Yaiba: Samurai Legend

Episode 6

I guess the show thought this joke was good enough to use twice, because this episode opens up with yet another appearance from Mr. Slug. This time, he's upgraded to having a shell on his back and now insists on going by the much more illustrious name of Mr. Snail. Yaiba and friends are very unimpressed and try to throw salt on him again, but his new shell makes him invulnerable to such attacks. While you'd expect Yaiba to have to come up with a clever workaround, he instead opts to cut the shell in half with his sword and ends this fight within a minute. I'm glad this gag feels less out of place than last week, but it's over so quickly that it almost feels pointless.

Thankfully, the show doesn't take long to get to the main event, and as soon as Mr. Snail heads for the hills, we're introduced to our actual villain of the week, the vampire, Mr. Bat. Between the age of the source material and elements of his design, I was a little worried he'd lean into some terrible queer stereotypes, but aside from having to hear him shout half his lines in campy English, he's otherwise pretty harmless, and it at least helps him feel a lot more memorable than Yaiba's previous baddies. He's also a lot stronger, as his ability to fly gives him a natural advantage over Yaiba, and he's pretty good with a sword in his own right. Musashi steps in to give Yaiba a hand, but we quickly learn that Mr. Bat is his biggest fan and decides to get closer to his idol by turning him into a vampire. Mr. Bat ends up doing the same to some of Yaiba's animal pals (as well as Onimaru's oni minions, which feels a bit redundant, but it lets the animators have a little more fun with them). Before long, Yaiba and Sayaka end up staring down an entire army of vampires.

Given how unmatched they are, Yaiba thinks that now is the time to take back the Raijinken's orb and use the sword's full power, but Sayaka is worried about Yaiba losing control again since there's no one around to stop him if he does. Yaiba and Sayaka then decide to lay a trap for Mr. Bat and hide in an old castle to ambush him. This ends up working well enough to get Mr. Bat to drop his silly act and start taking Yaiba more seriously, which ends up resulting in one of the show's most impressive-looking swordfights to date. I said last time that I wished the show was able to use its stellar production in service of more than just gags and cool fights, and while I still stand by that, I can't pretend these action scenes don't look amazing. This one in particular demonstrates the advantages of the show's simplistic art style as it's practically bursting from the scenes with fluid battle animation and well-timed impact frames. The battle eventually comes to a close when Mr. Bat jams an orb into Yaiba's sword to stop him from spinning it around, but when Yaiba takes notice of Mr. Bat's weakness to the sun, he cuts the entire roof off the castle to expose him to it and defeat him.

Unfortunately, the aftermath left me feeling a bit mixed. When the battle is over and Sayaka offers Yaiba a hug, he backs out of it, as his brush with death seems to have finally made him realize that he should focus more on training than girls and vows to get stronger. Given how exhausting Yaiba's general harassment of Sayaka has been up to this point, I'm all for him finally growing past it. Still, this is another instance where the show's breakneck pacing weakens the moment. I like the idea of this fight spooking Yaiba enough to start acting a bit more seriously, but even with Mr. Bat being a bit more threatening than the other monsters he's fought, nothing here is particularly more dangerous than his other battles. If fear was the lesson Yaiba was supposed to learn here, I don't think it came across very well, and it might have landed better if the show wasn't moving at a mile a minute. However, I'll take the attempt at having Yaiba grow over nothing at all, and this was an otherwise fun episode. I'm willing to give the show a bit of a and choose to believe that something substantial will come of this later on. Plus, it's hard to get too upset at the show not quite nailing its attempts to be a bit more serious when the episode ends with Onimaru starting to sell his own merchandise, an act which is somehow treated as more heinous than anything else he's done (though to be fair, while he's been fairly patient with his minions I doubt he's paying them for the extra labor, so I'm inclined to agree with Yaiba and the gang on this one). I'd still like to see this show have a little more on offer beyond some cool fights and slapstick, but if that's most of what we'll get out of this, I can only hope it leads to more episodes that look as spectacular as this one.

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Yaiba: Samurai Legend is currently streaming on Netflix and Hulu on Saturdays.