Time for a review children!  So sit around me in a circle and I'll do a little dance!  What we'll be talking about today is Samurai X, the prequel to Rurouni Kenshin.  Now, I have come to understand that if you have seen RK, as I haven't, you may disagree with the rating I gave SX... according to a guy I know, SX is just a chopped up piece of crap compared to RK but hey, he didn't like Cowboy Bebop either, so there!

          Let's see. This anime takes place before the TV series, explaining the origin of the main character and how he came to be such a badass.  I found the story in this show to be very well done, it wasn't too hard to follow and it was still fairly complex.  Bonus points for not confusing Jeff!  One small problem that I didn't mind so much was that things were kinda slow at times, just like in Macross Plus, the third episode had no action but seemed to be there just to advance the story line.  As I said, I didn't mind so much, but since I was watching this with Josh and Schuster, I got the impression that at any moment either one of them would start complaining at me about it and I would once again be forced to defend myself against accusations of being stupid

          The artwork and animation is very good, and during the fight scenes, they crank up the animation power a bit to make us all happy.  Also, while I'm mentioning it, the fight scenes are some of the best I've seen in an anime.  It was like well, let's just say that the samurai sword fights were extremely well choreographed.  (ACK!  There is crap playing on the radio damnit!)

          The music also fit very well and was well above average.  It helped to add a nice feel of 'Hi, we're in ancient Japan!' or whatever.  All in all, I really liked this anime, it had plenty of very well done action sequences, good music, very good animation and no super powered people.  I hate it when they have a perfectly good ninja type anime and they feel that they have to go and throw in someone who can make electricity shoot along a string or have demons posses girls and pop out of their heads to mock the good guys (Ninja Scroll/Wrath of the Ninja).  For that reason and a bunch of others I guess, I liked this show more than Ninja Scroll.

Genre - action/drama?/samurai?/background of Kenshin (nice)

Animation - aside from a few times that the animators used computer animation to bad effect, the artwork and animation was wonderful

Sub vs. Dub - don't even remember if I watched the sub

the Good - best sword type fight scenes I've yet seen in an anime, believable, generally very good action sequences, story wasn't that confusing, very good animation

the Bad - a bit slow at times, not quite enough ninja action for my taste, makes me want to buy Rurouni Kenshin (I did buy RK much later, and it is better than SX... unfortunately, if you want to see all of it, there's 95 episodes)

Overall - this was well worth the money I paid for it