studio: the computer generated bears are infamous and the drawing often slips off model. Brain's Base took over for the fourth season and for the final chapter, which ran from January to March 2026 and looks far better, with the runaway train climax still to come.