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In the dawn of Japan’s new era during the Meiji Restoration, samurais found themselves jobless and thrown into the bottom of the hierarchy, with the shogunate lords gone, the merchants harboring grudge on them for past grievances, and the government stripping them off their identity by enforcing the no sword-wielding act. The samurai class who had basked in comfort and glory now has been downgraded to shizoku, a social class in limbo that holds no priveleges whatsoever. Being warriors who knew no other skills but to kill, shizokus struggle to make a living and many are thrown into poverty. Shujiro Saga who was formerly known as the Manslayer struggled financially as his family is plagued with cholera and has no money for treatment. A flyer with 100,000 dollars prize money lured him to a congregation of former samurais. After each been given a tag that bears their names and no means to back down, theyre forced to play a death game where they had to make their way to Tokyo by collecting specific number of tags to pass each checkpoint.

This is a straight out survival game, the only thing different is the ones playing are all samurais with the exact skill to kill. There are so many gory scenes as some of the samurais go off on a killing spree as they see this as a venting opportunity after being heavily suppressed by the government, while most samurais actually just went along to simply survive and possibly gain the prize money. It’s just slashing and killing in each episode with mountain-load investment on blood material and make up department. Theyre very convincing and very good at it. The action choreograph is superb too.

The plot is very straightforward, if you would say it’s a plot. I say it’s just senseless killing spree. The 6episode-series made the plot too loose to make up a proper plot though they tried hard with the back story of the clash of interest between Home Ministry and Police Force. I saw it as a one crazy powerful man’s grudge to wipe out the samurai class, but then again I could only comment on this particular adaptation cuz I have no idea of the original source and have no intention to refer to it.

The support characters clinging on to Saga on their way to Tokyo weren’t all impressive either. Futaba is almost transparent with her only presence to annoy the heck out of me, being the “child with no martial skill whatsoever who is only eyeing for the prize money without any planning on how to win it” she is a total freeloader with some bullshit justice preach. Meanwhile Iroha is a total downer, despite being tauted to be one of the 8 successors of some lost samurai skill, she is a downright disappointment, getting subdued only with a slash on the thigh that didnt even bleed that much, while the rest of her sibling successors could go on fighting after getting stabbed even. Rolled my eyes so many times at this character. Such pointless characters. The only character that piqued my interest was Saga and the undercover police with underlying suspicious intentions though im not sure they could make me watch the sequels.

I am actually divided if I should continue to follow its sequels when they come out, cuz I have no intention to get disappointed again as I did with Alice in Borderland. If this had been a pure samurai story i wouldnt have this kind of sentiment, but because it’s just a survival game with samurai players, I kinda hesitate. I am an action lover, i totally love good action like this, but having a senseless plot just turned me off big time.