Review for Samurai Bride

Introduction

Would you believe that the original Hyakka Ryoran Samurai Girls (not to be confused with Majikoi-Oh Samurai Girls) series was only the third title to be released in the UK by Kazé Entertainment, after Professor Layton and Vampire Knight. At the start of 2012, they released the somewhat conventional harem action comedy, with wholly unconventional visuals on Blu-ray and DVD, and given its straightforward approach to fan service (this was a show with nipples), it garnered sufficient interest for fans to await its 2013 broadcast sequel with eagerness. I’m not particularly a fan of how Kazé author their discs, but Samurai Girls was a fair release, not too far removed from the US release from Sentai. But the licensing and eventual release of this sequel, Samurai Bride in the UK has had a rocky road. Initially it seemed that Kazé would release it and Manga would distribute, but eventually it fell to Manga Entertainment to release it directly. The story has been one of Blu-ray and DVD, cancellation and reinstatement, delays and pushbacks to the point that it’s only now, in 2015 that Samurai Bride is seeing a UK release, thankfully on Blu-ray and DVD as initially hoped. And while I haven’t been all that enthused about Manga’s releases of late, Samurai Bride looks to buck the trend on Blu-ray at least. They’re using Sentai’s masters.

In this Samurai Bride, the world has followed an alternate course of history, one where the nation of Great Japan stands proudly in the world, where the Tokugawa Shogunate remained resolute and strong against all challengers, and where in the 21st Century, the Samurai still protect the nation against all its foes. Actually, in the 21st Century, the Samurai lay down the Tokugawa law in all of the high schools, and they inherit the names of famous Samurai warriors of the past. All that changed when Muneakira Yagyu returned to Edo's Buou Academic School to be reunited with his childhood friend Princess Sen (sister of the next heir to the Tokugawa Shogunate). Only he got sidetracked first by a couple of young 'rebel' samurai, Yukimura Sanada, and Matabei Goto, who were wanted by the state for an ominous prediction that Yukimura made. She saw in a vision that a darkness was coming that would smother Great Japan. That prediction seemed to come true when Muneakira was drawn into fleeing with Sanada and Goto from Princess Sen's ninja assassins led by Hatori Hanzo. Muneakira was watched, judged, and found worthy. There was a flash of light, and a cute, vulnerable, naked, red-haired girl literally fell into his arms. Except when she kissed him, all hell broke loose as Master Samurai Jubei Yagyu was unleashed.


At the end of the previous season, the menace to Great Japan had been defeated, or at least substantially delayed, so you’d think that Muneakira and his harem could take a well deserved rest. Six months later, Muneakira returns after a lengthy training trip to find that the dojo has been turned into a maid cafe, with the girls now donning maid outfits to make ends meet. They might have achieved a great victory, but Princess Sen’s brother Yoshihiko took all the credit. The dojo ran out of money, which is why Yukimura has come up with the maid cafe plan, only some of the girls are less suited to be maids than others. And then the Dark Samurai are resurrected, four women warriors with a severe anger management problem, and they come looking for Master Samurai Jubei Yagyu. They only find cute little Jubei, as for some unknown reason, she’s no longer able to transform. Incensed, the Dark Samurai seal Muneakira’s powers, making him unable to even hold a katana, and they give him a month to produce the real Jubei Yagyu. The remaining Master Samurai, Princess Sen and Yukimura are outclassed by the Dark Samurai, and with time running out, they’ll need more strength if they’re to stand up and fight. That means Muneakira will have to find some more girls to lock lips with to create Master Samurai, and the first girl he kisses is... Yukimura’s pet monkey Sasuke? But there is the rumour of the Samurai Bride, a Master Samurai with extra power and strength. But if kissing only makes a Master Samurai, what will Muneakira have to do to create a Samurai Bride?

12 episodes of Samurai Bride plus extras are presented across 2 Blu-ray discs from Manga Entertainment thus.

Disc 1
1. True Shadow, Now Open
2. Kiss Again
3. Love and Kiss
4. Samurai Bride
5. Supremacy of the Underworld
6. The Reputed Dandy
7. Unable to Unlock
8. The Mysterious Shadow
9. The New Master Samurai

Disc 2
10. The Secret of the Chingo Stone
11. The Showdown
12. Samurai Bride is Born

Picture

Samurai Bride gets a 1.78:1 widescreen transfer at 1080p, and it’s a decent transfer, I assume from Sentai considering the menus follow the usual Sentai formatting (the only logo when the discs load is the Manga logo). The image is clear throughout, and there’s no sign of any compression artefacts, aliasing or the like. Given the nature of the animation, this is also one HD anime that’s spared the usual menace of digital banding. There’s certainly none of the issues that plagued the Kazé DVD of Samurai Girls.


Just like Samurai Girls, its sequel is a rather unusual looking anime. It has a peculiar visual style that makes it stand out against the countless similar combat girl fan service offerings. Its conceit is that it's presented as an artwork, an animated painting. There's very much a 2D look to it, scenes and backgrounds will be presented minus perspective, often as parallax layered planes, or just a simple single 2D plane, and the pale pastels of the palette, the bold outlines of the characters call to mind ink and watercolours. It looks a little like Blade of the Immortal in tone, but the style is made all the more obvious with touches like ink blots staining the surface of the animation, with the drops flying during the action sequences, and the whole screen filling up with black ink stains during the scene transitions. It's an arresting way of doing things, and it certainly grabs the attention. The Blu-ray affords the animation much in the way of clarity, of smoothness, and of colour, but it is still a pastel animation, it doesn’t have too much in the way of HD vividness, and looking at it on Blu-ray, it becomes apparent that the animation is deliberately soft in style when it comes to the character art.

