Hell's Paradise: Jigokuraku Review

Gabimaru is a shinobi from Iwagakure who has stopped being able to die. The shogunate offers him a pardon in exchange for the elixir of immortality, said to exist on an island nobody returns from, and ships him there with a boatload of other condemned criminals and a line of executioners to watch them. Sagiri Yamada Asaemon draws Gabimaru, and the pairing is the best thing here: a swordswoman who has begun to doubt the work, walking beside a man who kills without effort and wants only to go home to his wife.

MAPPA give the island real weight under Kaori Makita's direction. The flowers are wrong, the butterflies are wrong, the stone figures are corpses, and the first four episodes deliver dread with almost no exposition. Then the Tensen arrive and the plot settles into something familiar: transformations, tiers of strength, allies dispatched to fight whichever opponent suits them. The second season, which ran from January to March 2026 and covers the Lord Tensen and Horai arcs, is where the source material starts explaining itself, and the explanations are less interesting than the island was while it stayed unexplained. Watch it for the setting and for Sagiri.