I don't know if you follow or read my reviews but a few things that you need to know about me is that i love anime. I may have watched over 500-600 anime and i have read over 300 manga as well. Maybe way more than that, as i have lost count, to be honest.
The reason i say this is because i am gonna be quite harsh on my review and many may wonder "what the hell does that guy know" or something. Today, i decided to watch YASUKE a brand new anime original by Netflix.
Now if you know Neflix, then you will be aware that for some reason they try to attract and please all types of audiences. In particular, they wanna please the minorities among other communities. You definitely know this if you have watched some of their movies and there are tons of memes about that as well.
YASUKE is another example of how they wanna take advantage of that and attract that audience. The reason YASUKE is an example is that it tells the story of a black samurai and ofc Yasuke is the protagonist.
Now the amazing thing is that Yasuke actually existed and he was indeed a black samurai. Not only that, he was quite an amazing person that from slave because one of the most royal, if not the most loyal of Oda's men.
So for that exact reason, i was excited that an anime with such an awesome historical character was out. I was expecting to either see an anime about his actual story or something similar. If you have some expectations, it's better for you to go and read a book about Yasuke.
Plot
There won't be a lot of spoilers so don't worry, either way, we only have 6 episodes of this. So the show starts with ODA killing himself and having Yasuke next to him, giving the final blow as he considers him his most royal commander.
Yasuke follows his leader's wish about apparently he can't get over it as he has nightmares for years. Now he lives in a small village that nobody knows about his past and there he simply has a small boat and helps people with everything chores.
At the same time, we get to see glimpses of his past as one of ODA's commanders. People were treating him as a slave and mostly everyone considered him as an outsider even though he was formidable. Also, and here is the funny part, there has been a big fight between oda's power and his arch-enemy or something.
So in that fight except for the usual armies, they also had robots along with soldiers with psychic powers. Aside from that the enemies had demonic and dark-like powers. Yeahh i am not joking.
Also, later on there a small girl with special powers that can't use them and she is in need of a doctor or someone to help her learn how to use her power. Some mercenaries are searching for them which are hired by a mutant priest that wanna rule Europe and Vatican and those mercenaries are, a Russian woman werewolf, a robot, a woman with a scythe and a Beninese shaman conjuring ghosts.....
What I Liked and What I Didn't
So the only things i liked were the animation and some fight scenes. The animation was quite decent and at some points, especially when sceneries were involved it was freaking awesome. Mostly any scene that had scenery with water it was amazing, that i can tell. Also, the fight scenes were pretty decent and as we are used to Netflix anime production quite gory as well.
Now let's start with the bad things. The worst thing by far for me is that in six episodes they literally tried to add everything. We had soldiers, Shamans, freaking robots, demonic and dark powers, astral and psychic powers, fucking werewolves, Beninese shaman conjuring ghosts, little girls learning to use their op powers in days etc etc.
It's extremely hard to add all of these in just six 25 minutes episodes and actually with all of these anime gets more like a joke. My best guess is that they tried to make this like Afro Samurai but they failed miserably.
There are a lot of other things that had no point or were quite stupid like for example an arrow killing one person while the rest of all the arrows "flew" a couple of seconds later. Who the hell shoot that one arrow and how? was it a general or something, cause it never showed? And because of that arrow, they tried to create a scene that would make us come closer with a character that we only have heard 10 lines :P
Why i said it has potential?
The only reason i said and say this anime has potential is that there are ideas. You want to all of the above? heck even add freaking vampires but do it on YASUKE anime with 50-100-500 episodes. With 5 episodes this only results in a joke. The only reason it gets this rating is the animation and the potential, otherwise, i would rate it with 1.