The images in this review are sourced from the PR, and aren’t necessarily representative of the final retail release.

Sound

You have the choice between DTS-HD MA 2.0 Stereo English and Japanese, with optional translated subtitles and a signs only track. These being Sentai discs, they use a degree of formatting for the signs captions to match the screen text, and also there are the odd notes and references to explain certain terms, and offer quick reminders of events in season 1. It’s not excessively done, but it is useful. The Japanese audio is the way to go here, with the usual enthusiastic performances from the original voice cast. There’s been a degree of re-casting with the English dub, most notably for Jubei Yagyu, but either I’ve grown more intolerant, or they really just didn’t make an effort this time, as I could bear no more than a couple of minutes of Samurai Bride’s English dub, whereas I thought Samurai Girls was tolerable at least.

Extras

These are indeed the Sentai discs, now that I’ve seen the disc credits, just with the Sentai logo replaced by the Manga one. The discs present their content with a silent and static menu and each episode is followed by a rather long translated credit reel.


All of the extras are on disc 2, and of most interest will be the Samurai Bride shorts, six of them running to 16:53 in total, in HD and in subtitled Japanese only. There’s no story here, it’s just pure fan service, and boobs will bounce and be groped in various situations.

You get 2:27 worth of Japanese Preview, 34 seconds of Japanese Promos, 3 of the Textless Openings running to 4:36, and 8 of the Textless Endings running to 10:44. Finally there is a trailer for Samurai Girls, and I suspect that Manga left out the other trailers (Sentai discs usually have a handful).

Conclusion

I generally watch these shows two episodes a night for review. It allows me to take them in at something approaching a schedule, so that I can appreciate each episode to the full, and not be overwhelmed by the info-dump of a mass anime marathon. I started off that way with Samurai Bride, but by the time I got to the end of the discs, and had four episodes plus the shorts left, I just watched all that remained in one go. It wasn’t the scheduled release date looming that prompted that, and it certainly wasn’t me falling in love with the show so much that I couldn’t bring myself to stop, even for a few hours. No, it was to get it out of the way!


If you’ve read my review for the first series, Samurai Girls, then you’ll know that I didn’t really click with that show. The Samurai Bride sequel offers more of the same, which is great if you’re a fan of the franchise, but for me it was less so. Just like the original, Samurai Bride is a fan-service comedy action show, with the emphasis on the fan-service. This is a show which isn’t shy about nudity, and it does far less than the usual anime show to censor its visuals. Boobs, and indeed nipples abound, and it does get full frontal at times, although this is Barbie doll full frontal rather than any degree of anatomical accuracy.

This time the enemy are the Dark Samurai, four over-powered, resurrected girls who are looking for a fight with the Master Samurai, although as it transpires they don’t actually know why. So unlike the first series, we have two avenues of fan service, Muneakira’s harem, and the Dark Samurai. The Dark Samurai are all pretty girls with big swords as you might expect. There’s a butch one that wants to pick a fight with Jubei, a really butch one with a massive sword who’ll pick a fight with anyone, the elegant one, and the Rei Ayanami/Yuki Nagato quiet girl trope. They’re never really enemies so much as they are rivals, and quite naturally, trusting Jubei winds up befriending them, even after their opening attack, and the curse on Muneakira’s arms, and their one month ultimatum.

Most of the show is devoted to silly hijinks, harem comedy, as the girls work to run their maid cafe and get out of debt, then later on a man-hating mystic shows up to teach them how to manage their ki, so that they can stand against the Dark Samurai. Slowly over the course of the series the story develops and unfolds, the real villain of the piece is revealed, and the climactic battle ensues. Where in the first season Muneakira had managed to create Master Samurai from Jubei, Yukimura, and Princess Sen, this series arc is about him completing the set, and then levelling up one of his harem to a Samurai Bride, so more lips are locked.


Just like the first series, Samurai Bride is a very average fan-service show with exceptional production values. Its aesthetic is quite singular, the art style does grab the attention, but it also imposes a veil between the viewer and the story. With the woodcut style imagery, and the ink blot transitions (which this time around I realised sound like short bursts of diarrhoea), I felt at a remove from the characters and what they were going through. Yes, there is fan service in abundance, and each episode will find several of the female characters in some degree of undress (although not so much Muneakira this time; he spent a fair bit of the first series in compromised situations), but it’s a curiously sexless and non-titillating fan-service. It’s almost clinical at times.

I was bored by Samurai Bride. The shonen style action and the blatant fan service are all designed to appeal to a certain demographic, but once again I found the visual style to be more distracting than entertaining. Most anime these days are produced by committees of animation studios, broadcasters, sponsors and the like, but Samurai Bride really does feel as if it was designed by a committee, following a formula to appeal to its target demographic, and lacking in vitality or energy. I found it to be all style and no substance.