Rurouni Kenshin Review

The Kyoto arc is the case for this show, and it is a strong one. Kenshin's past arrives in the form of Shishio, a rival assassin with a coherent political argument, and the series spends sixty episodes taking the premise seriously: a killer who refuses to kill has to keep beating people who accept no such rule. Kazuhiro Furuhashi directs the swordplay with a sense of distance and footwork that most action anime skips, and the cast around Kenshin is unusually well built, with Sanosuke, Saito, and Kaoru all given positions rather than jobs.

Then it falls apart. Studio Deen takes over, the manga runs out, and the final two invented arcs are so poorly conceived that the show's own Japanese audience turned on them. The drawing drops with them, and fights that were once about technique become long stretches of held frames and reused cuts, which is why the animation grade sits a tier under the whole. The honest recommendation is to stop when Kyoto ends and treat the Trust and Betrayal prequel as the real conclusion. Graded whole the run is uneven, and the peak is high enough to be worth the sorting.