Ninja Scroll TV Volume 3

Ninja Scroll TV has been a fun and exciting ride through a semi-authentic historical Japan; brimming with inventive monsters, crazed demons and some damn fine samurai warriors. Admittedly, I began watching this series feeling fairly sceptical towards its purpose, wondering how they could possibly hope to expand the infamously wafer-thin Ninja Scroll (movie) plot into a 13 episode TV series. But the answer was simple; in Jubei, Ninja Scroll has an immensely likable hero– and instead of attempting to create a more substantial plotline, the Ninja Scroll TV writers made the intelligent choice by treating us to yet more of Jubei’s surreal and exciting adventures. It’s easy to forget that Ninja Scroll TV actually bothered to set up something of a basic premise, you know – ‘the light maiden’ and all that jazz, but really, that was just an excuse to match up a wise-cracking Jubei against yet more nightmarish demons, each wielding their own strange (and I mean strange) powers in an attempt to kill off our arrogant hero. We know that Jubei can’t die- but that doesn’t matter; it’s still exciting and creative fun.

We join Jubei and the gang as they continue their quest across the Japanese landscape fighting off the various demon clans that are frequently attempting to kidnap Shigure (the ‘light maiden’) and steal her fabled magical stones.

As the attacks intensify, the Light Maiden is eventually kidnapped and with her, the fate of the country hangs by a thread. The time is nigh and Jubei must act fast if he is to save Shigure and potentially, Japan, from the tyrannical rule of the Kimon clan.

To give this story credit would be to do an injustice to all the good writers out there. The Ninja Scroll TV plot just isn’t very interesting, but quite honestly, who cares? As stated before, the story involving the Light Maiden has simply been invented to act as an elaborate mechanism to purposely involve Jubei in as many ‘death’ fights as possible. The whole Shigure/Light Maiden arc ends on something of an anti-climax, but by then, I guess I had just stopped caring about her and that other annoying kid.

For a story so concerned with bloody action, the main villain (the Kimon leader) ended up being crap and uninteresting character who, by the end of the series, had been completely outshone by his devious henchmen. Perhaps it was because we never saw that devilish grin wiped off his face? I don’t know, but it just felt like he faded from the story with a bit of a whimper.

In his place though, we meet another cool looking, badass samurai, who by all accounts, is around the same skill level as Jubei and provides more than a few enthralling battle scenes in the place of the ‘floating fat man’. Seeing Jubei fight against just a regular strong samurai is something of a novelty for this series and shows us that regular sword fighting can still be exciting to watch.

In Summary

There really isn’t too much to say about this final volume of Ninja Scroll TV. It earnestly delivers exactly what you would expect from a series with ‘Ninja’ in it’s title; cool fights, some fun monsters and a lot of blood– but above all, a fun and exciting lead character in Jubei.

From the first episode alone, it was made clear that Ninja Scroll TV was never going to bring anything new or innovative to its genre – yet it still remains a fine samurai action series that will entertain you from start till finish. A sword slashing guilty pleasure.